The conference will open on Friday evening with a public lecture by Elijah Anderson, Professor of Sociology at Yale University. Saturday's sessions will include a panel on community diversity and integration, a panel on interactional processes, and two discussant-led sessions.
The panel on community diversity and integration encompass researchers from both qualitative and quantitative traditions whose research will, together, sketch the contours of the community changes we are experiencing in the US. Though wide-ranging in scale -- from national-level patterns, to neighborhood-level processes, to within-school interactions -- this research all speaks to the same set of questions: What does “integration” look like? What does “integration” mean? Urban and community scholars often excel at describing the nature of social problems occurring in spaces and places where differences intersect; however, when it comes to understanding potential solutions that involve combating power and status differences, xenophobia, racism, stereotypes, and fear, our research offers little. We hope that this first panel will lay the groundwork for productive dialogue between subfields by describing the detailed nature of real- world sites of interaction across difference.
The panel on interactional processes will include social psychological scholars from four major theoretical traditions, each of which offers unique insights into mechanisms of inequality and best practices for producing outcomes such as cooperation, trust, commitment, and positive emotions in groups. We hope that speakers in this set of panels will present findings from their own work or work in their theoretical tradition that identifies interactional sources of inequality, as well as theoretically-derived inflection points for improving group dynamics. In preparing your remarks, we would like you to consider the social problems identified in the work of scholars in the first panel, and potential solutions that can be suggested by work in sociological social psychology.
Two discussant-led sessions will focus on summarizing points of intersection and difference across the four presentations in each panel. We will use this time to discuss, as a group, our perceptions about what we know, what we don’t know, and what we need to know if we are to suggest policy-relevant interventions to reduce inequality in diverse settings. The orienting questions below will be used as a starting point for conversation; we hope to arrive at some concrete suggestions for social intervention by the end of the day.
Dr. Anderson will participate in several other public events during his visit, including a teaching seminar at the Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning, a community dinner at South House, and a lunchtime conversation sponsored by the Office of Institutional Diversity and Equity.