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Sociology Department Colloquium
Series for Spring 2006
Wednesdays from 12:00 - 1:00pm, McNeil Building, University of Pennsylvania,
3718 Locust Walk, Philadelphia, PA, Room 103 (unless otherwise noted)
Wednesday, January 18, 2006
Donna Pavetti, Ph.D.
Mathematica Policy Research, Inc.
"What if They Can't All Work?: A Reconsideration of the Safety Net for Hard-to-Employ TANF Recipients. "
LaDonna Pavetti, a resident of Washington, D.C., is a nationally recognized expert in welfare policy research. She came to Mathematica in 1997 from the Urban Institute. Her expertise on employment strategies for hard-to-employ populations, the implementation of welfare reform, and other issues is widely sought by the policy community. She has a Ph.D. in public policy from Harvard University.
Mathematica, one of the nation’s leading independent research firms, conducts policy research and surveys for federal and state governments, as well as private clients. The employee-owned firm, with offices in Princeton, N.J., Washington, D.C., and Cambridge, Mass., has conducted some of the most important studies of health care, education, welfare, employment, nutrition, and early childhood policies and programs in the United States. Mathematica strives to improve public well-being by bringing the highest standards of quality, objectivity, and excellence to bear on the provision of information collection and analysis to its clients.
http://www.mathematica-mpr.com/
http://www.mathematica-mpr.com/about%20us/company%20news%20archive/seniorfellowspavpot.asp
Wednesday, january 25, 2006
Joseph Cappella
Annenberg School of Communications
Dr. Cappella will speak on the topic:
"Political Talk Radio: The Conservative Media Enclave"
Joseph N. Cappella (Ph.D., 1974, Michigan State University) is Professor of Communication and holds the Gerald R. Miller Chair at the Annenberg School for Communication at The University of Pennsylvania. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania and Northwestern University and a visiting scholar at Stanford. His lecturing has taken him to more than 25 different universities including Duke, Harvard, University of Southern California, University of Washington, and Ohio State University. His research has resulted in 75 articles and book chapters and three co-authored books. The research has focused on political communication, health, social interaction, nonverbal behavior, media effects, and statistical methods. The articles have appeared in journals in psychology, communication, health, and politics. Book credits include Spiral of Cynicism (Oxford), Multivariate Techniques in Human Communication Research (Academic), and Sequence and Pattern in Communicative Behavior (Arnold). He has edited special issues of Journal of Language and Social Psychology and Journal of Communication. His research has been supported by grants from the National Institutes of Mental Health, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, The Twentieth Century Fund, and from the following foundations: Markle, Ford, Carnegie, Pew, and Robert Wood Johnson. He has served on the editorial boards of 15 different journals including Communication Monographs, Social Psychology Quarterly, Critical Studies in Mass Communication, Quarterly Journal of Speech, Journal of Personal and Social Relationships, Journal of Communication, Communication Research, and Communication Theory. He is a Fellow of the International Communication Association and its past president, and recipient of the B. Aubrey Fisher Mentorship Award.
Website: http://www.asc.upenn.edu/asc/Application/Faculty/BioDetails.asp?txtUserID=jcappella
Wednesday, February 1, 2006
Paul Ingram
Professor of Management
Columbia Business School
Dr. Ingram will present:
"The Life of the Party: Encounter and Engagement at a Business Mixer "
Professor Ingram studies the effect of the competitive environment on the structure and performance of organizations. The courses he teaches on management and strategy benefit from his research on organizations in the United States, Canada, Israel and Australia. His research has been published in a number of articles, book chapters and books. Ingram's current research projects examine organizational learning among Manhattan hotels and the effect of changes in the role of the state on the survival of Israeli organizations. He serves on the editorial boards of Administrative Science Quarterly and Management Science.
