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Sociology's focus on sociality and co-presence has long oriented studies of commensality-the social dimension of eating together. This literature commonly prioritizes face-to-face interactions and takes physical proximity for granted. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020 largely halted in-person gatherings and altered everyday foodways. Consequently, many people turned to

How do governments commemorate salient national figures with contested reputations? The case of Marshal Philippe Pétain, whose fame followed World War I (WWI), but was later stigmatized for having led the Nazi-affiliated Vichy regime during World War II (WWII), suggests that political leaders consider the interests of competing groups. In the case of Pétain, these include veterans’ organizations, Jewish heritage groups, leftists, and, eventually, the rightist National Front. State leaders attempt to reconcile these pressures in the hope of avoiding politically damaging conflicts. Successful commemorations reinforce the legitimacy of the State as the guardian of symbolic compatibility between visions of history and morality. Recognizing memorialization as political process, we describe how Presidents of France attempt to distinguish an honorable Pétain from a dishonorable one. We describe four strategies by which states address difficult reputations: erasing, selecting, reconciling, and differentiating. Competing groups may create ambiguous meanings, attacking the State, while keeping distant from those with difficult reputations.

During the late 1920s and ’30s, performative populism played a major role in the politics of the American Deep South. In the gubernatorial campaigns of three of the most prominent populist politicians of the era—Huey Long, Theodore Bilbo, and Eugene Talmadge—performance skills and entertainment were key strategies for gaining voter support and crafting personas within a popular imaginary.

Purpose This study aims to explore how graduate students in the social sciences develop reading and note-taking routines. Design/methodology/approach Using a professional socialization framework drawing on grounded theory, this study draws on a snowball sample of 36 graduate students in the social sciences at US universities. Qualitative interviews were conducted to learn about graduate students’ reading and note-taking techniques. Findings This study uncovered how doctoral students experienced the shift from undergraduate to graduate training. Graduate school requires students to adopt new modes of reading and note-taking. However, students lacked explicit mentorship in these skills. Once they realized that the goal was to enter an academic conversation to produce knowledge, they developed new reading and note-taking routines by soliciting and implementing suggestions from advanced doctoral students and faculty mentors. Research limitations/implications The specific requirements of the individual graduate program shape students’ goals for reading and note-taking. Further examination of the relationship between graduate students’ reading and note-taking and institutional requirements is warranted with a larger sample of universities, including non-American institutions. Practical implications Graduate students benefit from explicit mentoring in reading and note-taking skills from doctoral faculty and advanced graduate students. Originality/value This study uncovers the perspectives of graduate students in the social sciences as they transition from undergraduate coursework in a doctoral program of study. This empirical, interview-based research highlights the centrality of reading and note-taking in doctoral studies.

We examine how the contemporary art market has changed as a result of the disruptions caused by the novel coronavirus. Based on interviews with artists, collectors, a dealer, and an auction house executive, we argue that the decline of face-to-face interaction, previously essential to art market transactions, has placed strain on each corner of the community. In the absence of physical co-presence with the artworks and art world actors, participants struggle to evaluate and appreciate artworks, make new social ties, develop trust, and experience a shared sense of pleasure and collective effervescence. These challenges especially impact the primary gallery market, where participants emphasize a communal commitment to art above instrumental speculation, which is more accepted in the secondary auction market. We find a transition to distant online communication, but the likelihood of this continuing after the lockdowns end and the virus dissipates varies according to the subcultures of these market segments.

What accounts for name choices in a transnational context? What does the choice of ethnic or English names reveal about global identities and the desire to fit into a new culture? Drawing on the sociology of culture and migration, we examine the intersection of naming, assimilation, and self-presentation in light of international student mobility. Based on 25 semi-structured interviews with mainland Chinese students enrolled in an elite Midwestern university, we find that these students make name choices by engaging in both transnational processes and situated practices. First, Chinese international students negotiate between multiple names to deal with ethnic distinctions. While ethnic names can signal distance from other ethnic communities, they also distinguish individuals from others. For these students, names are multi-layered and temporal: their name choices evolve throughout school lives, shaped by power relations in American cultural contexts and channeled by images of their home country. Second, multiple names allow these students to practice situated performance, incorporating the reflective self, the distinctive self, and the imagined self. We address “cross-cultural naming” that accounts for identity in transnational social spaces.

Current research on artistic groups suggests the career benefits of being place-based. This article examines the Chicago Imagists—a group defined by local recognition in Chicago and limited national renown—to explain the limits of these benefits when actors’ interests within a local scene diverge. Studying critical discourse on the Imagists from the 1960s to 1980s, we explain how “critical circles,” tied to the interests of regional evaluators, mediate artistic reputations. During initial group formation, Chicago artists and critics shared the goal of developing a distinct local art. However, critics’ investment in defining the boundaries of a “Chicago” style to further their careers ultimately diverged from Imagists’ investment in mastering a broader “American” style to further theirs. Chicago critics’ ensuing debates about the parochial limits of the label—and New York critics’ framing of Imagist work as provincial—further came to organize the very regionalism Imagist artists hoped to evade. We argue that attending to the divergent interests in the cultural field within which collaborative circles operate expands understanding of how affordances of place shape artistic careers. This study has further implications for theorizing the interplay of impression management and strong program perspectives on cultural wealth.

Micro-sociological theory has traditionally stressed interactional pressures towards alignment: actors’ attempts to co-construct a shared definition of the situation. We argue that this model provides an insufficient account of the coordination of action and of the emergence of intersubjectivity among actors. To complement the focus on alignment, we develop a theory of disruption—a perceived misalignment of the dramaturgical structure of interaction in coordinating expected lines of action. We develop a theory of the interaction order that takes the interplay between interactional alignment and disruption as a foundational challenge both for sociology and for actors in their everyday lives. We focus on the practical ways in which actors negotiate both interactional breaches and wider relational ruptures, and how they differentiate between disruptions-of relations and disruptions-for them. By doing so, we connect the interaction order to a wider relational order, providing a bridge between micro-level interactionism and the sociology of culture.