The American Nation Facing Nuclear Proliferation, 1945-53

After the Second World War, the applications of nuclear science raise a crucial threat to international security as far as their civil applications can be turned into military devices. Debates about nuclear proliferation offer a fruitful site to analyze the production of an expertise in “bio-security.” This paper analyzes in particular how experts have envisioned the role of nation-states and sovereign power in relation to policies aimed at ensuring the security of populations against the risk of nuclear annihilation. It explores what conceptions of sovereignty different experts constructed; what disciplines (political science, natural science, law) were mobilized in this debate; what strategies of institutionalization American experts followed; what publics were targeted by these experts (officials, think tanks, academic publics, media). Experts’ conceptions of threats and insurances as well as the institutional paths they build to access policy circles explain which of the experts’ policies diffused among policy circles. This approach, which focuses on the production of ideas rather than on the diffusion of administrative norms, complements neo-institutionalist studies of the internationalization of scientific modes of regulation.

The application of genetic engineering in food production is a highly contested issue that holds immense implications for the future of the global food supply and humans' relationship to nature. The paper analyzes how distinct national policy frameworks for Genetically Modified (GM) food emerged in Japan and France. In particular, it examines different meanings, or definitions, of GM food came about in each country's public discourse and how such definitions interacted with policy developments. The paper shows how available cultural resources constrain and enable political actors in their struggles to define the issue, and how earlier definitions of the issue shape the subsequent development of policy processes. By examining the definition of the issue both as a site of political struggle and as a key causal factor, the paper seeks to integrate insights from historical institutionalist and sociological institutionalist approaches in explaining institutional change.

Persuasion is the most common strategic means we use, yet rhetoric is rarely deployed as a way to understand the intersection of culture and politics (or culture and strategy). It is the oldest continuous form of cultural analysis around, and the earliest (and in some ways clearest) form of social constructionism. What do the ancient and modern theorists of oratory have to offer sociologists of culture?

This paper analyzes the newest front in the creationist battle: intelligent design. After describing the most visible case of this challenge in Dover, Pennsylvania, I show how intelligent design grew out of earlier rhetorical arguments for including creationism in school curricula. I then think about how the dynamics of these battles between intelligent design proponents, on the one hand, and the defenders of schools, science, and civil liberties, on the other, can be productively examined using social movements concepts in the area of repression, or protest control. Following this discussion of movement dynamics, I explore the question of how students might actually be affected if intelligent design were to be minimally incorporated into school curricula in an era when science has a great deal of cultural authority. I conclude with four "modest proposals" that progressives might consider for responding to future creationist challenges.

The prevailing explanatory approach in the sociology of culture is an Archimedean one: it purports to stand outside the substance or content of culture; it claims to be normatively neutral; it looks at its object from “ the point of view of no-one in particular .” By contrast, I argue that a satisfactory scientific explanation of cultural objects, knowledge claims, or systems of ideas may require a normative assessment of the worth of these objects. That an idea is crazy rather than reasonable, a scientific theory true rather than false, a story plausible rather than implausible, an ethical judgment discriminatory rather than fair, are pieces of information about the explananda that one may need to take into account. In turn, this necessitates that one temporarily situates oneself within the universe of discourse under study and conscientiously grapple with the substance or content of culture. In the second section of the paper, I consider in some more detail the special case of the explanation of people's moral views.

This project explores the relationship bettween the civic structure, public discourse and racial identity by examining how black 'slam' poets utilize public performance venues to express social and political rhetoric. Since the late 1980s, contemporary performance poetry, known as spoken word or slam poetry, has become an increasingly institutionalized and widely diffused mechanism of face-to-face interaction and public expression. The genre has also attained commercial success and spoken word has been featured in commercial films, documentaries, music, anthologies--even Broadway. At the national level, this cultural phenomenon has also become a social movement, with the most popular slam poets expressing progressive political rhetoric, which often take the form of racialized social critiques. I examine poets' movement between and discursive decisions within predominately white, predominately black and multiracial venues located within the same performance network in the Boston metropolitan area. The central research questions include: (1) to what extent do blacks poets incorporate racialized social critiques (RSCs) into their performances? (2) what influences poets' decisions about whether or not to engage these discourses before black, white and multiracial audiences? (3) what role does social background play in poets' decisions to engage in RSCs? and (4) what kind of civic and discursive interactions take place within this art world? I make use of three methodological tools to probe when and how African-American poets use their performances to engage issues of racial identity and social critiques: participant observation at poetry events; in-depth interviews with performance poets and audience members and content analysis of the poetry itself.