2025
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Thursday, December 4, 2025 Faculty Fellow/Assistant Professor, New York University Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium 5:00 pm EST/GMT-5 This talk examines how Black, Latino, and Asian Americans define what it means to be “truly American” and how these definitions relate to perceptions of racial group position in the national hierarchy. Using data from the Truly American Project (TrAP) 2 survey—a nationally representative sample of 3,000 respondents across the three groups—the study uses a ranking-based measure of Americanness to uncover patterned differences in how groups prioritize ascriptive traits such as nativity and long-term residence and credal traits such as hard work, lawfulness, and paying taxes. The analysis shows that these priorities reflect groups’ demographic profiles and perceived strengths: Black respondents elevate nativity, while Latino and Asian respondents emphasize credal qualities. These definitions correspond to distinct views of the national hierarchy, with each group locating itself differently relative to Whites, Blacks, Latinos, and Asians. Additional analyses demonstrate that emphasizing specific traits shifts perceptions of relative Americanness in systematic ways. Together, the findings reveal that national identity is not a shared consensus but a contested symbolic arena in which groups advance status claims that shape intergroup relations. Victoria S. Asbury-Kimmel is a political and cultural sociologist and a Faculty Fellow in the NYU Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program. She received her PhD in Sociology from Harvard University and holds an MA in Education from Stanford University. Her research investigates how definitions of national belonging shape democratic institutions, civic participation, intergroup relations, and policy attitudes. Drawing on surveys, experiments, behavioral economic tasks, and computational text analysis, she examines how legal, racial, and civic criteria inform judgments of Americanness and structure views on immigration, redistribution, and citizenship. Her work has appeared in Public Opinion Quarterly, Social Psychology Quarterly, the Journal of Communication, and the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. She has received support from the Russell Sage Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy, and her research has been recognized with awards from the American Association for Public Opinion Research, the Eastern Sociological Society, and the Society for the Study of Social Problems. |
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Monday, December 1, 2025
Terresa Eun, PhD Candidate in Sociology, Stanford University
Olin Humanities, Room 102 5:00 pm EST/GMT-5 Pain is rising in the United States and globally—an alarming trend with wide-reaching implications given that pain serves as a “barometer” for population health and well-being. These increases are not evenly distributed: pain reflects and exacerbates existing inequalities, including by socioeconomic status. While literature has established socioeconomic inequalities in pain trends, little is known about how perceptions of socioeconomic status, rather than objective or relative access to resources, contribute to these inequalities. Such distinctions matter given that internalizations of status do not necessarily align with material conditions yet can affect our health through various psychosocial mechanisms. Using Health and Retirement Study panel data from 2004 to 2018, I use conditional, quadratic growth models to find that feeling worse off—regardless of one’s socioeconomic reality—is associated with worse health. Perceptions of lower SES and perceived declines in status are significantly associated with more pain, even after accounting for objective and relative SES. These results demonstrate that subjective socioeconomic status matters for health beyond access to resources, underscoring the importance of perceptions in shaping health realities and highlighting subjective SES as an underexplored mechanism explaining the persistence of health inequalities. Terresa Eun is a PhD Candidate in Sociology at Stanford University. As a sociologist and social demographer, she studies how social determinants of health shape and are shaped by structural inequalities, particularly by race, class, and gender. Her research to date examines the lived experience and distribution of physical pain, the relationship between law enforcement and health, and the implementation of public health interventions. Across these substantive domains, she investigates how our perceptions shape our social realities, how conceptual categories can obscure underlying heterogeneity, and how discretion enters decision-making processes. Her work has been supported by various grants and fellowships, including a National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute T32 training grant, and has been published in peer-reviewed journals at the intersection of social science and medicine. |
