Sociology

I. OVERVIEW

II. DIALOGUES

Sociology Overview

Begin an investigation of social life. The Department of Sociology offers a distinctive approach that builds on The New School’s historical connections to European social science to develop a tradition of critical inquiry and engage with contemporary debates and academic communities globally.

The department focuses on core areas of research that reflect the interests of the faculty: social inequalities; culture and politics; law, rights, and citizenship; historical and comparative sociology; and cities and publics. The graduate program emphasizes theoretically informed ethnographic, historical, and interpretive inquiry into the significant social issues of our times in local, national, and transnational contexts. The ultimate goal is to ensure that students understand the major transformations taking place in modern and postmodern societies and are prepared to devise concrete solutions to challenges posed by these changes.

Degrees Offered

The department offers the MA, MPhil, and PhD in Sociology. Students who complete MA requirements with sufficient distinction may be considered for admission to PhD study. In rare cases, the department grants direct PhD admission to applicants who have completed a comparable MA in Sociology at another institution. Students with an MA in Historical Studies, Sociology, or Politics at The New School for Social Research (NSSR) may apply to study in the PhD program in Sociology and receive their PhD while adding a specialization in Historical Studies.

Recent Courses

Sociology of Organization and Disorganization Post-Democracy: A Survey of the Debate in the Global North and South Fundamentals of Political Sociology Nationalism Revisited Logic of Inquiry Historical Sociology Forced Migration: Concepts and Policy

Recent Outcomes

Mario Hernandez (PhD ’19): Assistant

Professor, Mills College

Marijn Mado (MA ’19): Doctoral Student,

Stanford University

Zeyno Ustun (PhD ’19): Postdoctoral

Fellow, University of Pennsylvania

Elizabeth Ziff (PhD ’19): Assistant Professor,

University of Indianapolis

Maria Cabrera (PhD ’16): Postdoctoral

Research Fellow, New York University

Vincent Carducci (PhD ’15): Dean of

Undergraduate Studies, College for

Creative Studies

Lauren Trigo (MA ’16): Director of

Operations Data and Special Programs,

NYC Department of Education

The Language That Shapes Events

Robin Wagner-Pacifici University in Exile Professor of Sociology

Events shape society. But what exactly constitutes an event, and what factors shape it? Through her research, Robin Wagner-Pacifici strives to answer these questions. With a background in comparative literature, Wagner-Pacifici brought a humanistic approach to her graduate studies in sociology, studying the ethnography of speaking and sociolinguistics in order to “read” society by listening to the language surrounding events. First focusing on conflict and violent events, Wagner-Pacifici studied the ways language, images, and symbols shaped those events and mobilized people. Her work has examined different groups and political ideologies to determine whether similar patterns arise despite the differing ideologies and led her to write books on standoffs and military surrender.

Wagner-Pacifici’s latest book, What Is an Event? (University of Chicago Press, 2017), presents the idea that events never end, but rather keep changing form and may even undergo a period of hibernation until they are revived when a new group takes interest. In addition to writing this new book, Wagner-Pacifici has also begun computational analysis of texts, including the National Security Strategy Reports of the United States, to analyze relational networks within the documents. This work has sparked her interest in data visualization and in developing partnerships with New School colleagues at Parsons School of Design to help her and her students present their findings in new ways.

Wagner-Pacifici attributes the ease with which she collaborates with other scholars to the interdisciplinary nature of NSSR’s sociology department. Trained in disciplines beyond sociology, including history and political theory, the faculty create an atmosphere of skepticism toward traditional academic boundaries. Wagner-Pacifici notes that while most American sociology departments are U.S.-centric, at NSSR the focus is much more international, because of the demographics of both the faculty and students. Unlike many sociology programs, NSSR’s Department of Sociology also emphasizes qualitative approaches over quantitative ones.

Students who come to study with Wagner-Pacifici typically have an interest in social transformation and in theory. The department offers students a strong theoretical grounding and a way of theoretically framing whatever they may empirically study, regardless of the substantive content. WagnerPacifici frames her own approach around discourse analysis, and teaches a discourse class unique in New York City, to ground students in the theories of language, speech, and iconography. She notes, “We are fundamentally in the business of producing knowledge here and encourage students to think of themselves as theoreticians.”

A Conversation on the Culture of Service and Inequality with Rachel Sherman

Rachel Sherman Professor of Sociology

[00:00:00] Interviewer: What are your general research interests and how did you get started in those areas? Where do you see that research going in the future?

[00:00:20] Rachel Sherman: My research interests mostly have to do with social class and culture, primarily in the United States. I’m especially interested in why we accept such high levels of inequality. I use qualitative methods—for example, interviewing and participant observation or ethnography. My first book, which was based on my dissertation, was an ethnographic study of two luxury hotels. In these hotels, there are high levels of obvious face-to-face inequality between workers and guests. So I looked at how both workers and guests negotiated this inequality interactively. I worked in many different jobs in these two hotels and mostly examined how workers managed inequality through their thoughts about and treatment of guests, their feelings about other workers and managers, and the games that they played on the job. I also interviewed managers and people who stay at luxury hotels, to get their perspectives.

