Sociological Science conference program (archived)

In June 2026 the Department of Sociology, Stanford University hosted the Sociological Science annual conference. This is an archived version of the conference program. Photographs from the conference are provided courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld.

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8:30-9:00am: Registration

9:00-9:05am: Welcome

David Grusky

9:05-10:30am: Plenary Session

Chair: David Grusky

• Shamus Khan
• Alexandra Killewald

10:30-10:45am: Break

10:45am-12:30pm: Morning Sessions

Session 1: Macro Processes and Outcomes

1. Lane Kenworthy, “Successful Societies”
2. Stephanie Mudge, “The Formation of the American Political Field, 1872–1928”
3. Ezra Zuckerman Sivan, “Revolutionary Non-Events: What the Nearly-Silent Reorientations that Spread of the Seven-Day Week Teach us about the Relationship between Structure and Culture”
4. Arnout van de Rijt, “Strong Reinforcement as a Condition for Social Construction”

Session 2: Race, Xenophobia, and Immigration

1. Robert Braun, “Religious Frontiers and Xenophobia: Evidence From Weimar Germany”
2. Mauro Guillen, “Immigration and Global Hegemony: Can China Overtake the U.S. during the 21st Century?”
3. Merlin Schaeffer, “Seeing People, Seeing Place: The Causal Link From Minorities To Perceived Disorder”
4. Marissa Thompson, “What Does it Mean to be Black? Experimental Evidence on the Situational Deployment of Racial Schemas”

Session 3: Sociology of Science

1. Jungsik Choi, “Is Science a World Culture? Restricted Actorhood and Trust in Science”
2. Emily Erikson, “Tragedy and Social Science”
3. Peter McMahan, “Contentious Boundaries in the Evolution of Scholarly Fields”

Session 4: Neighborhoods and Housing

1. Noli Brazil, “Neighborhood Knowledge in the Digital Age: Racial Patterns in AI Housing Recommendations”
2. Ann Owens, “Inequality in Context: Neighborhood Effects in Extralocal Perspective”
3. Katherine Thomas, "Moving to Risk: The Effect of Climate Risk Information on Residential Mobility and Spatial Inequality”
4. Eunsung Yoon, “How Algorithms Reshape Rental Prices Across Neighborhoods”

12:45-2:00pm: Lunch

2:00-3:45pm: Early Afternoon Sessions

Session 1: Culture and Agency

1. Amir Goldberg and Kara Luo, “The Broken Geometry of Culture”
2. Andrei Boutyline, “Agency: A Dual-Process Account”
3. Ari Adut, “On Doxa”
4. Landon Schnabel, “Men Leave Religion for a Disenchanted World; Women Do Not: The Materialist Gap in Global Perspective”

Session 2: Exchange, Contagion, and Trust

1. Elisa Jayne Bienenstock and Jon McQueen, “The Trappings of Trust”
2. Claude Fischer, “How People Make Friends: Strategies, Practices, and Results”
3. Douglas Guilbeault, “Emergent Directedness in Social Contagion”
4. Gabriel Rossman, “Where There’s Smoke, There's Fire: Accusation and Exoneration of Disreputable Exchange”

Session 3: The Structure of Inequality

1. Lewis Anderson, “Social Origins of the UK Corporate Elite”
2. Angelina Grigoryeva, “New Money in the New Economy: The Shift to Stock-Based Compensation and U.S. Wealth Inequality”
3. Tali Kristal, “Is Our Understanding of Income Inequality Accurate? Studying Income Inequality Using a New Analytical Approach”
4. Emma Williams-Baron, “A Roadmap for Inequality Research: Transparency, Intersectionality, and Multiple Measures of Race”

Session 4: Work in Late Capitalism

1. Wenhao Jiang, “Economic Crisis and the Discipline of Work Schedule”
2. Turgut Keskinturk, “Political Ideology and Occupational Preferences”
3. Hanzhang Ren, “The Unexpectedness Gap: Decomposing the Socioeconomic Inequality in the Quality of Employment Self-predictions”
4. Wiebke Schulz, “The Paradox of Specialization: Job Tasks and the Division of Labor in the Contemporary German Labor Market”

3:45-4:00pm: Break

4:00-5:45pm: Late Afternoon Sessions

Session 1: The Law

1. Tina Law, “Suing the State: American Legal Discourse on Police Expertise and Accountability, 1940–1975”
2. Carol Heimer, “When Law Makes Us Better, And When It Doesn’t”
3. Laura Beth Nielsen and Robert Nelson, “The Hero and the Monsignor: Law, Sexual Violence, and the Catholic Church”
4. Mark Suchman, “Law, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship”

Session 2: Educational Effects

1. Jennie Brand, “Flexibly Detecting Effect Heterogeneity with an Application to the Effects of College on Reducing Poverty”
2. Christina Ciocca Eller, “The Economic Returns to Some College: Heterogeneous Higher Education Pathways and Inequality in Early Careers”
3. Emily Rauscher, “Hidden Funds: School-Supporting Non-Profits and Rising Inequality”
4. Fumiya Uchikoshi, “Is Good News Good for Everyone? Testing the Gendered Effect of Relative Grades on Application Behaviors in Japanese College Admissions”

