Amy Binder, Associate Professor

Ph.D. - Northwestern, 1998

Areas of Specialization: Culture, Conservative Social Movements, Education, Organizations

Email Address: abinder@ucsd.edu
Phone number: 858-534-0483
Office location: 492 Social Science Building

Office Hours

Curriculum Vitae

Conservative Movements Workshop - Current Schedule

Classes to be taught in 2011/2012:

Winter 2012

SOCI 104- Field Research

SOCI 126- Social Organization of Education

Spring 2012

SOCI 110- Qualitative Research in Educational Settings

SOCG 216- Sociology of Culture

 

Biography:

Amy Binder received her B.A in Anthropology from Stanford University and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Sociology from Northwestern University. Her principal research interests are in the areas of cultural sociology, education, social movements, and organizations. Her first book Contentious Curricula: Afrocentrism and Creationism in American Public Schools (Princeton University Press 2002) explored two marginal challenge efforts to shape curriculum in public school systems, and received the 2003 Best Book Prize of the Culture Section of the American Sociological Association, the 2003 Distinguished Scholarship Prize of the Pacific Sociological Association, and the 2004 Outstanding Book Award from the American Educational Research Association (AERA). A link to a description of the book on the Princeton University Press website is here: http://press.princeton.edu/titles/7430.html

Professor Binder is completing a new book project (and related articles), co-authored with UCSD Sociology graduate student Kate Wood.The book, tentatively titled Creating Conservatism: How Campuses Shape Political Discourse and Style, analyzes conservative college students’ experiences on two university campuses—one an elite private institution, the other a major public university. In this work, Binder and Wood examine how campuses are places where students do not just come and express their ‘natural political inclinations’ developed in their pre-college formative years but, rather, are places that create particular types of political identities. Different conservative styles, in this view, are the organizational product of specific institutional contexts. Data for the project come primarily from interviews with students and alumni but also include interviews with university faculty and administrators, and leaders of organizations that sponsor conservative students and campus organizations.

Work from this project has already been published in:

  • Binder, Amy and Kate Wood. 2011. “Conservative Critics and Conservative College Students: Variations in Discourses of Exclusion” in Diversity in American Education: Toward a More Comprehensive Approach; Lisa Stulberg and Sharon Weinberg (eds.), New York: Routledge.

and is forthcoming in:

  • Binder, Amy and Kate Wood. forthcoming. “’Civil’” or “’Provocative’”? Varieties of Conservative Student Style and Discourse in American Universities” in Professors and Their Politics (Neil Gross and Solon Simmons, eds., Johns Hopkins University Press).

  • Binder, Amy and Kate Wood. (tentative title): Creating Conservatism: How Campuses Shape Political Discourse and Style. Princeton University Press (expected publication date 2013).

Professor Binder’s other recent work includes an article co-authored with UCSD graduate student Andrew Cheyne on the meaning of place in elite journalists’ assessments of domestic and foreign rap (Poetics, 2010); an article published with UCSD graduate student Meghan Duffy and colleague John Skrentny on an elite foundation’s role in building a more socially conscious housing development (Social Problems, 2010); and a solo-authored article on the remarkable variability in professional orientations that exists across departments within a single transitional housing complex (Theory and Society, 2007).

What do all these projects have in common? Although substantively disparate in focus, Professor Binder’s work centers on how people make meaning in the context of both broader cultural repertoires and local organizational structures. Whether it is in studying conservative undergraduates’ stylistic differences across campuses or media writers’ framing of popular culture across national boundaries, her comparative work concentrates on the effects that cultural ideas and practices, and the institutional structures that shape those ideas, have on the lives of people.

In addition to this work, Professor Binder also co-edited a special issue of The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science with her UCSD colleagues Mary Blair-Loy, John Evans, Kwai Ng, and Michael Schudson. Contributing authors in this special issue of the journal examine how culture concepts have migrated into and out of various sociological subfields, such as the study of race and ethnicity, science studies, the sociology of education, organizational sociology, and social movements. Most of the articles in the issue were first presented at one of three Annual Culture Conferences, hosted by UCSD’s Department of Sociology.

Professor Binder is a founding member and organizer of an interdisciplinary workshop at UCSD, called the Workshop for the Study of Conservative Movements. She also participates regularly in the Department of Sociology’s Culture + Society Workshop, and has co-organized four UCSD Culture Conferences http://sociology.ucsd.edu/news/events.shtml

She also has been highly involved for several years at one of the six undergraduate colleges at UCSD, Thurgood Marshall College, where she has served as a member of the Executive Committee, as the director of the Public Service Minor http://publicsvcminor.ucsd.edu/, and as Acting Provost in Spring 2010. She also has worked in several ways with The Preuss School — UCSD’s award-winning charter middle and high school for first generation college-goers http://preuss.ucsd.edu/

Selected Publications

  • Binder, Amy. 2008."The Diversity of Culture" (with Mary Blair-Loy, John Evans, Kwai Ng, and Michael Schudson), pp.1-9 in Cultural Sociology and Its Diversity, special issue of The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (Amy Binder, Mary Blair-Loy, John Evans, Kwai Ng, and Michael Schudson. Volume 619 (September).