4376 - Meaning-Making through the Lens of Cultural Cognition

Session Submission Type: Paper Session 100min

Description

Taking inspiration from a number of theoretical perspectives, many contemporary sociologists have conceptualized and analyzed culture as a process of meaning-making. Such analyses generally focus on how particular cultural objects, practices, ideas, schemas, etc. are made meaningful to social actors over time and in and through social relationships and interactions. But meaning-making analyses also entail (often implicit) assumptions about human cognition – i.e., about how actors are cognitively accessing, organizing, and enacting cultural meaning(s). This session solicits papers that seek to highlight the cognitive processes underlying and involved in processes of meaning-making, broadly defined. Priority will be given to papers that are grounded in empirical analyses of meaning-making and demonstrate how attention to cognitive processes strengthens sociological explanations of meaning-making in action. “Cognition” is defined broadly to include papers that focus on cognitive processes ranging from abstract conceptualization and self-reflexivity to more concrete modes of bodily perception and sensation.

Sub Unit

• Section on Sociology of Culture / Meaning-Making through the Lens of Cultural Cognition

Session Organizer

• Daniel A. Winchester, Purdue University

Presider

• Daniel A. Winchester, Purdue University

Individual Presentations

• Binding Significance to Form: Cultural Objects, Cognition, and Cultural Change - Marshall Allen Taylor, University of Notre Dame; Dustin S. Stoltz, University of Notre Dame; Terence Emmett McDonnell, University of Notre Dame

• Making Meaning from Numbers: Demographic Knowledge and Evaluations of Racial Diversity - Jiayi Janet Xu, Princeton University

• Relational Evaluation and Cultural Anchoring in Everyday Evaluations of Food Cost - Caitlin Daniel, University of California-Berkeley

• Signal Transmission, Signal Reception: Drawing on Goffman and the Dual Process Framework to Theorize Protest Events - Justin Van Ness, University of Notre Dame

• I Won’t Kill Jimmy, but I’ll Kill that Fly: Rapport as a Structure of Social Interaction - Ethan W. Johnson, University of Minnesota; Penny Edgell, University of Minnesota; Kathleen E. Hull, University of Minnesota