About PHS

The Politics, History, and Society (PHS) Workshop aims to provide an intellectual home for graduate students and faculty working in the areas of political and historical sociology. We welcome papers–dissertation chapters, papers for publication, research proposals, and qualifying papers–covering such topics as the sociology of the state, civil society, social class, and social movements. Papers are circulated one week in advance, and participants are required to read them before the workshop. Each session begins with the presenter putting her paper in context (five minutes), followed by the discussant’s comments (ten minutes) and then comments from general participants. Faculty participants are prohibited from commenting during the first 45 minutes. Regular attendance is strongly encouraged.

During the 2022-2023 year, we are especially interested in studies that focus on urbanization, racial/ethnic/sexual and gender minorities, decolonization, and modernity, decolonization using qualitative or mixed methods but open to other works that address a substantive issue within studies of politics, history, and society.

To give you a sense of the range of topics and methods at PHS, here are the titles of papers we have recently workshopped:

  • Symbolic hazard or strategic opportunity? Center parties’ reaction to right-wing ascendancy in the Federal Republic of Germany, 1964-1990
  • The Autonomous Colonial State: Lessons from the British Empire
  • Measuring the Carceral Legacy of Slavery
  • The Making of a Precarious Retail Labor Force in the United States, 1900-2019
  • A Recipe for Disaster: Framing Risk and Vulnerability in Slum Relocation Policies in Chennai, India
  • Living One’s Theories: Moral Consistency in The Life of Émile Durkheim
  • Rich Voter, Poor Voter: Representational Inequality in the U.S. Congress
  • Sufi Networks Between Empires: Sainthood and Recognition in Southern Punjab
  • Corporate Conspiracies and Complex Secrets: Structure and Perception of the Insull Scheme in 1920s/30s Chicago
  • The Polarization of Confidence in the Scientific Community: Towards a Field-Theoretic Conception of Political Ideology
  • Knowledge Work and Interpretive Dispute in the U.S. Courts of Appeals
  • Path Dependence or Ship of Theseus? Transitions to the Knowledge Economy in Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden
  • Lineage as Structure
  • Tip of the Iceberg: Durability and Transformation of the Indigenous Votes in Taiwan
  • Unbundling Abundance: Work Strategies in French and Spanish Hypermarkets
  • Group Threat and Intercommunal Violence
  • Armed Politics and the State in South Asia
  • Nationalist Origins of Democracy and Dictatorship: Categorical Inequality and Regime Trajectories in South and Southeast Asia
  • When Socialism Meets Market: The Reconstruction of Ideology in China, 1976-1992
  • What is a Social Group in the Eyes of the Law? Knowledge Work in Refugee Status Determination
  • The Effect of Interspersion on Class Relations
  • The Politics of Water: Privatization, Institutional Change, and Social Protest in Santiago de Chile, late 1970s to the present
  • An Unconventional Military in a Conventional Battle: The Informal Organization of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps in the Iran-Iraq War
  • Social and Political Mobility in Florence
  • What is Political Sociology?
  • Insurgent Ecology and the Rise of the Taiping Rebellion, 1847-1853