Job announcement: University of California, Irvine The Department of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine, announces recruitment for two tenure-track positions at the assistant professor level. We welcome applicants in all sub-fields, especially those with expertise in gender/sexuality and race/ethnicity. We seek candidates with strong publication profiles and well-defined research agendas, who will also contribute to the university’s mission of excellence in teaching, mentoring, and inclusive excellence. This position requires a Ph.D. Priority will be given to applications completed by October 1, 2021, but the position will remain open until filled. Please upload materials at recruit.ap.uci.edu/JPF07032. For more information on the department, see www.sociology.uci.edu.
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 | Lauren Adler is PhD candidate in Sociology at Harvard University. Her dissertation examines how organizations set pay for new employees, identifying organizational practices and moral narratives that produce and legitimize gender pay inequality. |
Elena Ayala-Hurtado is a PhD student in sociology at Harvard University. Her research examines how individuals narrate and make sense of their lives within unstable social contexts, and particularly how individuals narrate their projections toward the future. |  |
In conjunction with the annual meeting theme of “Emancipatory Sociology: Rising to the Du Boisian Challenge,” the AMSS section hosts an invited session that considers the role of altruism, morality, and social solidarity in racial and social justice efforts. As the nation grapples with global pandemics, new solidarities have been mobilized for collective actions, such as Black Lives Matter. The themes of altruism, morality, and social solidarity are evident in the protests surrounding the tragic deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Botham Jean, Atatiana Jefferson and thousands of other black men, women, and children who have been killed in fatal encounters with U.S. police. This invited session considers the role of nonprofit organizations, voluntary associations, and social movements in these efforts. For example, Fatal Encounters is a volunteer-maintained database that records a searchable record of fatal police interactions, and the Center for Justice is one among many non-profit organizations that work with community and public interest groups to protect the legal and social justice rights for vulnerable people, communities, and families.
Presider: Ashley Harrell, Duke University
Panelists: Una Okonkwo Osili, Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy D. Brian Burghart, Fatal Encounters Jennifer Wood, Center for Justice Tina Sacks, Center for Research on Social Change Candice C. Robinson, University of Pittsburgh
OPEN SESSION AMSS: Advocating for Morality and Prosociality in Unsettled Times by Candace Robinson
8/3/2021
Organizer Notes submitted by Candice Robinson- AMSS has been one of my favorite sections since I joined ASA in 2012. At an AMSS roundtable in 2016, I presented my solo-authored work at ASA for the first time. That year, I also served on the AMSS Graduate Student Paper Award Committee. From 2017-2018 I was one of the AMSS Student Representatives. in 2020, I served as the Presider for the 2020 ASA Annual Meeting Regular Session: "Open Session on Altruism, Morality, and Social Solidarity: Understanding the Good in a World Gone Bad." For 2021, I will serve as a Panelist on the Panel Session: "Black Lives Matter: The Role of Altruism, Morality, and Social Solidarity in Supporting Racial Justice Efforts." My most exciting contribution to the section in my career so far has been organizing the "2021 Open Session on Altruism, Morality, and Social Solidarity: Advocating for Morality and Prosociality in Unsettled Times."
As a scholar of inequality, broadly interested in race, class, civic engagement, and social movements, I understood the importance of developing a nuanced scholarship for more accurate interpretations of the social world. Furthermore, we must incorporate this year's session theme: "Advocating for Morality and Prosociality in Unsettled Times." Our session leans on the following questions: How do people develop and sustain moral commitments during times of unrest? Why and when do people seek to challenge inequalities, do good for others, and bond together amidst unsettled times? How do people seek to make collective change for the better?
We received approximately 15 phenomenal papers that more specifically fell along with the themes of prosociality as a variable, motivations for AMSS, fairness, and discussions of shared missions of individuals and organizations. We have 4* sole author papers from Ph. D.s and Ph.D. students from across the world. The papers I selected ultimately fall under a broad view of what leads to AMSS actions. In more detail, the work analyzes how scholars characterize prosociality and similar traits, how individuals account for their prosocial actions, how love sustains prosocial and activist activities, and how philanthropists market themselves. These papers broaden the field of AMSS through a variety of mixed-methodologies and push forward theories that ensure that AMSS has far reach implications beyond our subfields. Additionally, the use of qualitative data in most papers helps to add additional analytical and descriptive dimensions to our work. For more information, check out the abstracts and titles for the papers below, and be sure to tune in during our session on Sunday, August 8, from 11 am-12:25 pm Eastern. I look forward to the University of Southern California Graduate Student Demetrius Murphy presiding over the session.
