Transnational Talks: The Sexual Health Initiative to Foster Transformation

Thursday, April 25, 2019 11:00 am - 12:20 pm EDT (GMT -04:00)

Please join the Department of Sociology and Legal Studies for this Transnational Talk event, featuring Professor Shamus Khan, Columbia University, for a talk and seminar. The Transnational Talks series is supported by Waterloo International and aims to foster international collaboration and enhance methods training and exposure among faculty and students.

Talk: The Sexual Health Initiative to Foster Transformation (11:00 AM - 12:20 PM)

The Sexual Health Initiative to Foster Transformation (SHIFT) is one of the most comprehensive studies of sexual violence within a community. Taking two years, and drawing upon surveys, diaries, focus groups, interviews, and embedded ethnography, SHIFT is an attempt to systematically and scientifically understand sexual violence, and proposes community transformations that can help address and reduce it. In this talk Shamus Khan draws upon the SHIFT project to think through how we might better make sense of sexual violence, and what we might do to create healthier campus communities.

Seminar: Accounts of Situated Action in Qualitative Social Science (2:30 - 4:30 PM)

This seminar concerns the relationship between saying and doing in qualitative social research. While earlier work suggested avoiding the "attitudinal fallacy," it was largely silent on two important but related questions. First, can the observer trust what you observe, and their impressions of it? Second, what can the research do about behaviors essential to social reproduction and human relations that are unobservable independent of verbal accounts? This talk addresses, in practical terms, different ways to approach data gathering in the qualitative social sciences, with particular attention to inaccurate observation and unobservable social action.

About the speaker 

Shamus Khan

Shamus Khan (b. 1978) is a professor of sociology at Columbia University, where he is the chair of the department. He writes on culture, inequality, gender, and elites. He is the author of over 80 articles, books, and essays, including Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School (Princeton), The Practice of Research (Oxford, with Dana Fisher), Approaches to Ethnography: Modes of Representation and Analysis in Participant Observation (Oxford, with Colin Jerolmack), and the forthcoming Exceptional: The Astors, the New York Elite, and the story of American Inequality (Princeton) and The Sexual Project (W.W. Norton, with Jennifer Hirsch). He is the co-Principal Investigator of SHIFT, a two-year study of sexual health and sexual violence at Columbia University. He directed the working group on the political influence of economic elites at the Russell Sage Foundation, is the series editor of “The Middle Range” at Columbia University Press, and the editor of the journal Public Culture. He writes regularly for the popular press such as the New Yorker, the New York Times, Washington Post, and has served as a columnist for Time Magazine. In 2018 he was awarded the Hans L. Zetterberg Prize from Uppsala University in Sweden for “the best sociologist under 40”.