officers: current
Current section officers
Mission
The ASA Marxist Section serves as a resource and meeting point for Marxist scholars. The Section on Marxist Sociology is not a narrowly focused group that mechanically applies Marxist rhetoric to complex sociological issues. The Section consists of a membership that is interested in examining how insights from Marxist methodology and analysis can help explain the complex dynamics of modern society in all its dimensions: political, economic, military, cultural, even interpersonal. You don't have to "be a Marxist" to be a member of the Marxist Section. Send any inquiries about the section to the Secretary-Treasurer.
Section Officers, 2008-2009
Chair: David A. Smith, University of California - Irvine
Chair-Elect: Patricia T. Clough, CUNY - The Graduate Center
Howard Waitzkin, University of New MexicoPast Chair: William DiFazio
Secretary-Treasurer: Arthur J. Jipson, University of Dayton
Council: Jacqueline A. Carrigan, California State University - Sacramento
Wilma A. Dunaway, Virginia Tech
Thomas J. Keil, Arizona State University
Lloyd Klein, Kingsborough Community College, CUNY
Paul B. Paolucci, Eastern Kentuky University
David Norman Smith, University of Kansas
Student Representative: Joshua Howard, CUNY- The Graduate Center
Newsletter Editors/Web Designer: Arthur J. Jipson, University of Dayton (Webpages from an original template by Hannah Holleman and R. Jonna, University of Oregon)
Candidates for Marxist Sociology Section, 2009
Chair:
Randy Martin
Professor and Chair
Department of Art and Public Policy
Tisch School of the Arts
Randy Martin is Professor and Chair of the Department of Art and Public Policy at New York University. His books include, An Empire of Indifference: American War and the Financial Logic of Risk Management; Financialization of Daily Life; On Your Marx: Relinking Socialism and the Left; Socialist Ensembles: Theater and State in Cuba and Nicaragua (among others). He detects a renewed interest in Marx among graduate students and would like to help promote a salient reading of marxism for our times that moves beyond sociology's own goldilocks approach to different schools of thought. He would also love to see the field engage a more rigorous critique of capital as its progressive wing considers what might constitute a public sociology.
Roger Salerno
Professor and Chair of Sociology
Pace University
New York City Campus
rsalerno@pace.eduHaving received both a Master’s of Urban Planning degree and a Ph.D. from NYU, where he studied with Richard Sennett, Dennis Wrong and others, he worked for several years as a community planner in East Harlem with grass-root organizations. As advisor to Pace’s chapter of S.D.S., he helped to lead a successful campaign in 2007 to oust the university’s president and to condemn his limits on free speech.
His book, Landscapes of Abandonment (SUNY Press, 2003) deals with the impact of capitalism on contemporary culture. His more recent works have included Beyond the Enlightenment (Preager, 2004), Sociology Noir (McFarland Press, 2007) and “Imagining the Urban Poor,” an essay that will appear later this year in Fleeing the City: Culture and Politics of Antiurbanism, (Palgrave 2009) edited by Michael J. Thompson. He has been active in campus anti-war activities since his undergraduate days and has been an outspoken advocate and worker for adjunct faculty unionization at Pace. For the first time in its history, the University signed a collective bargaining agreement this year (2009) with its part-time faculty.
We are witnessing capitalism’s collapse here and around the world. Such a breakdown is wedded to its inherent structural failures, which have not only devastated our natural environment, but also have lead to a greater sense of dehumanization and helplessness. Given our training, our understanding of Marxism, and our belief in activism this section becomes a precious resource. It houses a powerful core of people capable of identifying and addressing these challenges—people who can critically formulate innovative strategies to replace the rusted, antiquated system that can no longer be propped-up. It requires young people at the helm—women and men with an activist vision and a commitment to change. And it is clearly important that we continue to welcome them in and make them at home here. This means expanding our Marxist sensibilities and opening ourselves up to internal challenges as well as to the external ones. We need to find better ways of connecting to the streets.
Council:
Michael E.Brown
Professor of Sociology
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
Northeastern University
MikeBrown29@rcn.comMicheal Brown as taught at Sarah Lawrence College, City University of New York, and Northeastern where he was chair and is now a professor in the. He was a founder and long-time editor of the journal, Socialism and Democracy, and has published in New Political Science, Philosophical Forum, Sociometry, Administrative Science, Social Text, October, Contemporary Sociology, Transaction/Society, and other journals and magazines. His books include "Collective Behavior" (with Amy Goldin), The Production of Society: A Marxian Foundation for Social Theory," "Recent Studies in the Politics and Culture of U. S. Communism" (edited with Randy Martin, George Snedeker, and Frank Rosengarten), and, most recently, "The Historiography of Communism" (2009). He has been an activist, and, like many of his colleagues in the Marxist Section of the ASA, was arrested, occasionally dramatically, on a number of occasions.
