Archive

In this episode, we are joined by Dr. Amanda McMillan Lequieu, Assistant Professor in Sociology at Drexel University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and author of the forthcoming book Who we are is where we are: Making home in the American Rust Belt. Amanda joins us to discuss Kai Erikson’s Everything in its Path: Destruction of Community in the Buffalo Creek Flood (1976). Amanda introduces us to Erikson’s subtle approach to theorizing which he employs to better understand the Appalachian community’s response to environmental disaster. As she guides us through excerpts from the book, Amanda helps us understand Erikson’s concepts of community and communality, as well as the importance of time, space, and place to his theorizing. We conclude with a short discussion of potential critiques of Erikson’s classic work.

As always, a pdf of the two chapters discussed (‘Collective trauma: the loss of communality’ and the ‘Conclusion’) are available here.

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In this episode we are joined once again by Seth Abrutyn, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of British Columbia. Seth joins us to discuss what sociology can potentially add to the public conversation that surrounds COVID-19. In our conversation, Seth touches on the value of a number of theorists including Emile Durkheim, Erving Goffman, Jaak Panksepp.

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In this episode we are joined by Seth Abrutyn, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of British Columbia. Abrutyn joins us to speak about his initial encounters with the writings of Emile Durkheim and how his current research on suicide was both inspired by and offers important correctives to Durkheim’s famous work. Abrutyn also reflects on whether as a discipline we are guilty of deifying the classic theorists and whether the social theory syllabus is in need of a dramatic re-working.

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