Moral Boundaries, Accountability, and the Possibilities of Solidarity

Session Submission Type: Paper Session (90 minute)

Description

This session examines how moral boundaries are drawn, enforced, and contested, and how these processes reshape possibilities for solidarity. Papers explore the normative foundations of solidarity itself, the moral negotiations surrounding toxic but economically valuable practices, the differing behavioral force of prescriptive versus proscriptive moral norms, and the moral realignments triggered by cancellation in a polarized cultural field. Together, they illuminate how accountability, risk, and stigma both constrain and reconfigure social ties across diverse empirical contexts.

Sub Unit

• Altruism, Morality, and Social Solidarity Section / Altruism, Morality, and Social Solidarity Section Open Call Paper Session

Presider

• Heba Alex, University of Chicago

Individual Presentations

• Cancellation and Moral Realignment in the Context of Cultural Polarization - Laura Adler, Yale University; Elena Ayala-Hurtado, Princeton University

• Why Solidarity, With Whom, and How? Three Problems in the Sociology of Solidarity - Muhammad Amasha, Yale University

• Objecting Toxicity: The Materiality and Morality of Pesticide Use in Argentina - Pablo Lapegna, University of Georgia

• Is Thou Shalt Not > Thou Shalt?: Testing the Behavioral Priority of Proscriptive Morality - Andrew Miles, University of Toronto; Zifan Huang, University of Toronto

Discussant

• Shai M. Dromi, Harvard University

Session Organizer

• Shai M. Dromi, Harvard University