Spring 2026
January 26th (Zoom) – Elizaveta P. Sheremet (Columbia University): “Public Trust” as Moral Vocabulary of Science
February 2nd – Dan Hirshman (Cornell University): The Costs of Climate Change
February 9th (Zoom) – Zoltan Dujisin (Corvinus University, Budapest): Building a Field of Counter-Disinformation Expertise: East-Central European Experts in the Globalization of the Disinformation Threat
February 16th – Barbara Kiviat (Columbia University): The Moral Economy of Using Real-Time Driving Data to Price Car Insurance
March 2nd – Jun Zhou (University of Michigan): Selling Live: Metrics Architecture and the Reorganization of Service Work in China
March 9th – Sawako Shinomiya & Yize Hu (Keio University): Humanities and Social Sciences in National Scientific Projects: Mental Health, Avatars, and the “ELSI” of Japan’s Moonshot Program
March 23rd – Joanna Kempner (Rutgers University): Cyberbotany and the Enclosure of Underground Knowledge
March 30th [Algorithms] – Katy Habr (Columbia University): Speculative Technologies: Service Sector Companies and the Specter of Big Tech
April 6th [Algorithms] – David Gray-Widder (University of Texas at Austin): Where is the Money from? Empirical Data on Who is Funding the Military-BigTech-Academic AI Bubble
April 13th – Ruotong Niu (Columbia University): Asymmetrical Intimacy: How People Form Emotional Relationships with AI Companions
April 20th – Rafael Andrade (Federal University of São Paulo): Governing Psychology: Circuits of Intervention in the History of Transnational Science
April 27th (Zoom) – Maja Hojer Bruun (Aarhus University): Relational Expertise and Clinical Learning with AI: Revealing Tensions Between Patient Flow and Competence Development
April 30th (12:30pm – 2pm, room 207) – Yingyao Wang (University of Virginia): Seeing Like Many States: Economic Policy Paradigms and the Remaking of the Chinese State in the Reform Era
May 4th [Algorithms] – JS Tan (MIT): Cloud Capitalism and the AI Transition
May 11th – Cecilia Martínez-Plaza (New York University): Addressing Abdication: How Lay Experts Evaluate and Redistribute Professional Expertise
Fall 2025
September 8th (Zoom) – Emilie Dyrlev (Aarhus University): Warm Hands Entangled in Cold Technology? Psychologists’ Tinkering Expertise in Digital Psychiatry
September 15th – Andrés Castro Araújo (Duke University): Authoritative Abstractions
September 22nd (12:30pm -2pm, room 509) – Phillip Brandt (Science Po): Inside Data Science: Hackers and the Making of a New Profession
September 29th – Clay Davis (Northwestern University): Experts in exile: How populist mistrust empowers “knowledge brokers” at the margins of health governance
October 6th – Wanheng Hu (Stanford University): The Inscription of Expertise: Constructing the Credibility of Uncredentialed Medical Image Annotators in China’s AI Industry
October 13th [Algorithms] – Julian Posada (Yale University): Researching Platform Labor and Data Production for Machine Learning
October 27th (12:30pm -2pm, room 509) – Laure Bereni (CNRS): Managing Corporate Virtue: The Politics of Workplace Diversity in New York and Paris
November 10th – Robin Hart (Columbia University): Reframing Americans’ Racial Conceptualizations: Under What Conditions are People Willing to Learn About Structural Racism?
November 17th – Dian Sheng (Columbia University): I Re-Member Me”: Crafting Authentic Self-Narration in Memoirs
November 24th – Yingzhe Zhu (Northwestern University): No Negative Reviews: Unveiling Patients’ Excessively Positive Evaluation and Contextualized Utilization of Online Medical Platforms in China
December 1st – Yanze Yu (Columbia University): Give Me a Patch and I Will Create a Market
December 8th – Elena De Leo (UC San Diego): Facts and Facticity as Cultural Entities
January 29th (Wednesday) – Claire Decoteau (University of Illinois at Chicago): Declaring Racism a Public Health Crisis
February 3rd –Tara Gonsalves (Columbia University): TBD
February 10th – Amy Weissenbach (Columbia University): Here’s My Story”: Narrativizing Crisis and Agency in Personal Appeals
February 17th (Zoom) –Jérôme Gaillaguet (EHESS): TBD
February 24th – TBD
March 3rd – Caleb Scoville (Tufts University): Stupid Little Fish: Extraction, Conservation, and the Politics of Environmental Decline
March 10th (Zoom) – Jeremy Ward (INSERM): Toward a political sociology of ordinary relationships to science: public attitudes in France after the Covid-19 pandemic
March 24th – Patrick Sheehan (Stanford): TBD
March 31st – Siobhan O’Mahony (Boston University): Evaluating entrepreneurial potential: Where do disparities come from?