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Monday, November 24, 2025 Olin Humanities, Room 102 5:00 pm EST/GMT-5 Consumer complaints are a powerful window into how individuals experience and contest financial institutions. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), established after the 2008 financial crisis, was founded to protect consumers from unfair practices, in part by mediating disputes between firms and consumers. The recent federal attacks on the CFPB underscore the importance of leveraging this unique data source. This study compares complaints lodged against banks and credit unions using grounded computational theory, which is a method that blends qualitative and computational techniques to generate more robust and replicable findings. Credit unions are cooperative, not-for-profit institutions that present themselves as more customer-focused, raising the expectation that their complaints will differ from those about commercial banks. Structural topic models, qualitative coding, and word embedding regressions reveal that credit union complaints more frequently invoke moralized language, emphasizing how institutional actions created a “burden” or how the treatment is “unfair.” Although bank customers also used this language, they did not do it to the same extent, and most of their complaints focused on the personal issue at hand. Findings from this study emphasize the value in examining credit unions separately from banks and demonstrate the value of using complaint data. Kathy is an economic sociologist interested in financial services access and affordability. Her current work focuses on credit unions and how they shape the broader financial environment and people's experiences with them compared to traditional commercial banks. Her past scholarship has examined labor union support and organizational reputation management among large banks. She is versed in qualitative content analysis, computational text analysis, and advanced quantitative methods. When teaching methods, she emphasizes the importance of centering the research question and matching data and methods to answer the question. |
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Monday, October 20, 2025 Olin Humanities, Room 102 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4 For most of the twentieth century, Albina was the only majority Black area in Portland, Oregon. Between 1990 and 2010, Albina gentrified and became majority-white. This talk will look at how longtime Black Portland residents experienced and responded to the loss of Portland’s historically Black place. |
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Tuesday, April 15, 2025
Uri Shanas, Associate Professor at University of Haifa-Oranim
Olin Humanities, Room 201 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 In this talk, Prof. Uri Shanas, will introduce the TiME (This is My Earth) initiative. TiME is a non-profit and volunteer-based international conservation organization that works with local communities to acquire and steward biodiversity hotspots around the world. The organization is led by an array of environmental leaders and renowned scientists from around the world. Since 2016, TiME has purchased and protected ten biodiversity hotspots in the upper Amazon, the Caribbean, Colombia, Brazil, Kenya, and Ecuador, protecting a total area of over 15 million square yards. After the talk, Professor Shanas will talk with students about potential involvement in TiME. This event is sponsored by the Sociology and EUS/ES Programs. |
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Friday, April 11, 2025 – Saturday, April 12, 2025 These totalitarian regimes molded their relationship with religious institutions and traditions since their oriented conception of religion. This was discernible, and an extremization of post–Westphalian understanding about religion was based on a dialectical relationship between political power and religious institutions in which the latter are essentially subjugated to the former. However, this did not preclude regimes, such as the fascist one, from establishing agreements and collaborations with religious institutions, nor did it prevent their state secularism from mimetically and selectively embed some religious practices or symbols. In the case of communist and socialist–relative regimes, it could happen that state institutions subjugated religious ones in what we might call the “domestication of religion” which could involve blatant anti–religious conflict, as in the instance of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, or even the incorporation of national worship and state ideology into religious organizations. Indeed, it also included the shaping of the architectural religious landscape, which could be subdued to state purpose or even targeted by the anti–religious campaigns as in Albania’s in 1967 when churches and mosques were closed, destroyed or converted to civilian uses. Yet in the case of communist–inspired regimes as much as fascist ones, it would be inaccurate to believe that state institutions were able to totally erase the religious monumental and architectural landscape: both religious authorities and faithful were able to develop practices of negotiation and resistance through re–using and preserving religious spaces. Specific sacred locations were occasionally used to elaborate the cultural memory of religious communities, as happened in Soviet Central Asia. This workshop aims to investigate, according to various epistemological perspectives (historical, anthropological, architectural, archaeological) and through different methodological approaches how totalitarian regimes in the short 20th century shaped the religious monumental and architectural landscape. |