Colloquia Series 2005-2006

Topic: Reflections on Inequalities

Free and Open to All!

Thursday, February 9, 2006 at 3:00 pm
Pearlman Lounge

Kathryn Farr

Professor Em. , Portland State University

"Sex Trafficking"

One million people are trafficked into the sex industry each year, and in this timely study Kathryn Farr documents the macro and micro impact of trafficking women and children into the industry on a global scale. Farr looks not only at the victims themselves, but also at the men and women who control the trade, organized crime, economic conditions that push it along, and the military’s role in perpetuating its demand. Sex Trafficking can be incorporated into a variety of courses in sociology, social problems, culture and sexuality, history, and women’s studies.

Thursday, February 16, 2006 at 3:00 pm
Pearlman Lounge

Denis O`Hearn

Professor of Sociology, Queens University, Belfast Northern Ireland

"Nothing But an Unfinished Song"

Denis O'Hearn was trained as an economist and sociologist at the University of Michigan, where he received his Ph.D. in 1988. He worked for a number of years in the Sociology Department at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, where he was Associate Professor, and joined the Sociology Department at Queen's in 1994. He has been Fulbright Professor of Sociology at University College Dublin (1991/92) and visiting scholar at several universities in the US and Europe.

His scholarly interests are in social movements, the sociology of economic change, industrialisation and transnational corporations, and Marxian political economy. He has published extensively in journals such as the American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, Social Problems, Politics & Society, British Sociological Review, and elsewhere. Most recently, he has been researching the dynamics of conflict between anti-systemic social movements and states. Among the cases he has been studying are the prison conflict in the H-Blocks in Ireland and the Zapatistas in Mexico.

O'Hearn lectures in several courses at Queens, including the Sociology of Development and Change, The Development of Social Theory, and Social Movements. He also gives occasional lectures in courses on Irish Society. Apart from his academic work, O'Hearn is especially interested in action-oriented community research. He is active in the West Belfast Economic Forum, where he consults on community research projects. His publications emerging from this work include the report Jobs or Just Promises: the IDB in West Belfast (West Belfast Economic Forum, 1999) and 'Peace Dividend, Foreign Investment, and Economic Regeneration: The Northern Irish Case' Social Problems (May 2000).

Thursday, March 9, 2006 at 3:00 pm
Pearlman Lounge

Kim Williams

Associate Professor of Public Policy, Kennedy School at Harvard University

"Mark One or More: Civil Rights in Multicultural America"

Kim M. Williams, Associate Professor of Public Policy, teaches and conducts research on American racial politics, social movements, and immigration policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Her first book, Mark One or More: Civil Rights in Multiracial America (2006), explains how a small group of activists spurred the recent restructuring of the American racial classification system. The book argues that the new system of racial counting is likely to reach deeply into the civil rights agenda. Williams has contributed chapters to numerous edited volumes and she is the author of Multiracialism & the Civil Rights Future, recently published in Daedalus. Currently, Professor Williams is working on her second book, The New Politics of Displacement, which focuses on the challenge of black politics to the rise of other minority groups. Williams received a BA from the University of California at Berkeley and a PhD from Cornell University.

Thursday, March 23, 2006 at 3:00 pm
Pearlman Lounge

Kimberly McClain DaCosta

Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies and of Social Studies, Harvard University

"From Ethnic to Racial Options?:
Intermarriage, Multiracialism and Paradigms of Racial Change"

Kimberly DaCosta received a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California at Berkeley in 2000. She has most recently published "All in the Family: The Familial Roots of Racial Division," in The Politics of Multiracialism (2004), edited by Heather Dalmage. She is also the author of "Multiracial Identity: From Personal Problem to Public Issue," in New Faces in a Changing America: Multiracial Identity in the Twenty First Century, Loretta I. Winters and Herman L. DeBose (eds.), (2002).

Her dissertation, "Remaking the Color Line: Social Bases and Implications of the Multiracial Movement," draws on interview, ethnographic, demographic, and historical data to show how the "problem" of how to define persons of mixed descent moved from being a predominantly private issue to a civic one at the end of the twentieth century.

DaCosta shows that the preconditions for multiracial activism are located in changing practices of racial data collection and the changing class and social context within which mixed descent individuals and their families are embedded, as well as in the resources and political opportunities seized by social movement organizations. New policies of racial self-enumeration by institutions collecting racial data, the proliferation of efforts to collect such data in virtually all institutions of social life, the expansion of ethnic-specific social programs, and the increasing institutionalization of ethnic organizations heighten the imperative of "knowing" one's racial membership. This creates new experiences wherein multiracial individuals are constantly called upon to "choose" among ethnoracial affiliations. DaCosta theorizes the unintended consequences of the institutionalizaton of racial categories for the development of social movements, and lays bare the historical and cultural linkages between conceptions of race and family in the United States.

In 2000, DaCosta was a postdoctoral fellow in the Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Scholars Program at Yale University, where she studied the social, medical, and health policy implications of the use of racial statistics in the assessment of risk, diagnosis, and treatment of disease and the complicated issues that arise when competing conceptions of race developed in broader social and political life are imported into the health care arena. She gave particular attention to how the reliance on the state's racial categories shape and potentially limit our understanding of the health needs and profiles of populations and the broader social consequences of the health care industry's use of racial statistics for shaping public understandings of race.

Thursday, March 30, 2006 at 3:00 pm
Pearlman Lounge

Robert Ross

Professor of Sociology, Clark University

"Slaves to Fashion and the Three Pillars of Decency"

Dr. Ross received a B.A. from the University of Michigan in 1963, and an M.A. and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1966 and 1975, respectively. He has been at Clark since 1972. He is Director of the International Studies Stream and among the founders of the program in Urban Development and Social Change. He is affiliated with the programs in Peace Studies, Urban Development and Social Change, Ethics and Public Policy, and Race and Ethnic Relations.

Since the 1980s, Dr. Ross has worked on the political economy of urban development and the analysis of global capitalism. He still does occasional work on the social movements of the 1960s, and is frequently interviewed about his role in those movements. Ross has worked as a speechwriter and policy advisor, and he writes occasional commentary for magazines. In 1995, he began research on the resurgence of sweatshops in the U.S. and global apparel industry, and he has given over 100 public lectures on the issue. His work on this topic has been published in The Nation, Foreign Affairs, Dollars and Sense, as well as a number of edited collections of research on globalization. His book, Slaves to Fashion: Poverty and Abuse in the New Sweatshops, was published in 2004.

Thursday, October 6, 2005 at 2:00 pm
Pearlman Lounge

E. Kay Trimberger

"The New Single Woman"

Sociologist E. Kay Trimberger is Professor Emerita of Women’s and Gender Studies at Sonoma State University and is on the advisory board of the American Association for Single People. The author of Intimate Warriors, she lives in Berkeley, California.

Sponsored By:
   The Department of Sociology
   Women's and Gender Studies Program
   The Martin Weiner Distinguished Lecturers Fund