April 7th [Sociology of Algorithms] (Zoom) – Nic Fishman (Harvard University): TBD
April 14th – Gabriel Varela (Duke University): Authority Brokerage in Mental-Health Self-Diagnosis
April 21st- Donald MacKenzie (University of Edinburgh) & Koray Caliskan (New School): Inside Digital Advertising: Megamachines, Material Political Economy, Platform Power.
April 28th – Chuncheng Liu (Microsoft Research): The reluctant subjects of quantification and their alternative valuation
May 5th – Thomas DeGloma (CUNY): Our Songs of Our Selves: Culture and the Social Performance of Self-Reflexivity.
May 12th [Sociology of Algorithms] – Adam Seth Litwin (Cornell University): TBD
Fall 2024
September 9th (Zoom) – Cailin O’Connor (UC Irvine): Industrial Distraction.
September 16th– Nahoko Kameo (NYU): It’s hard to say good-bye: Humanoid morality and the problem of closing in human-robot interaction
September 23rd [Sociology of Algorithms] – Shazeda Ahmed (UCLA): The Work of ‘Aligning’ Artificial Intelligence
September 30th – Aviad Raz (Ben Gurion): Who moved my CT scan? Redistribution of Expert Workflow Following the Assimilation of AI in Stroke Care.
October 7th – Madisson Whitman and Jordan Brensinger (University of Toronto, Columbia): The Implications of Digital Platform Mediation for Qualitative Research.
October 14th – Mira Vale (University of Michigan): Data Values: Behavioral Data and the New Epistemology of Psychiatry.
October 21st – Anna Skarpelis (CUNY): When Whiteness Fails: Mixed-Race Germans and Conflicting Ontologies of Race in Nazi Germany (1933-1945)
October 28th (Zoom) – Leopold Ringel (Uni Bielefeld): Evaluative Expertise in the Making: Understanding the Proliferation, Power, and Resilience of Rankings.
November 11th – Nitsan Chorev (Brown University): The political economy of surveillance-for-hire: Israel’s military-industrial complex and the making of a private cyber-attack market.
November 18th (Book Talk) – Georg Rilinger (MIT): Failure by Design – The California Energy Crisis and the Limits of Market Planning.
November 25th – Elizaveta Sheremet (Columbia): Beyond Ethos: Reconstructing Morality of Scientists.
December 2nd – Gabriella Coleman (Harvard): The Hack and Leak and the Rise of a New Hacktivist Tactic.
December 9th [Sociology of Algorithms] – Simone Zhang (NYU): Social Mechanisms of Performative Prediction.
Spring 2024
January 16th – Stephen Turner (University of South Florida): Epistemic coercion
January 29th (12:30pm -2pm, room 509) – Julien Larregue (Université Laval): Hereditary: The Persistence of Biological Theories of Crime
February 5th – Adam Leeds (Columbia University): Red Spetsy in the People’s Household: Rationalizing the Economic Mechanism
February 14th (Wednesday)– Donald MacKenzie (University of Edinburgh): Battling for your Phone
February 19th [Sociology of Algorithms]– Renzhe Yu (Columbia University)
February 26th [Sociology of Algorithms]– Carl Vondrick (Columbia University): Multimodal Learning from Pixels to People
March 4th – Zoltan Nicolas Dujisin (Erasmus University Rotterdam)
March 18th (room 207) – Eli Zaretsky (The New School)
March 25th – Elgen Sauerborn (The Free University of Berlin): Science, Society, and Sentiment. The Emotional Fabric of Trust in Scientific Knowledge and Expertise
April 1st – Théo Voldoire (Sciences Po): Bayesian Imputation of Revolving Doors
April 11th (Thursday, 12pm-1:30pm, room 207) [Sociology of Algorithms]– Karl Berglund (Uppsala University): Reading Audio Readers. Book Consumption in the Streaming Age
April 15th – Ankit Bhardwaj (New York University): Decarbonization’s Math Problems: The Climate Politics of Quantifying Emissions, Renewables, and Justice
April 24th (Wednesday, 12:30pm -2pm, room 207)– Gisèle Sapiro (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales)
April 29th – Sanjana Malhotra (Columbia University): Geotagging and the changing nature of work in the Indian bureaucracy
May 6th – Tristan Leperlier (CNRS): Why bother? Motivations of American translators
May 13th – Sarah Lageson (Rutgers University): Algorithmic Injustice in Action. An empirical examination of criminal record data and background screening
