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

2024-2025

November 20, 2024

Speaker: Tanya Golash-Boza

Title: Before Gentrification: The Creation of DC’s Racial Wealth Gap

Abstract: This talk will show how a century of redlining, disinvestment, and the War on Drugs wreaked devastation on Black people and paved the way for gentrification in Washington, DC. Dr. Tanya Golash-Boza tracks the cycles of state abandonment and punishment that have shaped the city, revealing how policies and policing work to displace and decimate the Black middle class. Through the stories of those who have lost their homes and livelihoods, Golash-Boza explores how DC came to be the nation’s “Murder Capital” and incarceration capital, and why it’s now a haven for wealthy White people. This troubling history makes clear that the choice to use prisons and policing to solve problems faced by Black communities in the twentieth century—instead of investing in schools, community centers, social services, health care, and violence prevention—is what made gentrification possible in the twenty-first.

January 16 , 2025

Speaker: Nils C. Kumkar

Title: Doing Conspiracy Theory: A Reconstructive Approach to Suspicious Theorizing

Abstract: Conspiracy theories have received attention in public debates and research. What has not been explored and theorized is their production as a collaborative social process, and especially their complex social functions in different communicative contexts - everyday interactions, social media conversations, party politics, political protest communication, etc. This presentation outlines this gap and proposes to fill it by shifting the focus from believing in conspiracy theories to the problem of doing conspiracy theories. This perspective has the potential to improve our understanding of the current conjuncture of conspiracy theorizing as a conjuncture of freewheeling (empty) antagonism, and thus to prove insightful for understanding the production of contentious political knowledge more generally.

January 30, 2025
Speaker: Jaclyn Wong

Title: Equal Partners? How Dual-Professional Couples Make Career, Relationship, and Family Decisions

Abstract: Young Americans expect egalitarian partnerships in which both partners work for pay and perform unpaid domestic labor. Yet, different-gender couples’ realities often deviate from this ideal, with women trading off employment for family care. Will contemporary young professionals repeat this pattern, or will they take different paths in their careers, relationships, and families? How do workplace conditions and cultural norms shape these pathways? Finally, what do these trajectories reveal about the gender revolution and its likely future? Data from 156 interviews collected over six years from the partners of 21 different-gender couples show that consistently supportive workplaces, partners’ steadfast gender-egalitarian attitudes, and partners’ jointly coordinated action all need to come together for couples to experience gender equality in work and family. Weaknesses in any of these areas can divert partners away from equal sharing, and changes in these areas can result in a new balance that may be more gender-equal.

February 6, 2025 

Speaker: Tongyu Wu 

Title: How Gaming is Redefining the Future of Work in Silicon Valley

Abstract: What happens when work feels like playing video games—but the stakes are your autonomy, identity and well-being? This talk presents Play to Submission: Gaming Capitalism in a Tech Firm (Temple University Press, June 2024), a book that exposes how gamification is transforming the software development work in Silicon Valley. Drawing on 13 months of immersive ethnographic research, this book reveals a startling reality: the software development process is not merely technical or collaborative but is organized as a “field of games.” These games drive productivity, spark creativity, and encourage collaboration—yet, they also intensify competition and blur the boundaries between work and life. At the heart of this gamified environment lies the “gamer” subjectivity, cultivated through engineers’ personal experiences with video gameplay. By mobilizing this deeply ingrained identity, the company encourages workers to immerse themselves fully in their roles, pushing limits in ways that simultaneously exhilarate and exploit. Engineers—often viewed as autonomous, high-status professionals—are transformed into a precarious workforce, bound by the very games they once enjoyed. In short, Play to Submission offers a vital contribution to labour studies, organizational culture, and technology studies, critically examining how the gamification of tech work reshapes manager-worker relations,  relations among workers themselves, and worker commitment in the creative workplace of the digital age.

February 13, 2025 

Speaker: Natalie Aviles

Title: An Ungovernable Foe: Science and Policy Innovation in the U.S. National Cancer Institute

Abstract: In American politics, medical innovation is often considered the domain of the private sector, yet some of the most significant scientific and health breakthroughs of the past century have emerged from government research institutes. The U.S. National Cancer Institute (NCI) is tasked with both understanding and eradicating cancer—and its researchers have developed a surprising expertise in virus research and vaccine development. In this talk I introduce a special class of NCI employees I call “scientist-bureaucrats,” public servants who are simultaneously committed to conducting cutting-edge research and stewarding the nation’s investment in cancer research. Examining the dynamics between federal agency accountability and scientific innovation around the HPV vaccine in the 1990s and 2000s, I show how NCI scientist-bureaucrats learned to balance their scientific and bureaucratic missions around the emerging biomedical paradigm of “translational research.” My findings contribute to research in sociology, STS, and public policy that demonstrates how the interplay of science and governance in mission-oriented federal agencies allows expert civil servants to develop both impactful science and policy.

February 20, 2025 

Speaker: Martha Morales Hernandez 

Title: Emotional Rollercoaster: Agency, Immigration Law, and Mental Health Among Undocumented College Students

Abstract: This presentation introduces Martha Morales Hernandez’ current book project tentatively titled, “Acts of Resistance: Undocumented Students Surviving and Thriving on College Campuses.” Acts of Resistance departs from research that focuses on undocumented college students’ emotional distress by documenting the complex and multidimensional nature of mental health among undocumented college students. Drawing on 66 one-on-one in-depth interviews with undocumented college students attending one of California’s public universities, the book traces the process through which exclusionary immigration policies compromise students’ mental health, but also illuminates on how students promote their psychological wellbeing. In this talk, Morales Hernandez builds on undocumented college students’ descriptions of mental health as an emotional rollercoaster to illustrate how their mental health is shaped by immigration laws and students’ agency. She contends that ever-changing and unpredictable immigration laws and policies foster feelings of emotional distress, but undocumented students employ their agency to uplift themselves and support their psychological wellbeing. Despite their actions, emotional distress and psychological wellbeing coexist in students’ everyday lives. In all she argues that students’ agency supports their psychological wellbeing, but the immigration law and policy context they are embedded in limits their efforts and instead places them in a perilous emotional rollercoaster.

March 6, 2025

Speaker: Josefina Flores Morales 

Title: Undocumented Health: Latinx Immigrant Health Outcomes in the United States Context

Abstract: The Latinx/e population in the United States is disproportionately impacted by structural inequities related to the lack of a lawful documentation status. In this talk, Dr. Flores Morales will discuss how a structural determinant of health, documentation status, is associated with immigrants’ self-reported health. She will share results from a study examining how previous documentation status is associated with self-reported health using the New Immigrant Survey. This study also examines how previous exposure to a precarious documentation status is not race-neutral. Using a dynamic framework of documentation status, she will discuss how commonplace quantitative approaches to understanding undocumented immigrant health may underestimate observed health inequities.

April 17, 2025 - Monica Prasad - Details coming soon

May 8, 2025 - Amin Perez Vargas - Details coming soon

Please contact us to list your events here.