He has been involved in a number of organizational efforts on the left, including being faculty advisor to SDS and other student political groups and helping to found The New University Conference. He is presently concerned with three problems that bear on a new book he is in the process of completing. The first has to do with the ambiguous relationship between theory and practice. The second has to do with how Marxian theory, particularly "Capital," can be be taught at the college and graduate level, especially in the context of what appear to be alternative theoretical traditions. The third has to do with the possibility of deciding inwhat ways those traditions might and might not be compatible with the Marxian critique of political economy.
Graham Cassano
Assistant Professor of Sociology
Oakland University,
Varner Hall
Rochester, MI 48309-4401
graham@xrgb.comGraham Cassano studies the relations between the mass media and class formation during the New Deal and the theoretical parallels in the thought of Karl Marx and Thorstein Veblen. He also writes upon “whiteness,” “intersectionality,” and interpretive theory. He sits on the editorial board of Rethinking Marxism and serves as an associate editor of Critical Sociology. His articles have appeared in Rethinking Marxism, Critical Sociology, The Journal of Economic Issues, and Left History.
If I am elected to the Marxist council, I would like to work on the continuing effort to strengthen ties between the Marxist section and other related sections in the ASAs. In addition, I would like to help expand membership and bring more voices into the Marxist section, especially sociologists working on critical race theory, contemporary feminists and intersectionality theorists. Finally, I would like to see the Marxist section have an active role enlarging and enriching the Critical Sociology conferences currently held during ASA meetings.
Lynn Chancer, Professor of Sociology
Hunter College of the City University of New York
lchancer@hunter.cuny.edu
Publications include Sadomasochism in Everyday Life (Rutgers, 1992); Reconcilable Differences: Beauty, Pornography and the Future of Feminism (University of California 1998); High-Profile Crimes: When Legal Cases Become Social Causes (Chicago, 2005); and Gender, Race and Class: An Overview (with Beverly Watkins, Blackwell, 2006).
I am running to serve on the council of the Marxist section primarily to help sustain and invigorate a community of progressive scholars concerned about economic inequality nationally and internationally and also about how class interacts with issues of gender, race as well as class. I do not consider myself a "Marxist" anymore than I would consider myself an "ist" of any kind that relates to the work of a single person. However, I have been involved with left politics and *New Politics* (a journal of third camp democratic socialists), as well as with feminist causes, for many years and would like to remain connected to scholars who are also progressively oriented within sociology and who teach classical and contemporary texts influenced by Marx's own centrally important contributions.
Sam Binkley
Assistant professor of sociology
Emerson College
Samuel_Binkley@emerson.eduMy research considers the historical and social production of subjectivity in the context of lifestyle practices looking at lifestyle movements of the 1970s, contemporary anti-consumerist lifestyles, consumer cultures under Cuban socialism, and the temporality of neo-liberalism. I have also written on the theoretical contributions of Pierre Bourdieu, Norbert Elias and Michel Foucault. His recent monograph, Getting Loose: Lifestyle Consumption in the 1970s (Duke University Press, 2007), examines the role of lifestyle discourse in the shaping of reflexive subjectivity, and its ultimate influence on lifestyle branding. My articles have appeared in the Journal of Consumer Culture, Time and Society, Cultural Studies, Rethinking Marxism, The European Journal of Cultural Studies and the Journal for Cultural Research. He is currently working on a new book on happiness. I am currently co-editor of the journal Foucault Studies, and his.
In my view, the Marxist Section should move in the direction of a broader theoretical engagement with a range of more contemporary developments in critical theory, emerging from phenomena such a globalization, postmodernization, and reflexive modernity. While Marxism should continue to serve as the foundational identity for this section, the group should also expand to take on a range of concerns relevant to left intellectuals in academia, from a wide scope of theoretical traditions. As much of American social theory tends to reject many dynamic contemporary developments in critical theory, which extend from psychoanalysis to post-structuralism to governmentality theory, I feel that an appropriate role for the Marxist section is to provide those developments a forum at the American Sociological Association.
2007-8] (updated October 2008)