The 2014 Junior Theorists Symposium is just three weeks away! Below, please find an updated schedule. JTS 2014 will be held at the University of California Berkeley in 60 Evans Hall. A complete list of paper abstracts is available here (pdf link). If you have any questions, please contact Jordanna Matlon and myself at juniortheorists@gmail.com.

Junior Theorists Symposium
University of California (Berkeley)
60 Evans Hall
August 15, 2014

8:30 – 9:00 | Coffee and Bagels

9:00 – 10:50 | Culture, Action, and Difference
* Michael Halpin (University of Wisconsin – Madison) – “Science and Sociodicy: Neuroscientific Explanations of Social Problems”
* Ellis Monk (University of Chicago) – “Bodily Capital: Capturing the Role of the Body in Social Inequality”
* Daniel Sherwood (The New School) – “Acting Through the Margin of Freedom: Bourdieu as a Social Movement Theorist”
Discussant: Omar Lizardo (University of Notre Dame)

10:50 – 11:00 | Coffee

11:00 – 12:50 | Measures of Worth
* Alison Gerber (Yale University) – “Tradition, Rationalization and Worth: A Theory of Decommensuration”
* Katherine Kenny (University of California – San Diego) – “The Biopolitics of Global Health: Life and Death and Neoliberal Time”
* Brandon Vaidyanathan (Rice University) – “A Cultural Theory of Differentiation”
Discussant: Marion Fourcade (University of California – Berkeley)

12:50 – 2:00 | Lunch

2:00 – 3:50 | Place and Perspective
* Hillary Angelo (New York University) – “From the City as a Lens to Urbanization as a Way of Seeing: Refocusing Social Categories for an Urban Planet”
* Jennifer Carlson (University of Toronto) – “Citizen-Protectors: Guns, Masculinity and Citizenship in an Age of Decline”
* Victoria Reyes (Princeton University) – “Global Borderlands: A Case Study of the Subic Bay Freeport Zone, Philippines”
Discussant: Saskia Sassen (Columbia University)

4:00 – 5:30 | After-panel: The Boundaries of Theory
* Stefan Bargheer (University of California – Los Angeles)
* Claudio Benzecry (University of Connecticut)
* Margaret Frye (Harvard University)
* Julian Go (Boston University)
* Rhacel Parreñas (University of Southern California)

5:30 – ? | Theory in the Wild: Beer, wine, and good conversation (off-site)

The Junior Theorists Symposium is an open event. In order to facilitate planning, please RSVP by sending an email to juniortheorists@gmail.com with the subject line “JTS RSVP.” We suggest an on-site donation of $20 per faculty member and $10 per graduate student to cover event costs.

In case you haven’t seen it already, you should go read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ new, lengthy essay, The Case for Reparations. Rather than trying to summarize it, I’ll just post a few of many choice quotes. On the overall argument:

Having been enslaved for 250 years, black people were not left to their own devices. They were terrorized. In the Deep South, a second slavery ruled. In the North, legislatures, mayors, civic associations, banks, and citizens all colluded to pin black people into ghettos, where they were overcrowded, overcharged, and undereducated. Businesses discriminated against them, awarding them the worst jobs and the worst wages. Police brutalized them in the streets. And the notion that black lives, black bodies, and black wealth were rightful targets remained deeply rooted in the broader society. Now we have half-stepped away from our long centuries of despoilment, promising, “Never again.” But still we are haunted. It is as though we have run up a credit-card bill and, having pledged to charge no more, remain befuddled that the balance does not disappear. The effects of that balance, interest accruing daily, are all around us.

On how redlining and segregation were about public policy, not just individual preference:

When terrorism ultimately failed, white homeowners simply fled the neighborhood. The traditional terminology, white flight, implies a kind of natural expression of preference. In fact, white flight was a triumph of social engineering, orchestrated by the shared racist presumptions of America’s public and private sectors. For should any nonracist white families decide that integration might not be so bad as a matter of principle or practicality, they still had to contend with the hard facts of American housing policy: When the mid-20th-century white homeowner claimed that the presence of a Bill and Daisy Myers decreased his property value, he was not merely engaging in racist dogma—he was accurately observing the impact of federal policy on market prices. Redlining destroyed the possibility of investment wherever black people lived.

On fatherhood, and misplaced criticisms of black family values as the root of social ills:

From the White House on down, the myth holds that fatherhood is the great antidote to all that ails black people. But Billy Brooks Jr. had a father. Trayvon Martin had a father. Jordan Davis had a father. Adhering to middle-class norms has never shielded black people from plunder. Adhering to middle-class norms is what made Ethel Weatherspoon a lucrative target for rapacious speculators. Contract sellers did not target the very poor. They targeted black people who had worked hard enough to save a down payment and dreamed of the emblem of American citizenship—homeownership. It was not a tangle of pathology that put a target on Clyde Ross’s back. It was not a culture of poverty that singled out Mattie Lewis for “the thrill of the chase and the kill.” Some black people always will be twice as good. But they generally find white predation to be thrice as fast.

I can imagine using this in a variety of undergraduate classes. Both historians and sociologists figure prominently, as Coates addresses the different regimes of oppression that have created and maintained black-white economic inequality (and especially the wealth gap) over the past 400 years, up to the 21st century racial disparities in subprime mortgage lending.