Website: http://www0.gsb.columbia.edu/whoswho/bio.cfm?ID=55330
Friday, February 3, 2006
Location - Room 286-87 McNeil Building,
University of Pennsylvania
12noon
Prudence Carter
Harvard University
Dr. Carter will discuss:
"Coconuts & 'Fancy' Heads: Race, Culture & Educational Opportunity in Post Apartheid South Africa"
Professor Carter's primary research agenda contends with prevalent cultural explanations used to explain mobility differences among various racial and ethnic groups. Her new book, Keepin' It Real: School Success beyond Black and White (Oxford University Press 2005), discusses the intersections of race, ethnicity, class and gender and their influences on culture and academic achievement among low-income African American and Latino youths.
At present, Carter is at work on a new international study of culture and group dynamics in schools in South Africa and the United States.
Website: http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/soc/faculty/carter/
Wednesday, February 15, 2006
Ellen Idler
Professor and Department Chair
Rutgers University
Dr. Idler will speak on the topic:
"Religion and Health: The Continuing Usefulness of Early Insights"
Ellen Idler, Professor and Chair of Sociology, teaches courses in social gerontology, health and illness, social science writing, and research methods. Her research interests are in the areas of aging, sociology of religion, health and health perceptions, and disability, and she is currently involved in a study of social factors in recovery from heart surgery.
Dr. Idler's work is about how people's attitudes, beliefs, and social networks affect their health. She has conducted a series of studies of the effect of subjective health perceptions on mortality and disability, finding that perceiving one's health as poor is a stronger predictor of mortality than a medical history, a physician's exam, or health care records. She recently completed, under the auspices of a FIRST Award from the National Institute on Aging, a study of the social, cultural, and religious meanings of health among severely disabled patients at a clinic in New York City. She has a particular interest in the relationship between religion and health, and is the author of Cohesiveness and Coherence: Religion and the Health of the Elderly, as well as numerous articles on religion and depression, disability, and the timing of death among elderly persons. Her current projects include collection of data on religion and spirituality in patients undergoing heart surgery, interviews with depressed elderly patients in primary care, analysis of data on self-ratings of health at the end of life in elderly Danish men and women, development of an instrument for the improved measurement of religiousness, and a study of the quality of life in U.S. elderly in their last year of life.
Web page - http://sociology.rutgers.edu/faculty/Individual%20Pages/Idler.htm
Wednesday, February 22, 2006
Julia Lynch
Assistant Professor, Political Science
University of Pensylvania
Dr. Lynch will discuss:
"What's Fair in Health Care?"
Areas of Interest
• Political Economy of Western Europe
• Comparative Social Policy
• Political Parties and Party Systems
• Politics of Southern Europe
• Research Design and Methodology
Dr. Lynch's work focuses on the political economy of Western European countries. Her special areas of interest are Italian politics and comparative social welfare policy. She has been a research scholar at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, and is a past recipient of grants from the National Science Foundation, Social Science Research Council, and Luxembroug Income Study project.
Professor Lynch is co-director of the Penn-Temple European Studies Colloquium
Webpage, CV and selected papers: http://www.ssc.upenn.edu/polisci/faculty/bios/lynch.html
Wednesday, March 1, 2006
Dan McFarland, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Education and Sociology
Stanford University
Dr. McFarland will speak on
"Bowling Young: How Youth Voluntary Associations Influence Adult Political Participation."
Daniel McFarland received a PhD in sociology from the University of Chicago in 1999. He focuses on social dynamics and organizational characteristics of schools and classrooms. Dan has studied how the patterns of course-taking, extra-curricular affiliations, and friendship networks affect mobility and status inequality within high schools. In addition, he has looked at how friendship loyalties and instructional methods guide students' decisions to either engage in the learning process or to rebel against it. Dan is currently conducting three projects: (1) actors' use of discursive tools to mobilize and rewire networks in classrooms; (2) socio-cultural analysis of adolescents' interpersonal relations inside and outside of class (including classroom discourse and interpersonal notes); and (3) simulation models of students' educational and career decisions as they arise in varying types of school and community contexts.
