Oslo Summer School in Comparative Social Science Studies 2000
Comparative Cultural Sociology
Main discipline: Sociology
Lecturer: Professor Michéle Lamont,
Princeton University, USA
1. Course description
This seminar will introduce students to the field of cultural sociology. We will focus on a few selected research areas that have seen important theoretical developments in recent years, including cultural structures and repertoires, symbolic boundaries, social and national identity, global cultures, class cultures, and taste cultures. Particular attention will be paid to comparative scholarship and comparative research strategies.
2. Basic Readings
- Cerulo, Karen A. (1997), "Identity Construction: New Issues, New Direction", in Annual Review of Sociology 23, pp. 385-409.
- Corse, Sarah (1997), Nationalism and Literature: The Politics of Culture in Canada and the United States, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, "Chapters 1 and 7".
- Lamont, Michèle (1992), Money, Morals, and Manners: The Culture of the French and American Upper-Middle Class, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, (Conclusion).
- Lamont, Michèle and Laurent Thevenot (1999), "Introduction: Toward a Renewed Cultural Sociology" in Rethinking Comparative Cultural Sociology: Repertoires of Evaluation in France and the United States, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Long, Elisabeth (1997), From Sociology to Cultural Studies, New York:
Basil Blackwell, (Introduction).
3. The lecturer
Michèle Lamont is Professor at Department of Sociology, Princeton University, USA. She received her doctorate from Université de Paris in 1983. Her main research interests are the sociology of culture and knowledge, inequality, race, immigration, comparative sociology, and sociological theory. She has published Money, Morals and Manners: The Culture of the French and the American Upper-Middle Class, Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1992), and two recent edited volumes The Cultural Territories of Race: Black and White Boundaries, Chicago: University of Chicago Press and New York: Russell Sage Foundation (1999) and Polities and Repertoires of Evaluation in France and the United States (co-edited with Laurent Thévenot), London: Cambridge University Press and Paris: Presses de la Maison des sciences de l'homme (2000). The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class and Immigration will be published by Harvard University Press and the Russel Sage Foundation in fall 2000.