Please join us in the Sociology Department Commons (UNM builling #78, Room 1061) for a talk from Diana Olivas. Presentation title TBD.

Please join us on Friday, April 26th at 3pm for Dr. Craig Rawling's colloquium talk titled "Ideology and Influence: Friendship Networks and Belief Change in a Divided World"

This talk outlines and tests a model of belief change that hinges on both social factors (e.g., peer influence) and cognitive factors (e.g., ideological consistency). The model is tested using the salient case of first-year divinity students during a period of high-profile schisms over the morality of same-sex marriages and ordaining gay clergy. Results from longitudinal analyses of both quantitative and qualitative data support the model. Although students feel personally conflicted when their beliefs about God, the Bible, and sexuality are inconsistent with a liberal-conservative schema, these uncomfortable feelings alone are insufficient to drive belief change. Rather, belief change is driven by interpersonal influences that act as a catalyst for individuals resolving belief inconsistencies, leading individuals who are more embedded within the peer network to achieve greater ideological consistency. These results help make sense of broader patterns of belief change and stability throughout the life course, and the particular importance of peer influence in shaping these patterns.

If you are unable to join us in person, please email jordancilley13@unm.edu for a Zoom link.

See the flyer for this talk here.

Please join us for our colloquium on Friday, November 10th with a Graduate Student Professional Panel.

If you are unable to attend in person, please email jordancilley13@unm.edu for Zoom link. 

Please join us for our colloquium held Friday, October 27th! Our speaker will be Davyd Setter, a PhD Candidate from UNM's Sociology & Criminology Department. Davyd's talk is titled: What We Talk About When We Talk About Defunding: Shifting Attitudes on Crime Spending Among the American Republic, 2016-2020.

If you are unable to attend in person, please email jordancilley13@unm.edu for Zoom link. 

"Stuart Hall, Where'd You Go? Identity Politics and Antiracism's Debasements"

The discussion presents Stuart Hall's classic formulation "race is the modality in which class is lived" as a missed opportunity in critical theory, showing how antiracism failed to take seriously the inflection point Hall highlighted. Instead, anti-racism folded under the very racial capitalism Hall challenged. We will discuss how Asian Americans are similarly positioned as miner's canaries within America's conversations about race and racism, and how that position can yield critical insights and promulgate prograssive politics.

See flyer here.

The focus will be on helping grad students think about how best to go about putting together a committee of study (whether that’s a thesis committee, a comprehensive exam committee (where there is flexibility in that regard, depending on the area) or a dissertation committee. We will have 5 panelists—2 graduate students at different stages, one post-doc who did PhD here, and 2 faculty members. Each will address some tailored questions regarding: i) forming your committees of study; and ii) working with your committee. And there will be time for questions and further discussion.

Will be held in person in Sociology Department Commons (SSCI 1061) or via Zoom. Please email rlwood@unm.edu for link.

Please join us for a talk by Dr. Owen Whooley entitled "When Police go to Mental Health School: A Sociological Examination of Crisis Intervention Training (CIT)".

This talk will be held Friday, February 24th in person in the Sociology Commons SSCI #1061 or via Zoom. Zoom link will be available and sent to UNM Soc department Listserv. Please email rlwood@unm.edu for the link.

See flyer here.

Please join us for a talk by Elizabeth Korver-Glenn and Sofia Locklear, entitled “I’m Not Just a Tenant They Can Run Over: How Low-Income Renters Navigate Housing-Related Stress.”

The talk will be held on Friday November 13th at 3:00pm via Zoom. The Zoom Link will be distributed through UNM Soc Department listserv. Email mhv@unm.edu to request link. 

As part of our Fall Colloquium Series, Dr. Jan Doering will be presenting his book, Us versus Them. Race, Crime, and Gentrification in Chicago Neighborhoods.

Dr. Doering is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at McGill University. His research revolves around race and ethnicity, urban processes, and politics. His book, Us Versus Them: Race, Crime, and Gentrification in Chicago Neighborhoods, examines conflict over crime and gentrification in the era of Trayvon Mart n and Michael Brown.

A Zoom link will be sent to UNM Soc department Listserv. Email kpark3@unm.edu to request the link.

Please join us for a colloquium talk by Dr. Javier Auyero, entitled "The Ambivalent State." Dr. Auyero is a professor of sociology at the University of Texas - Austin. This invited talk is being supported by the department's Korzenwiecz Endowment, which was established to bring in experts on Latin America and/or comparative sociology to visit the sociology department.

The talk will be held on February 8th at 2:00pm in the Sociology Commons.

ABSTRACT

While research on terrorism has grown rapidly in recent years, few studies have applied criminological theories to the analysis of individual-level political extremism. Instead, research on radicalization has drawn primarily from political science and psychology and has overwhelmingly focused on violent extremists, leaving little variation in the dependent variable. Using a newly available dataset, we test whether a set of variables derived from prominent criminological theories are helpful in distinguishing between non-violent and violent extremists. Results show that variables related to social control (lack of stable employment), social learning (radical peers), psychological perspectives (history of mental illness), and prior criminal record all have significant effects on participation in violent political extremism and are robust across multiple techniques for imputing missing data. At the same time, other common indicators of social control (e.g., education, marital status) and social learning perspectives (e.g., radical family members) were not significant in the multivariate models. We argue that terrorism research would benefit from including criminology insights and by considering political radicalization as a dynamic, evolving process, much as life-course criminology treats more common forms of crime.