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Confirmed Presenters

Keynote Address

Elijah Anderson
Professor of Sociology, Yale University

Elijah Anderson is one of the leading urban ethnographers in the United States. His early books—A Place on the Corner (1978), Streetwise (1990), and Code of the Street (1999)—are important works in the sociological canon, which offer rich insight into the meaning of being black and poor in inner-city America. His most recent book, The Cosmopolitan Canopy (2011), takes an innovative turn, evaluating the potential for transformative inter-ethnic interaction in everyday public settings. He introduces the idea of the “cosmopolitan canopy”—an urban island of civility that exists amidst the ghettos, suburbs, and ethnic enclaves where segregation is the norm. Under the cosmopolitan canopy, diverse peoples come together and, for the most part, practice getting along.

Panel 1: Community Diversity and Integration

Michael Bader
Assistant Professor of Sociology, American University

Michael Bader is an urban demographer, with an overarching focus on racial and spatial dynamics in cities. Always pushing the quantitative methodological envelope, Bader combines “big data” with survey data to understand neighborhood change. One strand of his research investigates factors influencing the housing search process, where he finds that race most clearly shapes the residential perceptions and preferences of whites and Latinos, and matters the least to blacks. Another recent (awesome) study involved longitudinal analysis of racial neighborhood change since the Civil Rights movement, differentiating between nominal and durable neighborhood integration. Providing some hope for an integrated future, he uncovers a pattern in some neighborhoods, where multiple minority groups are able to establish a substantial, durable presence, while white decline occurs gradually over time.

  • Michael D. M. Bader and Maria Krysan. 2015. “Community Attraction and Avoidance in Chicago What's Race Got to Do with It?” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 660(1): 261-281.
  • Michael D. M. Bader and Siri Warkentien. 2016. “The Fragmented Evolution of Racial Integration since the Civil Rights Movement.” Sociological Science 3: 135-166.

Michael Maly
Professor of Sociology, Roosevelt University

Michael Maly’s research also challenges the notion that racial integration is inherently unstable. His book Beyond Segregation takes an in-depth, qualitative look at some of the multiethnic, durable integration in the post-Civil Rights era. In particular, Maly considers the ways recent global economic and demographic changes have impacted the cities and neighborhoods we live in, finding that local and grassroots strategies often work to both address community needs and build necessary bridges between groups. Maly’s latest book, Vanishing Eden, takes a different tack on understanding integration by examining the legacy of racial change. In this project, Maly investigates the experiences of whites growing up in racial changing neighborhoods in Chicago, exploring the racial lessons learned in such spaces and how whites reconcile this time through nostalgia narratives and colorblind meaning-making to bolster positive white racial identities and whiteness.

  • Maly, Michael T. 2005. Beyond Segregation: Multiracial and Multiethnic Neighborhoods in the United States. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
  • Maly, Michael T., and Heather M. Dalmage. 2016. Vanishing Eden: White Construction of Memory, Meaning, and Identity in a Racially Changing City. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Amanda Lewis
Professor of African American Studies and Sociology, University of Illinois at Chicago

Amanda Lewis’ research focuses on the ways that race is negotiated in everyday life, particularly among children in schools. Her approach and style are well-exemplified in her early Everyday Race-Making article, where she analyzes the ways that children understand and perform their racial identities in the contexts of their peers, teachers, and schools. More recently, she writes about integration in a high school setting in her book Despite the Best Intentions. Much like Maly’s findings about whiteness, she details the ways that inequality is reproduced even in integrated, resource-rich settings. A key takeaway is that, “while integration may well be a necessary condition to advance equity, it is not by itself a sufficient condition to ensure it.” Importantly, Lewis is also a leader in the movement to ensure that academic research on inequality is designed and used for social change.

  • Lewis, Amanda E. 2003. "Everyday Race-Making: Navigating Racial Boundaries in Schools." American Behavioral Scientist 47(3): 283-305.
  • Lewis, Amanda E. and John B. Diamond. 2015. Despite the Best Intentions: How Racial Inequality Thrives in Good Schools. New York: Oxford University Press.
  • Lewis, Amanda E., and David G. Embrick. 2016. "Working at the Intersection of Race and Public Policy: The promise (and perils) of putting research to work for societal transformation." Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 2(3): 253-62.