http://ed.stanford.edu/~mcfarland/
Wednesday, March 22, 2006
Philip Kasinitz Hunter
College and CUNY Graduate Center
"Inheriting the City: Immigrant Origins and American Dreams"
Philip Kasinitz holds a joint Professorship in Sociology at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center. He is the author of Caribbean New York: Black Immigrants and the Politics of Race (Cornell University Press, 1992), which won the Thomas and Znaniecki Award from the International Migration Section of ASA. Professor Kasinitz is currently co-directing a project on 'second generation immigrants' now coming of age in New York City. The first of several books to be produced by the project, Becoming New Yorkers: Ethnographies of the 'New' Second Generation, was published by the Russell Sage Foundation in 2004.
Wednesday, March 29, 2006
Michael Kearns
Professor of Computer and Information Science
National Center Chair in Resource Management and Technology
University of Pennsylvania
"Behavioral Graph Coloring "
Abstract
Recent theoretical work suggests that structural properties of naturally occurring networks play an important role in shaping individual and collective behavior and dynamics. However, the relationships between structure and behavior are difficult to establish via empirical studies, since the networks in such studies are typically fixed. Here we report on a series of experiments in which networks of 38 human subjects attempted to solve the challenging graph or network coloring problem. By systematically varying the topology of the underlying networks, we tested the effects of network structure on individual and collective performance, showing that networks generated by preferential attachment are generally harder for human subjects than networks based on cyclical structures, and that "small worlds" networks are easier still. We also showed that increasing the information available to subjects can have opposite effects on performance, depending on the network structure.
Joint work with Siddharth Suri and Nick Montfort.
Dr. Kearns is a professor in the Computer and Information Science Department at the University of Pennsylvania, where he holds the National Center Chair in Resource Management and Technology. At Penn, he is the co-director (with Linguistics professor Mark Liberman) of Penn's interdisciplinary Institute for Research in Cognitive Science. He also has a secondary appointment in the Operations and Information Management (OPIM) department of the Wharton School. http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~mkearns/
Wednesday, April 12, 2006
Annette Bernhardt
Deputy Director of the Poverty Program
Brennan Center for Justice
"Under the Radar: How New Business Strategies Are Moving Jobs Outside the Reach of Regulation"
Annette Bernhardt, Ph.D. is deputy director of the Poverty Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. She coordinates the Center’s policy analysis and research support for state and local campaigns around living wage jobs, workers’ rights, and accountable development. A leading scholar of low-wage work, she has helped develop and analyze innovative policy responses to the changing nature of work in the United States. She has published widely in journals such as the American Journal of Sociology, the American Sociological Review, and the Journal of Labor Economics, among others. Her recent book, Low-Wage America: How Employers are Reshaping Opportunity in the Workplace, is the most extensive study to date of how the choices employers make in response to economic globalization, industry deregulation, and new technology affect the lives of millions of workers at the bottom of the wage distribution. Her earlier book, Divergent Paths: Economic Mobility in the New American Labor Market (Russell Sage 2001), was awarded Princeton University’s Lester Prize for the best new work in labor economics in 2002. Dr. Bernhardt received her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Chicago in 1993.
Wednesday, April 19, 2006
Wednesday, April 26, 2006
David Garland, Ph.D.
Professor, Sociology
New York University
Dr. Garland will discuss:
"The American Death Penalty: A Theoretical Problem for Sociological Analysis"
Areas of Research/Interest: The legal institutions of punishment and control; history and sociology of criminological knowledge; social solidarity; the welfare state.
Select Publications:
Punishment and Modern Society: A Study in Social Theory (1990) Co-published by the University of Chicago Press and Oxford University Press, 312 pages
The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society (2001) Published in North America by University of Chicago Press and elsewhere by Oxford University Press.
Criminology and Social Theory (2000) (Co-edited with Richard Sparks) Oxford University Press.
http://sociology.fas.nyu.edu/object/davidgarland.html
Last Modified:
14-Apr-2006
For updates, comments please contact:
saunderc@ssc.upenn.edu
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