Stephen Robert '62 Campus Center, Petteruti Lounge (Room 201), 75 Waterman St
Du Bois is recognized as a pioneer of American scientific sociology and as someone who made contributions to the sociology of race and to urban sociology. Yet, in this book we argue that his work has not been thoroughly read and understood by the discipline. Du Bois was indeed a scholar of race and an earlier practitioner of urban sociology but he was in fact much more than that. Du Bois was a theorist of racialized modernity, and as such he should be considered one of the canonical classical sociological theorists. Moreover, Du Bois also proposed and implemented a program for empirical sociological studies that was different from the one developed later by the Chicago school of sociology that went on to inform the development of mainstream sociology. In fact, in his large corpus of writings, Du Bois developed an original sociological approach. In this book we analyze in depth Du Bois a number of Du Bois key works to reconstruct the theoretical and methodological unity of Du Bois sociological approach.
This event is part of a year-long series of talks and workshops entitled “Critical Sociologies of Race and Empire,” developed by a group of faculty and students in Sociology and American Studies. This series will explore new sociological work on race and empire from critical perspectives such as postcolonial and Du Boisian sociology.
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Karida Brown Karida Brown is a cultural sociologist of race whose current research centers on the relationship between social transformations and the racial self. She studies this phenomena across three Sewellian "eventful transformations"—the twentieth century African American Migration, the desegregation of the public school, and in the formation of institutional archives. Her current research forges a new direction in the study of race and migration by examining the conditions under which the twentieth century African American Great Migration emerged, and the ways in which this historic process has impacted African American identity, culture, and subjectivity. Her manuscript in-progress, entitled "Gone Home: Race and Roots through Appalachia," explores the ways in which African American identity was negotiated and transformed during this era of massive demographic, political, economic and cultural change. In this work, Brown reframes the African American Great Migration as a cultural and demographic process, arguing that it must be understood alongside its historical contingencies with racial slavery. |