Evelyn Perry
Assistant Professor of Sociology, Rhodes College

Evelyn Perry is an urban ethnographer who is particularly drawn to the messy places where differences meet. Her research examines culture, place, and inequality in the context of neighborhood life. Her book Live and Let Live sheds light on the everyday processes of negotiating difference in a racially and economically mixed neighborhood. She details how residents maintain relative stability in their community without insisting on conformity. She expands our understanding of the mechanisms by which neighborhoods shape residents’ perceptions, behaviors, and opportunities and challenges widely held assumptions about what “good” communities look like and what well-regulated communities want. Her current research examines the strategic movement of evangelical Christian families from affluent suburbs to high-poverty urban communities.

  • Perry, Evelyn M. 2017. Live and Let Live: Diversity, Conflict and Community in an Integrated Neighborhood. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Emily Walton
Assistant Professor of Sociology, Dartmouth College

As the U.S. population continues to be shaped by immigration in the 21st century, Emily Walton’s research aims to add complexity to the way scholars and policymakers understand the meanings of race and place. Her early work investigated co-ethnic neighborhood concentration, focusing on resilience and providing insight into factors that can promote health and well-being in disadvantaged communities. More recently, she has turned her attention toward understanding social interactions in multiethnic communities, asking how individuals with different backgrounds and identities may come together in transformative interaction.

  • Walton, Emily and Mae Hardebeck. Forthcoming. “Multiethnic Neighborhoods on the Ground: Resources, Constraints, and Sense of Community.” Du Bois Review.
  • Walton, Emily. 2016. “’It’s Not Just a Bunch of Buildings’: Investment, Sense of Community, and Collective Efficacy in a Multiethnic Public Housing Neighborhood” City & Community 15: 231-263

Discussant: Richard Wright
Professor of Geography, Dartmouth College

Richard Wright is a geographer with fluency in sociological culture and language, and research interests in immigrant incorporation into US society. His work investigates the labor market interactions of immigrants and migrants among the major metropolitan areas and regions of the United States. This research demonstrates the deeply segmented nature of these labor markets and the limited interaction between the foreign born and the native born. He is also interested in racial segregation and housing markets, approaching his geographic questions from a critical perspective of race and racism. In a particularly resonant piece, he argued against using proximity to whites as a benchmark of immigrant progress and that scholars should move beyond the city-suburb binary, thinking that continues to shape much scholarship on immigrant incorporation.

  • Wright, Richard, Mark Ellis, and Virginia Parks. 2005. "Re-Placing Whiteness in Spatial Assimilation Research." City & Community 4(2): 111-35.
  • Richard Wright, Mark Ellis, Steven Holloway, and Sandy Wong. 2013. “Patterns of Racial Segregation and Diversity in the United States: 1990-2010,” The Professional Geographer 66(2): 173-182.

Panel 2: Interactional Processes

Murray Webster, Jr.
Professor of Sociology, UNC Charlotte

Murray Webster is a social psychologist specializing in status processes and small group interaction. His research examines how status hierarchies affect interaction dynamics and how we can overcome the undesirable effects of status. Specifically, Murray’s work reveals how status distinctions based on race, gender, sexuality, and other characteristics are generalized into expectations about the likely abilities or contributions of group members to a task. These differential performance expectations for group members lead to inequalities of participation, influence, and reward in group interaction. Murray applies social psychological theory to not only understand social problems, but to engineer interventions that reduce inequality.

  • Walker, Lisa Slattery, Sharon C. Doerer, and Murray Webster, Jr. 2014. “Status, Participation, and Influence in Task Groups.” Sociological Perspectives 57: 364-81.
  • Webster, Murray, Jr. and Joseph Whitmeyer. 2001. ‘‘Applications of Theories of Group Processes.’’ Sociological Theory 19: 250-70.
  • Webster, Murray, Jr. and Stuart Hysom. 1998. “Creating Status Characteristics.” American Sociological Review 63: 351-78.

Brent Simpson
Professor of Sociology, University of South Carolina

Brent Simpson specializes in social psychology, networks, morality, and prosocial behavior (including altruism, trust, generosity, and cooperation). His research identifies the individual and social conditions that promote cooperation and prosocial behavior in both groups and networks. For instance, Brent has shown that activating minimal group identities can promote cooperation by reducing the incentive to ‘free ride’ on others’ contributions. He has also shown that people who make moral judgments about behaviors the group agrees are immoral subsequently act more morally, and become more trusted by others in the group. Brent’s research suggests that trust is greater within than across race-category boundaries, highlighting the need for interventions that increase trust across these boundaries.