Session 3: Health and Aging

1. Joe Galaskiewicz, “Neighbors, Nonprofits, and Saying No to Public Health Guidance”
2. Arvind Karunakaran, “Scope Capture of Medical Technology by Legal-Financial Institutions: Implications for the Autonomy of High-Status Physicians”
3. Bernardo Mackenna, “A Debt with Time: Consumer Credit History, Stress, and Biological Aging”
4. Daniel Tadmon, “How the Teletherapeutic Redistribution of Care Reproduces Inaccessibility”

Session 4: Networks and Organizations

1. Gabriel Levesque, “The Relational Structure of Corporate Ignorance Production”
2. Craig Rawlings and Clayton Childress, “The False Polarization of Heroes: How Partisan Schemas and Networks Affect Collective Memory”
3. Shahar Zach, “Educational Convergence in American Political Belief Network Structure, 1992-2020”
4. Tarjei Widding-Havneraas, “Heterogenous Effects of Neighborhood Disadvantage on Mental Health”

6:00-8:00pm: Dinner

8:30-9:00am: Registration

9:00-10:30am: Plenary Session

Chair: Kim Weeden

• Christina Ciocca Eller
• Ari Adut, Arnout van de Rijt, and Stephen Vaisey, Report on Sociological Science

10:30-10:45am: Break

10:45am-12:30pm: Morning Sessions

Session 1: Politics, Power, and Violence

1. Bart Bonikowski, “Collective Identification and Trump Support Among Immigrant Descendants”
2. Yutao Chen, “Power and Agency Expression in Organizational Communication”
3. Jessica Simes and Gerard Torrats-Espinosa, “The Local Politics of Mass Incarceration”
4. George Wood, “Soldiers on the Streets: The Effect of Military Experience on Police Use of Force”

Session 2: Research Methods

1. Pablo Bello, “What Do Rankings Do?”
2. Conrad Hackett, “Is Society being Misled by Online Opt-in Polls?”
3. Cristobal Young, “Taking the Con Out of Confidence Intervals: What Many Datasets Reveal About Empirical Uncertainty”
4. Ang Yu, “Explaining with Odds Ratios: Nonparametric Estimands and Estimators”

Session 3: Education and Labor Markets

1. Tom VanHeuvelen, “A (Lottery) Ticket to the Middle Class: The Changing Structure of Downside Risk Among American College Graduates”
2. Alex Chow, “What Predicts Subjective Social Position and Mobility? A Multinational, Multiversal Analysis”
3. AJ Alvero , “The Misreading of Man: Readability, Intelligence, and Language Ideologies”
4. Lindsey Denise Cameron, “Patchwork Organizing: People as the Infrastructure in Global Platform Work”

Session 4: Discrimination and Diversity

1. Greta Hsu, “Before Evaluation: The Asymmetric Effect of Gender on the Classification of Work”
2. Jukka Savolainen, “Turning Intersectionality Inward: Race, Gender, and Merit in Sociology Hiring”
3. Katie Spoon, “Backlash to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Efforts Among Faculty”
4. Robin Stryker, “Equality Wars: How Social Science Shaped U.S Employment Discrimination Law”

12:45-2:00pm: Lunch

2:00-3:45pm: Early Afternoon Sessions

Session 1: Culture, Morality, and Aesthetics

1. Angela He, “The Moral Principles of Buyer Legitimacy: Perceptions of Who Should Be Allowed to Buy in the American Housing Market”
2. Kevin Kiley, “Incremental Predictive Gain from Change: Quantifying Sources of Variance in Personal Culture”
3. Omar Alcides Lizardo, “The Social Distribution of Aesthetic Values/Beyond the Pure Gaze: Cultural Capital, Political Ideology, and New Forms of Aesthetic Distinction”
4. Andrew Miles, “Uncovering the Cognitive Properties of Prescriptive and Proscriptive Morality

Session 2: Educational Processes

1. Simon Cheng, “Parental STEM Involvement, High School STEM Experiences, and Choice of STEM Major in College: Total, Direct, and Indirect Effects”
2. Charlie Eaton, “Data Visualization and Inclusive Science Pedagogy: The STEM + Du Bois Experiment”
3. Jayanti Owens, “Racial Matching, Organizational Context, and Inequality in School Punishment”
4. sean reardon, “The Widening Income Achievement Gap, Revisited”

Session 3: Gender, Sexual Harassment, and Segregation

1. D’Lane Compton, “Beyond Binary, Beyond Marriage Improving Measurement For Inclusive Demography”
2. Matt Mendoza, “Between Workplace Segregation and the Gender Gap in Benefits: US Manufacturing, 1997–2021”
3. Michael Rosenfeld, “The Surprising Decline of Workplace Sexual Harassment Incidence in the U.S. Federal Workforce”
4. Anna Wainwright, “Precarious Consent: Financial Exchange and Sexual Intimacy Among Sugar Babies”

Session 4: Artificial Intelligence and Society

1. Ying Chu and Chen-Shuo Hong, “Flattening Sociological Reasoning in LLMs in Life Outcome Inference”
2. Myokyung Han, “Uneven Automation: AI's Impact on Software Engineering Varies by Task Difficulty and Data Availability”
3. Devesh Narayanan, “Structural Enablers and Constraints to Participation: Examining Participatory AI Development in a Large Firm”
4. David Broska, “The Mixed Subjects Design: Treating Large Language Models as Potentially Informative Observations”