Fall 2023
September 11th (in-person)– Donald MacKenzie, University of Edinburgh: “Intermediaries, Mediators and Digital Advertising’s Tensions”
September 18th (in person) – Simon Leger, LISIS: “Exploring Livestock’s Environmentalization through Global Expertise”
September 25th (from 12:30 to 2:00 pm, in-person) – Koray Caliskan, Parsons School of Design (book talk): “Our Understanding of Money is Broken, not Crypto”
October 2nd (in person) [Sociology of Algorithms Workshop] – Nilanjan Raghunath, Singapore University of Technology and Design: TBD
October 9th (in person) – Paul DiMaggio, NYU: “How Americans View Science and Religion: An Institutional Perspective”
October 16th (via Zoom) – Elizabeth Popp-Berman, University of Michigan: TBD
October 23rd (in person) – Sandra Portocarrero, Columbia (practice job talk): “Racialized Expertise: The Consequences of Perceiving and Presenting the Race and Ethnicity of Workers as a Type of Expertise”
October 30th (in person) – Byron Villacis, Bowdoin College: TBD
November 13th (in person) [Sociology of Algorithms Workshop] – Alka Menon, Yale: TBD
November 20th (in person) – Gil Rothschild, Berkeley: TBD
November 27th (in person) – Adam Leeds, Columbia: TBD
December 4th (in person) – Josh Whitford, Columbia: TBD
December 11th (in person) – Liora Goldensher, Virginia Tech: TBD
Spring 2023
February 6th (via Zoom) – Juan D. Delgado, University of Michigan: “Census Making as an Interstitial Space: The Politics of the Official Categorization of Blackness in Mexico (1994-2015)”
February 13th (from 12:30 to 2:00 pm, in person) – Janet Vertesi, Princeton University: “Shaping Science: Organizations, Decisions, and Culture on NASA’s Teams”
February 20th (in person) – Netta Avnoon, Tel Aviv University: TBD
February 27th (via Zoom) – Julian Jürgenmeyer, Columbia University: “Trials of Legitimacy. Stress Testing and Expertise in Bank Supervisors’ Quest for Embedded Autonomy”
March 6th (in person) – Chuncheng Liu, UC San Diego: “Datafication in Action: Boundary Embeddedness and State Surveillance of Everyday Behaviors in China”
March 20th (in person) – Larry Au, Cristan Capotescu and Gil Eyal, Columbia University: “Trust Methodologies: Accounting for Who, What, When, and How to Trust”
March 27th (via Zoom) – Adam Mastroianni, Columbia University: TBD
April 3rd (in person) – Alex Borsa, Columbia University: TBD
April 10th (via Zoom) – Kyungwhan Lee, University of Southern California: TBD
April 17th (in person) – Mailys Gantois, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne: “The origins of a negotiator habitus. Socio-historical and transnational perspectives from a re-appropriation of the North-American Human Relations through a French reformist union after 1945”
April 19th (in person, on WEDNESDAY) – Andrew Lakoff, University of Southern California: “The Government of Emergency?”
April 24th (from 12:30 to 2:00 pm, in person) – Victory Roy, Yale University: “Capitalizing a Cure: How Finance Controls the Price and Value of Medicines”
May 1st (in person) – Kris Velasco, Princeton University: TBD
May 8th (in person) – Galia Plotkin, Ben Gurion University: “The ADHD ‘epidemic’ in Israeli schools: teachers’ expertise in the context of public mistrust”
Fall 2022
September 19 (in-person) – Joonwoo Son (Columbia University): Numbers Relied upon by All Concerned: Competing Constructions of the Audience in Reform of Japanese Official Statistics
September 26 (from 12:30 to 2:00 pm at Knox Hall 501D, in-person) – Iddo Tavory (New York University): Tangled Goods: The Practical Life of Pro Bono Advertising
October 3 (via Zoom) – Olivia Steiert (The New School for Social Research): TBD
October 10 (in-person) – Héctor Vera (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) Experts in the Public Debate on Covid in Mexico
October 17 (in-person) – Pieter Vanden Broeck (Columbia University): Platforms, Teachers and Their Territory
October 24 (via Zoom) – Michael Rabi (Hebrew University of Jerusalem): The Governance of Global Health
October 31 (in-person) – Ari Galper and Jonathan Ben-Menachen (Columbia University): How Do Causal Accounts Explain?
