2018 Annual Sociology Conference | The New School for Social Research
AUTHENTHIC MYTHS, FABRICATED TRUTHS AND THE ORDERING OF SOCIETY
March 31, 2018| 6 East 16th Street, 11th Floor, New York NY 10003

REGISTRATION & BREAKFAST
Wolff Conference Room | 9:00 – 10:00 AM

OPENING SPEAKER
Jonathan S. Simon (UC Berkley) “The Arcs of Mass Incarceration: Four Sources of Penal Meaning in Contemporary Society; Sovereignty, Capitalism, Eugenics, and Fear of Crime”
Wolff Conference Room | 10:00 – 11:30 AM
Discussant: Prof. Robin Wagner-Pacifici (NSSR)

PANELS ROUND 1

PANEL 1: STATE AND COLLECTIVE MEMORY
Room 1106| 11:45 am-1:15 pm
Discussant: Prof. Julia Sonnevend (NSSR)
“Remembering and Forgetting: Berlin’s Humboldt Forum” | Anna
Bokun (Univ. of Minnesota)
“Lingering Legacies: The Continuing Attraction of Afrikaner Suffering
and Heroism during the Anglo-Boer War” | Marjin Mado (NSSR)
“Imagining Racial and Ethnic Communities in Late Imperial China” |
Kit Man (Boston Univ.)

PANEL 2. THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES ON REALITY/TRUTH MAKING
IN MEDIA AND TECHNOLOGY
Room 1107| 11:45 am-1:15 pm
Discussant: Zoe Carey (NSSR)
“Phantasmagoria and The Trump Opera” | Forrest Muelrath (School
of Visual Arts)
“Post-Truth? Social Reality via Media and Technology” | Richard
Gross (NSSR/TU Dresden)
“Let Me See: Digital Photographs and the Visual Construction of
Reality” | Sara Lillo (Boston Univ.)

LUNCH BREAK
Wolff Conference Room | 1:15 PM to 2.30 PM

PANELS ROUND 2

PANEL 3. DISCOURSES ON ETHNICITY AND IMAGINED
COMMUNITIES
Room 1106| 2:00-3:30 pm
Discussant: Douglas De Toledo Piza (NSSR)
“It’s All Greek to Me: The Impact of Mass Media on Contested
Immigrant Identity”| George Topalidis (Univ. of Florida)
“In Search of an Identity: Ethnic Return Migration of American Jews
to Israel”| Karina Shklyan (UC San Diego)
“Ethnicizing AIDS in Southwest China”| Beiyi Hu (CUNY)

PANEL 4. DISCOURSES AND HIERARCHIES IN MEDIA
Room 1107| 2:00-3:30 pm
Discussant: Zachary Sunderman (NSSR)
“Creating Monsters: How Media Discourse Frames Sexual Predators
and their Victims”| Rebecca DiBennardo (UCLA)
“Persistence of Racial Hierarchies in Urban Neighborhoods: Analysis
on Yelp reviews of ethnic restaurants in Manhattan”| Songzhi Wu
and Michael Morris Bearman (NYU)
The Vilification of Hippie Counterculture: Media Representations of
the Grateful Dead| Isaac Slone (NSSR)

PANELS ROUND 3

PANEL 5. STATE, RESISTANCE, AND MEDIA
Room 1106| 3:45-5:15 pm
Discussant: Prof. Markus Schulz (NSSR)
“‘An entrenched, decadent culture’: A discursive analysis of financial inclusion in India” |Anuradha Sajjanhar (Univ. of Minnesota)
“Relational Repression and Queer Resistance in China”| Di Wang
(Univ. of Wisconsin)
“The Sociality of Black Death: The Internet as a Modern-Day Lynch
Site”| Seon Britton (CUNY)

PANEL 6. DIGITAL COMMUNITIES: KNOWLEDGE AND IDEOLOGY
Room 1107| 3:45-5:15 pm
Discussant: TBD
“/R/THEWORLDISFLAT: An Ethnographic Account of Knowledge
Production in Online Communities”| Ahad Ali (NSSR)
“Reading Between the Battle Lines: Myth, Mass Communication,
Ideology and American Gun Culture”| Lara Drasin (UCLA)
“Are Anti-Science movements Cults?”| Angela Wilson (Univ. of
Alberta)

KEYNOTE SPEAKER
Prof. Steve Fuller (Univ. of Warwick) “Sociology as a Post-Truth Science”
Wolff Conference Room | 5:30-7:00 PM
Discussant: Prof. Virag Molnar (NSSR)

RECEPTION
Wolff Conference Room | 7:00 PM