Events
Upcoming Events
Dr. Heba Gowayed, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Boston University, will present her lecture, “Refuge: How the State Shapes Human Potential” on March 30th, 4:30pm; Wilson Hall 115.
Abstract:
Drawing on a global and comparative ethnography, this presentation explores how Syrian men and women seeking refuge in a moment of unprecedented global displacement are received by countries of resettlement and asylum—the U.S., Canada, and Germany. It shows that human capital, typically examined as the skills immigrants bring with them that shape their potential, is actually created, transformed, or destroyed by receiving states’ incorporation policies. Since these policies derive from historically informed and unequal approaches to social welfare, refugees’ experiences raise a mirror to how states (re)produce inequality.
Dr. Kristen Harknett, Professor of Social and Behavioral Sciences and a faculty affiliate of the Institute for Health Policy Studies at the University of California, San Francisco. She will present a talk on “Filling in the Paid-Leave Patchwork: The Role of National Firms in the Diffusion of Local Policy Mandates” on March 23rd, 12:30p; Garland Hall 209.
Abstract: By many measures, job quality has eroded over the past several decades in the U.S. As some states and localities have passed legislation to raise the floor on working conditions, a pressing policy question is whether these local policies will diffuse to benefit a broader set of workers. Prior research has focused on the potential for policy diffusion when state or local policies lay the groundwork for federal policy action. Extending this research, we argue that national firms may play an important and overlooked role in diffusing labor policy if companies voluntarily expand protections mandated for some of their workers to their broader workforce. To test this possibility, we take advantage of new employer-employee linked data from The Shift Project and focus on the case of paid sick leave. We find that workers who are not covered by PSL mandates are more likely to report access to paid sick leave when they work for firms with greater exposure to paid sick leave mandates across their national business operations by dint of the geographic distribution of their establishments and workers. That is, state and local paid sick leave mandates spill-over through multi-state employers to provide workers in places without mandates effective access to PSL benefits. We find that these associations are stronger for workers at firms headquartered in places with PSL mandates and weaker for workers at firms with franchise models and that these findings survive a placebo test using other fringe benefits. These findings provide evidence that companies act as conduits through which the reach of local mandates that raise the floor on job quality are expanded to cover a broader set of workers.
Prof. Bianca Manago | Brown Bag Lecture Series | April 6th @ 12p; Garland 209
Talk title: A Call for Standardization: A Systematic Review of Mental Illness Labeling and Stigma Research
Abstract: In the past 60 years, research on the stigma of mental illness has grown, generating important insights. Unfortunately, these insights have been accompanied by serious theoretical challenges. Partially due to its breadth, the stigma literature is rife with inconsistent definitions and a variety of measures. There have been several excellent papers that summarize specific areas of literature while accounting for the variations in definition and measurement; this paper will contribute to this body of literature. Specifically, we conducted a systematic literature review of literature from the past 60 years. Of the 1,501 papers identified in the keyword search , we consider all quantitative papers that consider others’ perceptions, mental illness labeling as the independent variable, and stigma, broadly defined, as the dependent variable. This reduced the final sample to 74 articles. We also conducted a systematic review of abstracts in 4 sociology and 4 psychology journals. In both systematic reviews, we catalogue theoretical and methodological variations among studies. Like previous research, we find multiple definitions and measures both within and across disciplines. For example, in the systematic review, there were over 15 different operationalizations of stigma, with the most common, social distance, only occurring in about 60% of articles. We also identify the ways that varying definitions, operationalizations, and research designs have led to conflicting theoretical inferences in the stigma literature. We then propose a standard set of definitions and operationalizations for future research.
MORE DETAILS TO COME
Prof. Patrick Greiner | Brown Bag Lecture Series | April 20th @ 12p
Title and location information coming soon.
Past Events
Professor Patrick T. Greiner participating as a panelist in the upcoming Nashville Youth Climate Summit, Climate 101 Panel on March 4th, 9am-10am cst.