November 14 (via Zoom) – Elizabeth Popp Berman (University of Michigan): Thinking like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in U.S. Public Policy
November 28 (in-person) – Dian Sheng (Columbia University): The Formation of Subfield Choice and Research Interests by Elite Economics PhDs
December 5 (in-person) – Natalia Otrishchenko (Lviv Center for Urban History): TBD
December 12 (via Zoom) – Dariusz Jemielniak (Kozminski University / MINDS): Good Climate for Denialism? Anti-scientific disinformation on social media
Spring 2022
January 24 (via Zoom) – Joonwoo Son (Columbia University): Reading the Government’s (Statistical) Face: National Income Accounting, Subjectivity, and Economic Governance in postwar Japan
January 31 (via Zoom) – Netta Avnoon (Tel-Aviv University): The Alternative Professionalization of Data Science: An Open Model for the Institutionalization of a Profession
February 7 (via Zoom) – Philipp Brandt (Sciences Po Paris): Data Discipline: How Hackers Took on Science
February 14 (via Zoom) – Thomas Angeletti (CNRS, Université Paris Dauphine) and Marcin Serafin (Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences): Reconceptualizing Eventful Sociology
February 21 (via Zoom) – Holger Straßheim (Bielefeld University): From Actors to Instruments: Agency Shifts in Global Expert Networks
March 7 (from 12:00 to 1:30 pm at Knox Hall 509, in-person) – Daniel A. Menchik (University of Arizona): Managing Medical Authority: How Doctors Compete for Status and Create Knowledge
March 21 (in-person) – Ari Galper (Columbia University): Algorithmic Technology and Knowledge Regimes in Three Healthcare Settings
March 28 (in-person) – Larry Au, Gil Eyal, and Cristian Capotescu (Columbia University): Long Covid and Trust in Science and Medicine: Results from an Online Survey (A paper from the COVID-19 and Trust in Science Project)
April 4 (from 12:00 to 1:00 pm, via Zoom) – Sandra Portocarrero and Gil Eyal (Columbia University): The Emergence of a Form of Racialized Expertise and Its Consequences at the Workplace
April 11 (from 12:00 to 1:30 pm at Knox Hall 509, in-person) – Scarlett Salman (Gustave Eiffel University): In the Care of Capitalism: What Executive Coaching tells us about the Changes in Work
April 18 (in-person) – Anna Katharina Thieser (Columbia University): Collaboration, Competition and Utopianism in a Blockchain Community
April 25 (in-person) – Matthias Thiemann (Sciences Po Paris): Growth at Risk: Boundary Walkers, Stylized Facts and the Legitimacy of Counter-Cyclical Interventions
May 2 (via Zoom) – Aviad Raz and Alma Levin-Fridman (Ben-Gurion University): Genomic Uncertainty and Genetics Counselors’ Professional Authority in Cross-Cultural Perspective
May 9 (in-person) – Cristian Capotescu (Columbia University): Through the Biographic Lens: Recovering Lay Expertise and Aid Practices in the Late Cold War
Fall 2021
September 27 (in-person) – Jordan Brensinger (Columbia University): Data Vulnerability, Mistrust, and the Production of Economic Insecurity
October 4 (via Zoom) – Przemyslaw Matt Lukacz (Columbia University): Can A.I. Be Trusted to Predict Weather? Ethics of Design, Jurisdictional Struggles, and Anxieties about Automation at the National A.I. Institute for Research on Trustworthy A.I. in Weather, Climate, and Coastal Oceanography
October 11 (via Zoom) – Arvind Karunakaran (McGill University): Truce Structures: Mechanisms for Addressing Protracted Jurisdictional Conflicts between Professions
October 18 (via Zoom) – James Chu (Columbia University): Educational Rankings and Adolescent Perceptions of College Cost
October 25 (via Zoom) – Tara Gonsalves (UC Berkeley): Unruly Categories: The Transnational Circulation of Transgender in INGOs
November 8 (via Zoom) – Blair Sackett (University of Pennsylvania): Circuit Breakers in Social Networks: Rejection, Reciprocity, and the Temporal Context of Exchange in a Refugee Camp
November 15 (via Zoom) – Amy Zhou (Columbia University): Two Worlds of Prenatal Care
November 29 (via Zoom) – Aaron Plasek (Columbia University): Machine Learning as the “Production of Completely New Ideas Not Deducible from Known Data”: Mechanical “Creativity,” the Mathematical Impossibility of Formal Categories, and the Creation of Data’s “Context” as a Solution to Problems of Extra-Experimental Evidence Posed by Representing and Intervening the Social and Physical World
