Center for Cultural Sociology

The Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011 and its corollaries, Occupy Sandy and Occupy Debt, have been largely understood as secular movements. In spite of this, religious actors not only participated, but in some cases played an integral role within the movement, lending material support, organizing expertise, and public statements of support. We rely on interviews with faith leaders (N ¼ 13) in New York and Oakland, and engage in an analysis of print and online media to explore the role of religious actors and groups in Occupy Wall Street. Religious participants were often long-time veterans of progressive political struggles and drew inspiration from their faith traditions. Nonetheless, religious commitments were secondary to political objectives shared by themselves and their secular counterparts. Religious leaders believed they offered symbolic authority to the movement and highlighted this in their engagement in the hope of giving it greater moral weight. Current discussions on postsecularism and public religions are considered.

Despite a long history of the use of de-contextualization in the interest of control and precision in science, the relationship of context and environment to human performance has emerged as a significant concern. The various contexts for human performance may be categorized as economic, existential, physical, political, psychological and social. Idiosyncratic, as well as consensus, perceptions of such contexts are thought to influence all human performances. The assessment and documentation of human performance are also thought to be context dependent. As epistemology's concerning and technologies for identifying contexts become more sensitive to the presence of and variations in contexts and their meanings, the relationships between contexts and human performance will become more critical for measurement science and assessment technologies. We proceed from the assumption that human behavior and performance are more than linear. They are both causal and organic phenomena. As such, they must be thought of, observed, assessed and understood as dialectical, dynamic, epigenetic, living phenomena in specific contexts and from specific perspectives.

"Grief, Care and Politics in the American Opioid Crisis" examines grief in the American opioid crisis through a case study of New England. The research investigates how the opioid crisis affects social and political life, particularly on the social experience of grief. The mixed-method approach includes interviews (N= 60), participant observation of grief groups and advocacy meetings, visits to relevant facilities and public gatherings (N= 30), and analysis of relevant documents and reports. I find that in response to healthcare shortages and inconsistencies groups primarily composed of women and mothers emerge to fill the void and form what I call "communities of care." These communities, in turn, become politicized as frustrations crest and overdose deaths mount. At the intersection of political sociology and the sociology of death and dying, the research shows how the death of a loved one can be a political catalyst with far reaching implications. Political theorists highlight grief as a powerful political tool, though grief and politics on a community level is less understood. Through the case study, I show how this unfolds and how, what I term, "the politics of blame" are negotiated with implications for medicalization, criminalization and militarization often along race, class, and national lines. Although the case study of the American opioid crisis focuses on New England, it is situated in a broader perspective, stressing connections to the War on Drugs and the Mexican Drug War.

The highly contentious Purdue Pharma settlement announced Sept. 1, 2021, comes at a pivotal time for the U.S. overdose crisis: 2020 was the worst year on record, with over 93,000 Americans losing their lives to fatal drug overdose. The drug overdose epidemic, now more than two decades long, has claimed the lives of more than 840,000 people since 1999. Current estimates suggest that some 2.3 million people in the U.S. use heroin and 1.7 million people use pharmaceutical opioids without a prescription.

Since 2016, I’ve studied the overdose crisis with an eye to understanding its roots as well as its ramifications. What I found was an increasingly dangerous drug environment for people who use drugs, often exacerbated by policies not founded in research and by attitudes that harm those affected.

In the United States, the first decades of the twenty-first century have been marked by a worsening fatal drug overdose epidemic leading life expectancy to decline for the first time in a century. Often termed deaths of despair, this development is attributed to declines in civic life, including lessening religious participation, wrought by long-term deindustrialization. Despite this, civil society has responded by contesting despair and the conditions hastening fatal overdose trends. This article examines faith-based community responses to the American overdose crisis through an extended case study of a church-led campaign in Massachusetts. In the summer of 2017, the state of Massachusetts released its fatal overdose numbers to the public: 2,069 people died of fatal overdose in 2016. In response, Trinity Church of Wrentham, Massachusetts, launched the #2069 campaign resulting in over 2,000 billboards and lawn signs emblazoned with #2069 displayed across the state. The memorial project fostered conversation, but also forged new community active in its work of social support, public health outreach and nonpartisan political engagement. The article considers the role of faith-based public health efforts and the potential for further interfaith and interracial collaboration on public health issues and the role of public religion in contesting conditions of despair.

Background/Context This article is a piece of analytic and descriptive commentary based on the work of the Gordon Commission on the Future of Assessment of Education. Purpose The purpose of this essay is to advocate for greater attention given to the correlates of human performance in educational measurement. The authors argue the importance of attribution, context, and perspective as factors influencing human performance. Research Design The essay is primarily analytic and historical with respect to the conceptualizations that should guide the contextualization of assessment in education. Conclusions (a) Greater respect for and sensitivity to the fact that adaptive behavior is a function of the integration of affective, cognitive, and situative processes operating in conscious organisms functioning in context. (b) Importance of systems of assessment that produce multiple forms of data that should be combined in different constellations for specific purposes. (c) Explicit recognitio...

Since the global financial crisis the unprecedented role independent central banks have come to play in our societies has been increasingly disputed. This, in turn, has drawn greater attention to the link between their legitimacy, public support and their independence. Over the past thirty years, academics and central bankers have tried to systematically pin down the sources of central bank independence. One of them, however, culture, has continuously eluded their grip. By delving into public communication about German, European and US monetary affairs, this book introduces a new analytical framework that will enable practitioners and academics, particularly within sociology, economics, political economy, and political science, to gain a clear understanding of the role of culture in central banking. Also, it will show why for an independent central bank meeting its own monetary goals may not be enough to secure public support for itself and its currency.

ENDORSEMENTS

“In his new book Carlo Tognato suggests that in order to better understand the way that central banks operate, we also have to take culture into account, in the form of symbols, rituals, national values and more. The result is a very intelligent and creative book, which will hopefully be read not only by economists and other social scientists but also by central bankers.”
Richard Swedberg, Professor of Sociology, Cornell University

“The European Central Bank and the euro have recently come under question. Can they survive? For a thoughtful rebuke of conventional wisdom, you must read this book. Tognato exposes the symbolic dimensions of money, the dramatic performances of central bankers, and the cultural dynamics of international markets. These ideas are worth grappling with in a time when our old ideas have failed us.”
Frederick F. Wherry, Associate Professor of Sociology, Columbia University, and author of “The Culture of Markets”

“Carlo Tognato boldly goes where no economist has gone before. If recent decades favored the depoliticization of monetary policy as well as central bank autonomy, the outlook for the future includes repoliticization and political accommodation. Once we understand, with the help of Tognato's analytical framework, how stability cultures enabled central bank independence in the first place, we are forewarned as to how Europe's cultural malaise might lead to its unravelling.”
Susanne Lohmann, Professor of Political Science and Public Policy and Director of the Center for Governance, University of California, Los Angeles

“Tognato shows well why we can not leave the study of money to economists. Money has not just economic meaning but also deep political and cultural significance. His analysis of the importance of stability cultures for the legitimacy and functioning of central banks is both fascinating and extremely timely for anyone interested in the political management of modern money.”
Eric Helleiner, CIGI Chair in International Political Economy, University of Waterloo, Canada and co-editor of the Series Cornell Studies in Money

Excerpt from the Series Preface:

"Central Bank Independence continues the cultural turn in economic sociology, connecting it more centrally with market logic than it has ever been before. A work of theoretical imagination and rich empirical texture, it is extraordinarily relevant to the crisis that capitalist economies are facing today." Jeffrey Alexander, Lillian Chavenson Saden Professor of Sociology, Yale University