Breaking Point? Faculty Speaker Series: Which way to America? Inequality in the United States

A central debate has emerged about the United States: do the conditions and conflicts defining American life today represent a critical rupture in U.S. political culture and its role in the world, or a more extreme continuation of trajectories that were already underway? The Centre for the Study of the United States will take up this question through "Breaking Point? Continuity and Rupture in U.S. Governance," our theme for the upcoming academic year. CSUS will bring together scholars working across disciplines to examine how recent transformations in American society, technology, and governance are reshaping both domestic life and the broader global order.

 

This first installment of the Breaking Point? Faculty Speaker Series brings together three scholars to question how patterns of advantage and disadvantage are shaping, and being reshaped by, this moment of American political upheaval.

 

 

 

Dr. Ellen Berrey is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto and an affiliated scholar of the American Bar Foundation. Her research investigates how organizations and movements advance, and thwart, progressive social change in the United States and Canada. She is particularly curious about how cultural ideals – diversity, fairness, sustainability – get invoked, contested, and institutionalized in law and organizations. Motivated by the goals of understanding and supporting anti-racism movements, her current study with Alex Hanna investigates campus protest and responses by university administrations and police. Her study of an anti-sustainability movement in the United States examines how conspiracy theory is politically mobilized by white, conservative, suburban homeowners and adopted in local government.

 

Dr. Berrey’s first book, The Enigma of Diversity: The Language of Race and the Limits of Racial Justice (U of Chicago Press 2015) received the prestigious Herbert Jacob Book Prize of the Law & Society Association, among other awards, and was profiled in The New Yorker. Her related Salon article, “Diversity Is for White People,” has been circulated on social media more that 33,000 times. Her second award-winning book, with Robert Nelson and Laura Beth Nielsen, Rights on Trial: How Workplace Discrimination Law Perpetuates Inequality (U of Chicago Press 2017), features online audio recordings of interviewees, which brings to life their experiences of discrimination.

 

 

Rob is an Assistant Professor of Economic Analysis and Policy at the University of Toronto. He received a Ph.D. from the Department of Economics at the University of Michigan in 2015. His research focuses on the economic history of the Indigenous peoples of North America and the intersection of discrimination, protest, and state institutions. Prior to his academic appointment, Rob served as the Chief Economist in the Office of the Leader of the Official Opposition in Ottawa. He has also served as the senior aide to the Minister of Finance and Deputy Premier of British Columbia. Rob is a Broadbent Institute fellow, co-director of the Canadian Economics Association’s Indigenous Economics Study Group, and a founding member of the Canadian Economics Diversity Committee.

 

 

Samuel R. Lucas is the William G. Davis Chair of Community College Leadership in the Department of Leadership, Higher and Adult Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) at the University of Toronto; Professor Emeritus, Department of Sociology, University of California-Berkeley; and a Faculty Affiliate of the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His substantive research focuses on whether and how structural factors maintain inequality, reduce educational opportunity, constitute discrimination, and threaten human rights. A methodologist, he has contributed new measures of social phenomena and new perspectives on sampling. Analysts have applied his theory of effectively maintained inequality, originally devised to make sense of socioeconomic inequality in education in the United States, to over 20 countries, including Brazil, Canada, China, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Israel, and Nigeria. In addition to his theoretical, substantive, and methodological work, Lucas was producer and host of the This Week in Sociological Perspective podcast.

 

Lucas is currently studying pathways through higher education, extending the investigation of effectively maintained inequality beyond education in the United States, continuing work on the third volume in the discrimination trilogy and, with several student collaborators, completing a project on social scientists’ perspectives on causality.