December 6 (via Zoom) – Jana C. Glaese (New York University): The Puzzle of Demand: Enthusiastic Recruiters, Ignored Offers and the Limits of Market Logic
December 13 (via Zoom) – Akshita Sivakumar (UC San Diego): Crossing the Threshold: On the Sociospatial Reproduction of Information and Control during Anthropogenic Accidents
December 20 (via Zoom) – Julian Jürgenmeyer (Columbia University) and Onur Özgöde (Harvard University): The Fed’s Modernity: Monetary Macroeconomic Government and the Quest for Embedded Autonomy in Central Banking
Spring 2021
January 19 – Gil Eyal and Jordan Brensinger (Columbia University): The Sociology of Identification Processes
January 26 – Martin Petzke (Bielefeld University): The Doxa of Official Statistics (RSVP will be required to receive the paper for this week)
February 2 – Anastasia V. Sergeeva (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam): Hiring Algorithms: An Ethnography of Developing and Using Machine Learning in Recruiting
February 23 – Ryan Hagen and Denise Milstein (Columbia University): Ontological Security Under Threat of Contagion
March 9 – Madisson Whitman (Columbia University): Modeling Ethics
March 16 – Arvind Karunakaran (McGill University): Front-line Professionals in the Wake of Social Media Scrutiny
March 23 – Nilanjan Raghunath (Singapore University of Technology and Design): Technological Adoption as a Social Process in Food Centers in Singapore
March 30 – Kyunghwan Lee (University of Southern California): Making the Economy in South Korea through National Income
April 14 – Mohamed Amine Brahimi (Columbia University) and Amín Pérez (Université du Québec à Montréal): French social sciences and post-colonial intellectuals: The cases of Mohamed Arkoun and Abdelmalek Sayad
April 20 – Wenjuan Zheng (Stanford University): The Hidden Cost of Crowdfunding Platforms for Small Nonprofit Organizations
April 27 – Théophile Lenoir (Institut Montaigne): Objectivity in Regulatory Science: Tensions between Journalistic and Scientific Interpretations of Objectivity
Fall 2020
September 15 – Humberto Fernandes (Rio de Janeiro State University): On Social Manipulability: Concepts for a Methodological Framework
September 22 – Larry Au (Columbia University): Constructing Lay Expertise on a Covid-19 Online Community
September 29 – Chuncheng Liu (UC San Diego), Zheng Fu (Columbia), and Larry Au (Columbia) : It’s (not) the flu: Expertise and the COVID-19 Pandemic in China, Hong Kong, and the United States
October 6 – Maïlys Gantois (CESSP/CRPS Université Paris I – Panthéon Sorbonne): Negotiation, Academic Notions and a Democratic Myth
October 20 – Nilanjan Raghunath (Singapore University of Technology and Design): Quantified Credibility as an Exigency of Late Modernity
November 10 – Alma Steingart (Columbia University): Statecraft by Algorithms
November 24 – Julian Jürgenmeyer (Columbia University) and Onur Özgöde (Harvard University): The Fed’s Modernity: Hybridization and the Management of Embedded Autonomy in US Central Banking
December 1 – Joshuamorris Hurwitz (Stanford University): Constructing the Essential
December 8 – Mohamed Amine Brahimi (Columbia University): How to Become a French Islamic Philosopher: The Case of Abdenour Bidar
Spring 2020
January 29 – Rosalind Donald (Columbia University): Climate knowledge as community ritual: Miami weathercasters as climate change communicators
February 5 – Benjamin Lemoine (CNRS, Université Paris Dauphine & IAS, Princeton): Earmarking public money under pressure. Greece as a European laboratory of privatization
February 12 – Renan Gonçalves Leonel da Silva (University of São Paulo): The governance of the productive development policies for Monoclonal Antibodies in Brazil
February 26 – Ryan Hagen (Columbia University): Constant objects: Materiality, temporality, and the management of disaster risk in New York City
March 11 – Joonwoo Son (Columbia University): Reliable numbers: Reform and standardization of official statistics in postwar Japan
March 25 – Seungwon Lee (Columbia University): Who comments on whose articles in sociology?