*I want to make a special note to say we had a 5th paper from Saugher Nojan (University of California-Santa Cruz) for this session that incorporated race and religion in understanding prosociality. Unfortunately, the author was no longer available. For those who are interested, the paper submitted builds on theory and data from another one of her recently published articles: Nojan, S. (2021). Racialized Religion and Civic Engagement: Insights into Intra-Muslim Racial Diversity on University Campuses. Sociology of Religion. I hope we can incorporate her critical scholarship in future panels.
Mijs, Jonathan J.B. and Christopher Hoy. 2021. "How Information about Inequality Impacts Belief in Meritocracy: Evidence from a Randomized Survey Experiment in Australia, Indonesia and Mexico." Social Problems doi: https://doi.org/10.1093/socpro/spaa059
Koch, Insa. 2021."The Guardians of the Welfare State: Universal Credit, Welfare Control and the Moral Economy of Frontline Work in Austerity Britain.” Sociology 55, no. 2: 243-262. doi:10.1177/0038038520936981
Aarons, Haydn. 2021. “Moral Distinction: Religion, Musical Taste and the Moral Cultural Consumer.” Journal of Consumer Culture 21, no. 2: 296–316. doi:10.1177/1469540518787584
Broom, Alex, and Katherine Kenny. 2021. “The Moral Cosmology of Cancer: Making Disease Meaningful.” The Sociological Review 69, no. 2: 468–83. doi:10.1177/0038026120962912
Rotolo, Michael. 2021. "Moral Religiosities: How Morality Structures Religious Understandings during the Transition to Adulthood." Sociology of Religion 82, no. 1: 63–84. doi:10.1093/socrel/sraa025
Cipriani, Roberto. 2021. "The Other, Altruism and Empathy. Variety of Prosocial Behavior.” The American Sociologist.. doi:10.1007/s12108-021-09496-y
Brad R. Fulton is an assistant professor at Indiana University in the O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs. His research draws on organizational theory and network analysis to examine the social, political, and economic impact of community-based organizations. Fulton is the PI for the National Study of Community Organizing—a multi-level study that examines the causes and consequences of racial, socioeconomic, and religious diversity within grassroots advocacy organizations. He is also the Co-PI for the Observing Civic Engagement project and the National Study of Congregations’ Economic Practices.
Sarah K. Harkness is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Iowa. Her work centers on the social psychology of inequality, specifically related to the study of morality, status, health stigma, and intersectionality. She is currently building a research program with Steven Hitlin (professor, University of Iowa) arguing that the level of inequality of a society deeply affects the moral reactions felt by its members, with those in more unequal societies experiencing more negative, sanctioning moral emotions, while those in more equal societies are more likely to feel positive, binding moral emotions. She is the co-author of Unequal Foundations: Inequality, Morality, and Emotions across Cultures (Oxford University Press).
Mary R. Rose, is an Associate Professor at University of Texas at Austin,. She teaches courses on social science and law as well as social psychology and research methods. Her research examines lay participation in the legal system and perceptions of justice. She writes on the effects of jury selection practices on jury representativeness, citizens’ views of justice, jury decision making, and public views of court practices. She has served on the editorial boards of Criminology, Law & Social Inquiry, Law & Society Review, and Law & Human Behavior. In 2005, her research on the peremptory challenge was cited in the U.S. Supreme Court decision, Miller-el v. Dretke (Breyer, J., concurring) and her work on punitive damages was cited in the 2008 decision Exxon Shipping Co. v. Baker.
Bin Xu is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Emory University. His research interests lie at the intersection of politics and culture, including collective memory, civil society, cultural sociology, and social theory. He is the author of The Politics of Compassion: The Sichuan Earthquake and Civic Engagement in China (Stanford University Press, 2017), which won the 2018 Best Book Prize for Culture and Honorable Mention for Asia from the American Sociological Association. He is currently finishing a book and a few related articles on the collective memory of China’s “educated youth” (zhiqing) generation—the 17 million youth sent down to the countryside in the 1960s and 1970s. His research has appeared in leading sociological and China studies journals.
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