A relatively consistent aspect of my research has been my interest in service work, which is work that involves interactions between workers and customers. After completing the hotel project, I did some research on the personal concierge industry, in which clients pay personal concierges, or “lifestyle managers,” to complete tasks for them. I found a lot of resistance to the idea of paying for things that you imagine you should be able to do yourself, or in the case of heterosexual men, that you imagine your wife or female partner should be able to do. So there’s a gendered aspect to what people are willing to pay for, while these concierges try to sell their services in a gender-neutral way. That was a deviation from the kind of social class focus of my previous work, although, of course, the people who tend to hire these services tend to have more money and people who tend to offer them have less.

The project that I just published with Princeton University Press, entitled Uneasy Street, comes back to the question of class. But it is different from my earlier work in that it’s looking not so much at work but more at consumption.

I have done an in-depth interview study with wealthy and affluent people in New York City and the surrounding suburbs about their consumption choices, such as where they send their kids to school and where they live. I have particularly focused on home renovation because it’s something that people really like to discuss and because this process brings together questions about finances, aesthetics, and family lifestyles. I researched these types of lifestyle decisions partly as a way of examining what it’s like to live with privilege, to have the option to send their children to private school, choose what neighborhood to live in, renovate a home or a second home, and so on.

And I’m finding, and the argument of the book is, that living with privilege is not as easy as I think we tend to imagine. Our pop culture images of wealthy people are primarily negative. Supposedly the U.S. is the country of the American Dream and it’s great to have a lot of money and be at the top of the heap. But actually, the people that I’ve interviewed—who are mostly liberal New Yorkers, so maybe there’s something specific to that population—tend to be kind of conflicted about it, for reasons that I think are generalized in popular culture and the media that have to do with moral judgments of wealthy people. We tend to evaluate wealthy people on the basis of individual characteristics. Are they nice to their nanny? Are they nice to a waiter? Are they nice

to other people? Or do we see them as obnoxious, rude, materialistic, and greedy? Culturally, we make these divisions between good and bad rich people. The people that I’ve interviewed are trying to be the good kind. What I’m interested in—and it’s partly these individual people’s conflict, but it’s also the general idea—is that if we as a society differentiate between good rich and bad rich people, that is a way of legitimating inequality. It’s a way of saying, “Yeah, there are bad rich people, but then there are good rich people too,” and that means that it’s OK for those good rich people to be so rich. We don’t have a strong cultural critique of distribution of resources; what we do have is an informal sense of whether people inhabit their privilege appropriately. Of course, that is changing to a certain extent with the emergence of Occupy and the Bernie Sanders campaign, which are articulating strong critiques of unequal distribution. But our ideas about the moral value of wealthy people, I think, remain quite prominent.

Now that this project is finished, I’ll probably go back to studying workers and service work in some capacity. I did research on the U.S. labor movement early in my career, and I’m interested in looking again at workers’ movements as well. And I would like to return to doing ethnographic work, because I like it. Interviewing is good too, but I sort of miss that more immersive nature of ethnographic work.

[00:10:28] IN: Can you describe how you teach students to do ethnographic research? How do you teach students not to have their own cultural biases influence their research?

[00:10:56] RS: I don’t teach ethnography in this department right now, but I do teach an interviewing methods course. My approach to teaching both interviewing and ethnography is to have students do their own projects. Students have to come up with a project quickly at the beginning of the semester, and most of the class time is spent workshopping those projects as students work on them in the field outside of class. We do a fair amount of reading, but mostly the students are figuring out what they want to study, whom they need to talk to, developing their interview questions, finding respondents, talking to those respondents, transcribing and coding and analyzing the interviews, and writing a final paper. Some students have continued to develop and publish from those projects after the class has ended. It’s very gratifying to me to see when that happens. And basically I just think there’s no other way to learn. Methodological issues are much more appropriately and productively dealt with if you’re actually encountering them in your work, as opposed to reading about hypothetical scenarios.

I don’t think it’s possible in qualitative research to be “unbiased.” I’m not even sure that’s really desirable or a useful way of thinking about the enterprise. What we have to think about is how we make choices about who to interview and how our particular demographic characteristics—like race, class, age, gender, and so on—influence what we’re finding in that they influence how people respond to us or how we ask questions and interpret answers. It also matters whether we’re new to the field that we’re researching or whether we’ve been in the field for a long time. That can make a big difference. Any position has positive and negative consequences, and we just need to think about those consequences and make explicit choices around them. That’s my philosophy.

[00:13:20] IN: Do your research and teaching take a heterodox approach to sociology? What would you tell prospective students about the sociology department at NSSR?

[00:13:45] RS: I think our department has a very distinctive position in American sociology because of our emphasis on qualitative, theoretical, and interpretative work, with a strong emphasis on history and culture. As a department, we have a shared interest in political culture, which faculty look at in many different arenas, including law, social movements and the state, discourse analysis, urban life and culture, art and politics, and civil society, as well as my own research on social class and on work. Students who are interested in theory, as well as politics, culture, and history, and in studying those topics using qualitative methods are a good fit for our department.