March 30 – Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra (UC San Diego): Research metrics, labor markets, and epistemic change: Evidence from Britain 1970-2018
April 15 – Marion Fourcade (UC Berkeley): Ordinal citizenship
April 29 – Aaron Plasek (Columbia University): Teaching a machine to be creative: Early machine learning, 1948-1963
Fall 2019
September 25 – Emily Paine (HIV Center, CUMC): ‘Fat Broken Arm Syndrome’: Negotiating Stigma and Risk in LGBTQ Care
October 2 – Larry Au (Columbia): China’s Human Gene-Editing Controversy
October 9 – Stéphanie Mignot-Gérard (IAE Gustave Eiffel et IRG, UPEC): Performance Measurement Systems and Collegiality in Universities: Ambivalent and Status-Dependent Interactions
October 23 – Yimang Zhou (Albany): Institutionalizing population sciences in four East Asian countries
October 30 – Zheng Fu (Columbia): Work of Legitimacy in China: Promoting Labor Law as a Legitimate Order Among Employers
November 20 – Benjamin Braun (IAS, Princeton & Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne): Engaging shareholders: The infrastructure of voice
December 4 – Jordan Brensinger (Columbia): (Mis)Trust in Numbers: Narratives and the Negotiation of Personal Data
December 11 – Adrianna Bagnall-Munson (Columbia) and Guillermina Altomonte (New School): Autonomy on the Horizon: Comparing Institutional Approaches to Disability and Elder Care
Spring 2019
January 29 – Alexander Hoppe (University of Pennsylvania): The Carnegie School of Fashion Design
February 12 – Pegah Zohouri Haghian (University of Oxford): Intellectual legitimacy across fields: the case of three Muslim intellectuals in the Anglophone academia (1989-2010)
February 19 – Larry Au (Columbia University): Anticipatory Discourses of China’s Push for Precision Medicine
February 26 – Pedro Blois (Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento): Sociologists and Market Research in Argentina
March 5 – Julian Jürgenmeyer (Columbia University): Bank Stress Tests as Tools of Government in the Age of Globalized Finance
March 26 –Sarah Sachs (Columbia University): The Algorithm at Work: The Reconfiguration of Work and Expertise in the Making of Similarity in Art
April 2 – Constance Nathanson (Columbia University): The Social Production of Crisis: Sagas of HIV/Blood Contamination in France and the United States
April 16 – Alka Menon (Yale University): “Objectifying the Face”: Visual Technologies and Doctor-Patient Communication in Cosmetic Surgery
April 23 – Maïlys Gantois (CESSP/CRPS Université Paris I – Panthéon Sorbonne): Collective bargaining ideas, knowledge and uses: What “democracy at work” and union study tells us about social transformations
April 30 – Jordan Brensinger (Columbia University): The Sociology of Identification Processes
Fall 2018
September 10 – Adrianna Bagnall-Munson (Columbia): “What a Mediminder does: Arranging Autonomy Through Technologies of Care”
September 17 – Claudio Benzecry (Northwestern University): The world at her fit: Scale-making, uniqueness and standardization
October 1 – Martin Petzke (University of Lucerne): “Ethnicizing the ‘Person with a Migration Background’ in German Integration Policy. The Role of Statistical Monitoring Instruments.”