Coates also posted an addendum on his blog, tracing his intellectual journey from opposing to supporting reparations. I was especially interested by Coates’ connecting the current debate about affirmative action to the failure of a conversation about wealth and reparations:

I’m thinking about it with the Supreme Court set to dismantle Affirmative Action. Isn’t the “diversity” argument actually kind of weak? Isn’t the recompensation argument actually much more compelling? Except this was outlawed with Bakke. What I am thinking is right now, at this moment, American institutions (especially its schools) are being asked to answer for the fact that country lacked the courage to do the right thing. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision coming down, in the wake of (what looks like) a second Obama term, we could make a really strong case that now is the time renew a serious discussion about Reparations.

This narrative is a small one in the final piece, but an important one.

The ever brilliant Tressie MC has an excellent follow-up post, further connecting Coates and the push to address wealth inequality to the impossibility of higher ed fixing contemporary racial inequality:

No matter what black college grads do, they are more sensitive than non-blacks to every negative macro labor market trend. They are more likely to be unemployed, underemployed, and hold low quality jobs even when they have STEM degrees. I point out that last bit because apparently STEM will save us all or something.
…
When we allow education to be sold as a fix for wealth inequality, we set a public good up to fail and black folks that do everything “right” to take the blame when it goes “wrong”.

Read it all, if you can. This is what happens when history and sociology get taken seriously in the public sphere, and it’s both wonderful and depressing.* As it should be.

* This quote from Coates’ follow-up post is especially touching:

… I became convinced that an unfortunate swath of popular writers/pundits/intellectuals are deeply ignorant of American history. For the past two years, I’ve been lucky enough to directly interact with a number of historians, anthropologists, economists, and sociologists in the academy. The debates I’ve encountered at Brandeis, Virginia Commonwealth, Yale, Northwestern, Rhodes, and Duke have been some of the most challenging and enlightening since I left Howard University. The difference in tenor between those conversations and the ones I have in the broader world, are disturbing. What is considered to be a “blue period” on this blog, is considered to be a survey course among academics. Which is not to say everyone, or even mostly everyone, agrees with me in the academy. It is to say that I’ve yet to engage a historian or sociologist who’s requested that I not be such a downer. [emphasis added]

Occasionally, I get the idea for a course I’ll probably never teach. This week’s idea is a course on real dystopias. A couple years ago, then-president of the American Sociological Association Erik Olin Wright unveiled a big collaborative project on “real utopias”. Real utopias are actually existing utopic projects, like cooperatives and Creative Commons. This of course inspires a whole mental 2×2 table of real vs. unreal utopias vs. dystopias (for a bit of humor at the time, see this old post). The category that most interests me is not so much Wright’s real utopias, but rather the actually existing, or plausible and predicted, dystopias. And then I thought, wouldn’t it be fun to teach a whole class about these things?

Following from the writing of Warren Ellis and Joshua Ellis, let’s call these “dispatches from the Grim Meathook Future.” Each week or sub-unit would cover a different real dystopia, ideally with a guest lecturer who could speak to the underlying science or politics of the particular kind of dystopia. A lot of them connect to climate change, but that’s almost too broad so we have to disaggregate, and I’ll just focus on one possibility. Here are some example units and ideas for guest lecture topics:

1. Antibiotic resistant infections. Guest lecturers: a historian of medicine to talk about the world before antibiotics, a microbiologists or epidemiologist to talk about the problems of antibiotic resistance, the lack of new antibiotics in development, and the already high prevalence of resistant bugs (e.g.). Here’s an essay from Medium that could serve as a primer.

2. Widespread droughts and massive disruptions of the food supply connected to climate change. Guest lecturers: a social scientist to speak about the current system of water provisioning, agriculture and the wacky politics thereof (e.g. Steve Jackson at Cornell), an environmental scientist to speak about draining of the aquifers, difficulties of desalination, and growing drought conditions in much of the world.

3. The dominance of the patrimonial super-rich. If we believe Thomas Piketty, absent some kind of major political realignment, revolution, or widespread war, the next century will see a continued increase in both income and wealth inequality, and especially the return of a class of super-rich inheritors who will dominate political and social life. Guest lecturers could include a historian or literary scholar to talk about the last gilded age and the cultural dominance of the super rich then, as well as an economist to walk through Piketty’s data and model and/or a political scientist or sociologist to talk about the improbability of enacting policies likely to stem the growing wealth of the super-elite (cf. Gilens and Page).

4. The Player Piano dystopia. In his optimistic vision of the future, outlined in Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren, Keynes argued that in the future, the economic system would be so productive that most people could live lives of relative leisure, working perhaps 15-hour weeks to share the reduced workload widely and make sure all have some meaningful labor. Kurt Vonnegut offered an alternative vision in his debut novel, Player Piano, in which a relatively small clique of engineers built and maintained the machines, while a large class of unemployed workers lived lives of aimless poverty. Modern version of Vonnegut’s argument focus on the inability of society to come up with ways of distributing resources equitably outside of the labor market. Class could focus on these literary texts, and/or the economics of automation.

5. The Surveillance state dystopia. A nice place to start, because it’s so personal and yet so vivid, might be the recent debates over big data and privacy, such as the story about Target predicting a teen girl’s pregnancy before her parents knew, and the recent (sort-of) follow-up about the lengths sociology professor Janet Vertesi had to go to to prevent automated surveillance systems from sussing out her own pregnancy. From there you could move to literature (Charles Stross’s Halting State, perhaps?), discussions of the NSA, and so on.

What do you think? And what real dystopias – social, political, environmental, etc. – would you want to teach?