Description
Over the past four years, scholars at Yale University and Fudan University in Shanghai engaged in a series of pilot exchanges that led to the recent formation of the Yale-Fudan Center for Research in Cultural Sociology. Yale requests our support to continue this joint effort, to help build the field of cultural sociology in China and foster awareness of Chinese cultural sociology in the United States.
Cultural sociology is a relatively recent approach to sociological practice that highlights the role of culture, foregrounding narratives, symbols, identities and performances in modern life. Using ethnographic fieldwork, interviews and other qualitative methods in addition to quantitative evidence, this subfield grew rapidly in the U.S., by the mid-1990s becoming one of the largest sections of the American Sociological Association. All major sociology departments now have cultural sociologists on their faculties.
In China, by contrast, the field remains underdeveloped, although it has grown considerably in recent years, in large measure due to leadership from Fudan professors Zhou Yi and Hu Anning and professors Jeffrey Alexander and Philip Smith at Yale. Alexander, the founder of the Yale Center for Cultural Sociology (Yale CCS), is one of the most significant figures in the field globally. His theoretical and empirical writings have been widely translated into Chinese. Zhou and Hu have recently established a cultural sociology section inside the Chinese Sociological Association, serving respectively as president and vice-president. On the basis of their interactions, and with seed funding from their respective universities, Zhou, Hu, Alexander and Smith initiated faculty and student exchanges.
With the Foundation’s support, the four project leaders propose to increase the level of exchange. Activities would include annual visits to Fudan by two faculty and one PhD student affiliated with Yale CSS, for teaching and research. Fudan and Yale contributions would support reciprocal visits of Chinese faculty and students to Yale. The grant would also fund two summer workshops at Fudan for Chinese students. A conference in New Haven on Chinese cultural sociology is planned for the summer of the third year, to involve faculty and students from each university and a wider group of Chinese and American institutions. A joint publication, themed sessions at major conferences, and a special edition of the American Journal of Cultural Sociology are also envisioned, all featuring research on and scholars from China.
Articles in a recent special issue of the Journal of Chinese Sociology demonstrate how use of a cultural lens aids understanding of the rapid social change that has accompanied China’s economic transformation: a survey of netizens engaging in online humor sheds light on the formation of networks and the role of the Internet in contemporary Chinese society; and organizational inequality is explored in an examination of how collective, stratified “rural” and “urban” identities gain salience in a Chinese retail store. As China moves toward a postindustrial society, these emerging cultural phenomena call for more rigorous research. Alexander writes, “The collaborations and knowledge formations we seek to build will inspire, motivate and form the intellectual foundations for wider interest in cultural sociology IN China. They will also generate a more powerful concern with the cultural sociology OF China among scholars in the United States.”
Recommendation: That the Directors of the Henry Luce Foundation approve a three-year grant of $300,000 to Yale University for projects of the Yale-Fudan Center for Research in Cultural Sociology.