October 8 (4 pm in Knox 509) – Talk by Jenny Reardon (UC Santa Cruz): “Just Genomes?” [sponsored by the Department of Sociology and the Precision Medicine and Society Initiative, see more here]
October 15 – Luciana de Souza Leao (Columbia) and Diana Graizbord (University of Georgia): “The Cultural Work of Experts: Policy Evaluation and the Search for a New Bureaucratic Ethos in Brazil and Mexico”
November 12 (11 am in Knox 501D) – Jordan Brensinger (Columbia): “Restoring Your Good Name”: Identity Theft as a New Economic Insecurity
November 26 – Elizabeth Watkins (Columbia): “Information Security Practices in the Future of Work”
Spring 2018
January 22 – Eliza Brown (NYU): Diagnosis without Bodily Material: Stunted Multiplicity and the Specters of Disease
January 29 – Adrianna Bagnall (Columbia University): The Rise of Social Intelligence: Interdependent Indicators for the Measurement of Mental Deficiency
February 5 – Joonwoo Son (Columbia): Governing Economy through Indicators: Transformation of Use of Indicators in Japanese Economic Planning, 1960-1965
February 19 – Jeremy Ward (Aix- Marseille Université & Université Paris Diderot): Science in the Media, a Neoinstitutionnalist Approach: Diversity and Boundary-making in the French Coverage of the 2009 Pandemic Flu Vaccine’s Safety
February 26 – Lisa Owens (Columbia): Borders of Social Order: Surveillance at the Poverty/Crime Nexus
March 19 – Dan Hirschman (Brown): The Stylized Facts of Inequality
March 26 – Apollonya Porcelli (Brown): “Esoteric” science and Peru’s New Left: How the labor movement shaped environmental discourse
April 9 [Lecture] – Kathrin Zippel (Northeastern): Academic Nationality: How the .edu Bonus Helps U.S. Academics Abroad [event link]
April 16 – Sarah Sachs (Columbia): The Algorithm at Work: Structured Interactions and the Enactment of Similarity Matching in Art
April 23 – Larry Au (Columbia): Boundary Orientations and Translational Strategies in the Field of Chinese Medicine
Fall 2017
September 18 – Moran Levy (Columbia University): ‘Adequate Trials’: How the Search for Cancer Cures Shaped Leukemia Classification
October 2 – Ryan Hagen (Columbia University): The Matzo Plant and the Atom Bomb: Resource Accretion and the Production of Stability in Everyday Life
October 16 – Stephanie Barral (Institute for Research and Innovation in Society, Paris): “No Net Loss” of Biodiversity: What Economy Does to Environmental Sciences
October 30 – Luciana de Souza Leao (Columbia University): The Database Wars: The Evolution of Datasets of the Poor as a Struggle for Power in Mexico and Brazil
November 13 – Sarah Sachs (Columbia University): The Algorithm at Work: The Practice of Constructing Similarity at the Art Genome Project
December 4 – Joshua Hurwitz (Columbia University): Diagnosing Automation: Radiological Digitization and its Discontents
Spring 2017
January 30 – Daniela Russ (Columbia University): Making Sources of Energy
February 13 – Jeremy Ward (Universite Paris Diderot): Rethinking the Antivaccine Movement Concept: A Case Study of Public Criticism of the Swine Flu Vaccine’s Safety in France
February 20 – Erela Potugaly (Columbia University)
March 6 – Gil Eyal and Luciana De Souza Leao (Columbia University): Experiments in the Wild: A Historical Perspective on the Rise of Randomized Controlled Trials in International Development
March 27 – Noah Arjomand (Columbia University): Sociological Fiction: Using Composite Characters in Narrative Ethnography
April 17 – Tonya Tartour (Sciences Po, Paris): Implementing Mandatory Outpaitent Treatment: A Comparative Analysis of French “Case program” and American Assisted Outpatient Treatment
May 8 – Alvarro Laiz (Center for Teaching and Research in Economics, Mexico City): Science Patronage, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Mexican Social Sciences around 1940
Fall 2016
September 19 – Adrianna Bagnall (Columbia University), “Institutionalized Adulthood: People with developmental disability inside and outside institutions”
October 10 – Hila Lifshitz-Assaf (New York University), TBA
October 24 – Kristien Hens and Delphine Jacobs (Centre for Biomedical Ethics and Law, KU Leuven), “The experiences of parents and clinicians with the concept of ASD”
October 31 – Abby Coplin (Columbia University), TBA
November 7 – Alex Barnard (UC Berkeley), TBA
