30612 - Culture I: On the Infrastructures and Politics of Belief

Description

Belief has attracted a healthy suspicion in many contemporary approaches in cultural sociology and the sociology of culture. But cultural analysis can't do away with belief entirely. The papers in this session take distinct conceptual and empirical approaches to the analysis of belief. In many cases, beliefs are the object to be explained - researchers may look for the infrastructures of belief, from the human organism and its material environments to social and ideological environments. But in others, beliefs do some of the explaining - that is, they help to account for the origins, maintenance, and transformation of organisms and their environments. How can and should we approach these matters? Ranging from studies of popular understandings of meritocracy and luck in the US, the politics of Islamic metaphysics, and emotion schemas to senses of the future in the midst of economic instability in Spain and the United States, and dreams of K-Pop stardom in South Korea, the papers in this session allow us to consider these questions about belief explicitly.

Sub Unit

• Sociology of Culture

Presider

• Tad P. Skotnicki, University of North Carolina-Greensboro

Individual Presentations

• From Schema to Shared Culture through Commensuration - Anna Gabur, Weber State University

• In Defense of Meritocracy: The Narrative Neutralization of Luck (and Structure) - Michael Sauder, University of Iowa; Hannah W Espy, Lycoming College; Freda B. Lynn, University of Iowa

• K-pop as a Vocation: Work, Education, and Gendered Pathways to Dreams in the K-pop Industry - So Yoon Lee, University of Chicago

• Politicizing Sufi Ontologies: Ubaidullah Sindhi and Ali Shariati's Articulations of Wahdat ul-Wajud and Tawhid - Sarah Merchant, University of California-Berkeley

Discussant

• Michael Strand, Brandeis University

Session Organizer

• Tad P. Skotnicki, University of North Carolina-Greensboro