Join us in honouring the laureates of the Kohli Prize for Sociology and the Infrastructure Prize for Sociology, as well as participating in the Max Weber Prpgramme Lecture by Professor Bearman.
This year the Kohli prize for sociology goes to Peter S. Bearman for his exceptional scholarly contributions to the sociology of movements, networks, health, and science. His work stands out for his remarkable ability to address important questions by bridging theory and empirical research.
The Infrastructure prize for sociology goes to SocArXiv, represented by Philip N. Cohen, for its accessible and timely contribution to the dissemination of sociological knowledge, having established itself as the leading platform for the early open sharing of research through preprint servers.
Abstract:
How do we become something? How do we understand and communicate to ourselves how we became what we find ourselves to be? And then, what can we tell others so that they 'get it'? These themes are explored by looking at roughly 10,000 accounts (written in letters to Warren Buffett and his sister, over the period from 2006 to 2016) of the pathways that individuals took, which as best as they could understand them, brought them into, or stopped them from exiting, abject poverty. We develop a method for representing and comparing 'becoming narratives at scale, identifying the typical pathways that people describe themselves as taking, and suggest that by thinking in terms of pathways, we can reveal how the ductile quality of social structure is built and sustained.�
Speaker:
Peter Bearman is Director of the Incite Institute and Cole Professor of Social Science in the Department of Sociology. He co-designed the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health and is a specialist in network analysis and historical sociology. He is author of Doormen (University of Chicago Press, 2005) and with Adam Reich, of Working for Respect: Community and Conflict at Walmart (Columbia University Press, 2018). He is currently co-editor of the Middle Range Series and the Oral History Series at Columbia University Press. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Science, the National Academy of Science, and the National Academy of Medicine. His recent work focuses on the analysis of texts and narratives. He teaches introductory sociology, qualitative research design, research designs, historical sociology, social networks, and classical social theory.