November 14 – Wendy Roth (University of British Columbia), “Does Genetic Ancestry Testing Promote an Essentialist View of Race? Findings from an Experimental Study” (a collaborative effort with the REM workshop, 12-2, room TBA
December 12 – Joan Robinson (Columbia University), TBA
Spring 2016
February 1 – Daniel Wojtkiewicz (Columbia University), “The Production of Medical Diagnosis in Autism: Genetic Tests in Clinical Practice”
February 22 – Adam Leeds (University of Pennsylvania), “Assembling the Economic Mechanism: Soviet Economics 1937-1965 and the Technology of Socialist Government”
March 7 – Mary X. Mitchell (University of Pennsylvania), “Possessing Bikini, Brandishing the Bomb: Race, Gender, and Sexuality at an Imperial Crossroads”
March 21 – Moran Levy (Columbia University), “Trial and Error: How Anticancer Drugs Shaped Cancer Science”
April 4 – Luciana de Souza Leão and Gil Eyal (Columbia University), “Experiments in the Wild: a Historical Perspective on the Rise of Randomized Controlled Trials in International Development”
April 14-15 – Graduate Student Conference at Columbia University: “Expertise from Margin to Center: Science, Politics, and Democracy”
April 18 – Mihai-Dan Cirjan (Central European University and New York University), “Talking about Work: Romanian Psychotechnics and the Evaluation of Labour after the Interwar Capitalist Crisis”
May 2 – Abigail Coplin (Columbia University), “The Limits of Politicized Science: Scientists and the State During China’s GMO Controversy”
Fall 2015
September 21 – Guus Dix, Maastricht University/Max-Planck-Institute Cologne: “What Incentives Will Bring. Fictional Expectations, Worth, and Symbolic Power in Economic Life”
October 5 – Philipp Brandt, Columbia University: “Mechanisms in the Emergence of Data Science: A Comparative Study of Abstract Knowledge”
October 19 – Noah Arjomand, Columbia University: “Composure of the Fixer: Using Composite Characters to Narrate a Sociology of News Production”
November 9 – Diana Graizbord, Brown University: “Experiments as Statecraft: How PROGRESAs Randomized Control Trial Refashioned Social Policy Making”
November 23 – Adrianna Bagnall, Columbia University: “Institutionalized Adulthood: People with Developmental Disabilities Inside and Outside Institutions”
December 7 – Zoltan Dujisin, Columbia University: “Memory Entrepreneurs: The Architects of a Post-Communist Regime of Remembrance”
Spring 2015
February 9th, 12pm
Abigail Coplin (Columbia University)
“Building Monsanto with Chinese Characteristics: The Role of Capital, Ambiguity, and the State in Chinese Agrobiotech Companies”.
February 23rd, 12pm
Ryan Hagen (Columbia University)
“Inconceivable Futures: Inevitable failures in collaborative anticipation.”
March 2nd, 12pm
Lisa Stampnitzky (Harvard University)
“What is speakability? State secrets and public discourse in the was on terror”
March 9th, 12pm
David Reinecke (Princeton University)
“Seamful regulation in an era of digital convergence”
March 23rd, 12pm
Joonwoo Son (Columbia University)
“Explaining the World of Big Data: the global IT consultancy and reshaping of policy knowledge in South Korea.”
April 13th, 12pm
Gabriel Abend (NYU)
“The Love of Neuroscience: A Case Study in the Sociology of Epistemologies.”
April 20th, 12pm
Diane Vaughan (Columbia University)
“Producing Controllers”
May 4th, 12pm
Sarah Sachs (Columbia University)
“The Order of Art: Expertise and Automation in the Classification of Art”
Fall 2014
September 16th, 12pm
Introductions
September 30th, 12pm
Joan Robinson (Columbia University)
“Conceiving technology: How political alliance and legal opportunity brought the pregnancy test home.”
October 7th, 12pm
Elizabeth McGhee Hassrick (University of Chicago)
“Mapping the Infra-structure of Networked Expertise”
October 14th, 12pm
Martine Lappé (UCLA)
“The Maternal Body as Environment in Autism Science”
October 28th, 12pm
Jigar Bhatt (Columbia University)
“Silver and Dross: Economists, Interventions, and the Politics of “What Works” in US Global Development”
November 14th, 11am
Martine Lappé (UCLA)
Practice Job Talk: “How Autism Became Environmental: The Unintended Consequences of Controversy”
November 18th, 12pm
Margarita Rayzberg (Northwestern University)
“The Population Control Origins of Field Experiments in International Economic Development: History and Implications.”
December 2nd, 12pm
Antoine Courmont (Science Po)
“The sociotechnical shaping of the data-driven city”