346 - Presidential Session on Current Societal Challenges. The Trump/Brexit Moment: Causes and Consequences

Session Submission Type: Invited Session

Description

This session reflects on challenges posed by the U.S. election and related political developments in Europe, such as the ‘Brexit’ referendum in the UK. Papers discuss how we can understand the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States, and what sense social scientists in particular can make of the political events that are now shaping political and social life in the US, the UK, and elsewhere. They examine the dimensions of sociology to which the election result calls attention – for example, populism, nationalism, inequality, anti-elite politics, migration, finance, and expertise – as well as considering the broader global patterns in which Donald Trump’s election appears to fit. This session brings together some of the authors contributing to a special issue of The British Journal of Sociology to be published in Fall 2017, to be edited by Nigel Dodd, Michele Lamont, and Mike Savage.

Sub Unit

• Special Sessions

Presider

• Mike Savage, LSE

Individual Presentations

• The Lost Unifying Energy of the State: Responding to Three Constituents: EU states, Financial Markets and the People - Patrick Le Galès, Sciences Po CNRS

• The Revolt of the Rust Belt: Place, Politics, and Sociology in the Twenty-First Century - Michael McQuarrie, London School of Economics

• The Cultural Resonance of Symbolic Boundaries Discourse and Trump’s Triumph: The Case of the White Working Class - Bo Yun Park, Harvard University; Elena Ayala-Hurtado, Harvard University; Michèle Lamont, Harvard University

• American Hybrid: Donald Trump’s Strange Marriage of Populism and Plutocracy - Paul Pierson, University of California-Berkeley