sociology

#501 Ethan Porter: The Consumer Citizen

Jul 29, 2021

Dr. Ethan Porter is an assistant professor at the George Washington University School of Media and Public Affairs. His research has appeared or is forthcoming in Political Communication, Journal of Politics, Political Behavior, Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, Politics, Groups and Identities and Journal of Experimental Political Science. He has also written for The New York Times, The Washington Post and other popular publications. His research interests include public opinion, political communication, political psychology and experimental design. He is the author of False Alarm: The Truth About Political Mistruths in the Trump Era, and The Consumer Citizen, which investigates the ways in which everyday consumer decision-making affects political attitudes and behavior. More»
#497 Daniel Bell - Just Hierarchy: Why Social Hierarchies Matter in China and the Rest of the World

Jul 19, 2021

Dr. Daniel A. Bell is Dean of the School of Political Science and Public Administration at Shandong University. He writes widely on Chinese politics and philosophy for the media including the New York Times, Financial times, Global Times, Nanfengchuang, Worldpost, Project Syndicate, and the Guardian’s Comment Is Free blog. Dr. Bell received the Huilin Prize in 2018. He is the author of numerous books including The China Model: Political Meritocracy and the Limits of Democracy (2015), The Spirit of Cities: Why the Identity of a City Matters in a Global Age[coauthored with Avner de-Shalit] (2011), China’s New Confucianism: Politics and Everyday Life in a Changing Society (2010), Beyond Liberal Democracy: Political Thinking for an East Asian Context (2006), East Meets West: Human Rights and Democracy in East Asia (2000), and, more recently, Just Hierarchy: Why Social Hierarchies Matter in China and the Rest of the World. More»
#496 Daniel Hoyer - Figuring Out the Past: The 3,495 Vital Statistics that Explain World History

Jul 16, 2021

Dr. Daniel Hoyer currently holds a postdoctoral position working with Dr. Peter Turchin on the Deep Roots of the Modern World, part of the SESHAT: Global History Databank Project, a large-scale, interdisciplinary and comparative project hosted by the Evolution Institute and the University of Oxford. His postdoctoral work focuses on determining the institutional features and structures which underpin economic performance and the provision of public goods in these different places and times. He received his Ph.D. from New York University in 2014 with a dissertation entitled Buying a Province, Building an Empire: Money, Markets, and Growth in Roman Africa from Augustus to Aurelian on the economic and financial development of the western Roman Empire. He is the author of Figuring Out The Past: The 3,495 Vital Statistics that Explain World History. More»
#479 James Cortada - Fake News Nation: The Long History of Lies and Misinterpretations in America

Jun 7, 2021

Dr. James W. Cortada is Senior Research Fellow at the Charles Babbage Institute at the University of Minnesota. He worked at IBM for thirty-eight years in sales, consulting, managerial, and research positions. He is the author of books like Information and the Modern Corporation, and Fake News Nation: The Long History of Lies and Misinterpretations in America. More»
#477 Ilana Redstone - Unassailable Ideas, Social Media, and Discourse in American Higher Education

Jun 3, 2021

Dr. Ilana Redstone is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Redstone's work has focused on legal permanent residents to the United States. Using a quantitative analytic approach, she has addressed questions surrounding a variety of dimensions of immigrant adaptation to the U.S. She has also written on the discipline of Sociology and the divisions therein. Dr. Redstone's current work focuses on campus climate and viewpoint diversity. She is the author of Unassailable Ideas: How Unwritten Rules and Social Media Shape Discourse in American Higher Education. More»
#473 George Yancey: Racism in the US, and Anti-Christian Hostility

May 24, 2021

Dr. George Yancey is a Professor of Sociology at the Baylor University. He has published several research articles on the topics of institutional racial diversity, racial identity, academic bias, progressive Christians and anti-Christian hostility. His books include Compromising Scholarship, What Motivates Cultural Progressives, There is no God, So Many Christians, So Few Lions (Rowman and Littlefield) a book that assess Christianophobia in the United States. More»
#463 Musa al-Gharbi: Academic Freedom, Trump and the 2016 Elections, and Political Polarization

Apr 30, 2021

Dr. Musa al-Gharbi is a Paul F. Lazarsfeld Fellow in the Department of Sociology, and a Mellon-Sawyer Fellow on Trust and Mistrust of Experts for the Interdisciplinary Center on Innovative Theory and Empirics (INCITE), in partnership with the American Assembly, at Columbia University. His research explores how knowledge is produced, transmitted, evaluated and put to use (or not) — and how people’s thinking is shaped by the social contexts they find themselves in. He applies these lenses to a range of topics including race, inequality, social movements, extremism, policing, national security, foreign policy — and more recently — U.S. political elections. More»
#459 Bear Braumoeller - Only the Dead: The Persistence of War in the Modern Age

Apr 22, 2021

Dr. Bear F. Braumoeller is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Ohio State University. He previously held faculty positions at Harvard University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is or has been on the Editorial Boards of five major journals or series, and he is a past Councilor of the Peace Science Society. In the summer of 2016 he was a Visiting Fellow at the Nobel Institute in Oslo, Norway. Dr. Braumoeller’s research is in the areas of international security and computational social science. His current research focus is on the relationship between international order and international conflict. He is the author of The Great Powers and the International System (winner of the 2014 International Studies Association Best Book Award and the 2014 J. David Singer Book Award) and Only the Dead: The Persistence of War in the Modern Age (Oxford University Press, 2019). More»
#454 Edward Westermann - Drunk on Genocide: Alcohol and Mass Murder in Nazi Germany

Apr 9, 2021

Dr. Edward Westermann is Professor of History at Texas A&M University (USA), where he teaches courses related to Modern and Contemporary European History. Dr. Westermann is the recipient of various awards and fellowships. In 2016, Southern Methodist University awarded him with the Clements Center-DeGolyer Library Research Grant (USA). He has also been a Fulbright fellow at the Free University of Berlin in 1995 and a German Academic Exchange Service fellow on three occasions (Germany). His most recent book is Drunk on Genocide: Alcohol and Mass Murder in Nazi Germany. More»
#452 Christopher Bail - Breaking the Social Media Prism: How to Make Our Platforms Less Polarizing

Apr 5, 2021

Dr. Christopher Bail is Professor of Sociology, Public Policy, and Data Science at Duke University, where he directs the Polarization Lab. A leader in the emerging field of computational social science, Dr. Bail’s research examines fundamental questions of social psychology, extremism, and political polarization using social media data, bots, and the latest advances in machine learning. Dr. Bail is the recipient of Guggenheim and Carnegie Fellowships. His research appears in top journals, such as Science, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Sociological Review. His book, Terrified: How Anti-Muslim Fringe Organizations Became Mainstream, received three awards and resulted in an invitation to address the 2016 Democratic National Convention. He is the author of the recent book, Breaking the Social Media Prism: How to Make Our Platforms Less Polarizing. More»