  • Simpson, Brent and Robb Willer. 2015. “Beyond Altruism: Sociological Foundations of Cooperation and Prosocial Behavior.” Annual Review of Sociology 41: 43-63.
  • Simpson, Brent and Ashley Harrell. 2013. “Hidden Paths from Morality to Cooperation: Moral Judgments Promote Trust and Trustworthiness.” Social Forces 91: 1529-48.
  • Simpson, Brent. 2006. “Social Identity and Cooperation in Social Dilemmas.” Rationality and Society 18: 443-70.

Karen Hegtvedt
Professor of Sociology, Emory University

Karen A. Hegtvedt studies social psychology and emotions, with special emphasis on justice processes, legitimacy, and the emergence of trust in groups. Her work considers the multiple roles of groups in justice processes—as contexts of interaction, structures in which evaluations occur, sources of identity, and standards against which fairness is judged. Karen’s research shows how perceptions of fairness in groups impact emotions, trust, and potential responses to inequality. Her work reveals the implications of justice processes for collectivities, showing how the complex interplay between justice, interpersonal trust, and emotions impacts the perceived legitimacy of authority figures, which in turn may affect evaluations of fairness, and compliance and trust in authority and the group itself.

  • Johnson, Cathryn, Karen A. Hegtvedt, Nikki Khanna, and Heather Scheuerman. 2016. “Legitimacy Processes and Emotional Responses to Injustice.” Social Psychology Quarterly 79: 95-114.
  • Hegtvedt, Karen A. 2015. “Creating Legitimacy: The Interrelated Roles of Justice and Trust.” Pp. 55-80 in Cooperation and Compliance with Authority: The Role of Institutional Trust, edited by Brian Bornstein and Alan Tompkins. New York: Springer.
  • Hegtvedt, Karen A. 2005. “Doing Justice to the Group: Examining the Roles of the Group in Justice Research.” Annual Review of Sociology 31: 25-45.

Kimberly Rogers
Assistant Professor of Sociology, Dartmouth College

Kimberly Rogers is a social psychologist specializing in culture, identity, and emotions. Her research explores how macro-inequalities may be either reproduced or overturned through behavior and emotion dynamics in interactions and small groups. Kimberly has studied behavioral and emotional responses to unfair reward distributions and to stereotyped groups, consensus in cultural sentiments within and between cultures, and opinion and sentiment change through interaction. Her recent work uses Bayesian methods to show how stable interaction patterns can emerge out of cultural disagreement and social uncertainty, and to explore the potential for gradual meaning change through social experience.

  • Schröder, Tobias, Jesse Hoey, and Kimberly B. Rogers. 2016. “Modeling Dynamic Identities and Uncertainty in Social Interactions: Bayesian Affect Control Theory.” American Sociological Review 81: 828-55.
  • Rogers, Kimberly B. 2015. “Expectation States, Social Influence, and Affect Control: Opinion and Sentiment Change through Social Interaction.” Advances in Group Processes 32: 65-98.
  • Rogers, Kimberly B., Tobias Schröder, and Wolfgang Scholl. 2013. “The Affective Structure of Stereotype Content: Behavior and Emotion in Intergroup Context.” Social Psychology Quarterly 76: 125-50.

Discussant: Kathryn Lively
Professor of Sociology, Dartmouth College

Kathryn Lively is a social psychologist specializing in emotions and inequality. Her research illuminates linkages between macro- and micro-social order, showing how social systems and local contexts of interaction affect feelings and behavior. Kathryn has studied, for example, emotional responses to inequity among paralegals and within families, and the impact of social domain and characteristics such as gender and age on emotional experience and emotion management. Her recent piece in Advances in Group Processes suggests steps forward in integrating theoretical perspectives in social psychology, and explains the role of social psychological processes in the reproduction of inequality.

  • McLeod, Jane D, Timothy Hallett, and Kathryn J. Lively. 2015. "Beyond Three Faces: Toward an Integrated Social Psychology of Inequality." Advances in Group Processes 32: 1-29.
  • Lively, Kathryn J. and Brian Powell. 2006. “Emotional Expression at Work and Home: Domain, Status, or Individual Characteristics?” Social Psychology Quarterly 69: 17-38.
  • Lively, Kathryn J. and David R. Heise. 2004. “Sociological Realms of Emotional Experience.” American Journal of Sociology 109: 1109-36.