UC San Diego’s Sociology Colloquium Speaker Series offers the opportunity to learn about the latest research from leading scholars in sociology and closely related fields. Presentations are followed by Q&A.

Colloquia are typically held Thursdays, 12:30 p.m. — 1:50 p.m. in SSB 101 unless otherwise noted

2026-2027

October 22, 2026
Speaker: Jozef Robles

Title: Conditions Apply: The Limits of Legal Inclusion

Abstract: For immigrants who have spent years or even decades living in the United States without legal status, receiving a green card marks a legal welcome into a country where they have already built lives, relationships, and ways of navigating exclusion. Drawing on 78 in-depth interviews with formerly undocumented Latino immigrants, Robles examines the process of becoming legally incorporated into a nation one has long called home—and how the racialized experience of illegality continues to shape life after legalization.

October 29, 2026
Speaker: Paula Winicki Brzostowski

Title: “Good Enough for a Person Like Me”: Precarity, Stigma, and the Uneven Possibilities of Collective Action

Abstract: Drawing on 12 months of participant observation and 51 interviews conducted during a multiyear union campaign at a Southern California warehouse, this article argues that precarity produces not uniform resignation but differentiated compliance, shaped by the distinct stigmas and institutional histories workers carry. The labor regime, which I call the Conditional Inclusion Regime, incorporates and exploits those histories as distinct practices of control. For U.S.-born Black and Latino workers with carceral histories, degraded working conditions felt deserved, and rights felt inapplicable to people like them. For workers whose substance use the regime tolerated, the workplace felt like a shelter they could not afford to lose. The implications of differentiated compliance for collective action became legible through the organizing process, which revealed who could participate, who could not, and the organizational responses required for each form of compliance. Among workers whose sense of themselves as legitimate claim-makers had been eroded, relational organizing had to rebuild that capacity before collective action could proceed. But organizing’s reach remained uneven: substance-use dependency made unionization feel threatening rather than protective, and the campaign’s “good worker” standard reproduced a conditional logic from within, foreclosing participation among workers whose circumstances it could not accommodate.

November 12, 2026
Speaker: Martha Morales Hernandez

Title: Acts of Resistance: Undocumented Students Reclaiming Agency While Navigating Legal Precarity

Abstract: In this talk, Dr. Morales Hernandez builds on her emotional rollercoaster framework to examine the ways in which undocumented college students practice their agency to promote their well-being while also navigating their legal precarity produced by exclusionary immigration laws. Existing work underscores the adverse mental health outcomes associated with immigrant illegality, but there is still limited work that has investigated the factors that promote undocumented students’ well-being. Drawing on 66 one-on-one in-depth interviews with undocumented college students attending one of California’s public universities, she deploys an asset-based approach in which she examines undocumented students’ acts of resistance. She conceptualizes acts of resistance as the agentic actions taken by students to resist the structural constraints of exclusionary immigration laws and theorizes these as a unique dimension of their stress processes. While stress process theory focuses on coping as a critical pathway to protect mental health, acts of resistance are unique actions taken to mitigate legal vulnerabilities which she argues can also support students in promoting their psychological well-being. She finds four acts of resistance: undocumented student program usage, political engagement, critical consciousness raising, and self-care. These actions can be personal or collective, and they promote wellbeing by demystifying the constraints imposed by exclusionary immigration laws. Findings affirm the need to explore not only what reduces detrimental health outcomes, but also to consider how individual agency can also protect and support mental health.

Spring 2026

Memorial Service for Professor Bennetta Jules-Rosette

May 29, 2026 - More details to come soon

Please contact us to list your events here.