Beyond the Case
The Logics and Practices of Comparative Ethnography
Edited by Corey M. Abramson and Neil Gong
Author Information
Edited by Corey M. Abramson, Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Arizona, and Edited by Neil Gong, National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow, Department of Sociology, UCLA
Corey M. Abramson is Associate Professor of Sociology at University of Arizona. His research uses a combination of quantitative, qualitative and hybrid methods to understand how persistent social inequalities structure everyday life and are reproduced over time. His recent comparative ethnography on this topic is The End Game: How Inequality Shapes Our Final Years. The End Game has been awarded the 2016 Outstanding Publication Award by the American Sociological Association Section (ASA) on Aging and the Life Course, selected for an Author Meets Critic Session at ASA, and featured in national media outlets including The New York Times and The Atlantic. Abramsons current methodological works, including recent pieces in Sociological Methodology and Ethnography, focus on integrating computational techniques to improve the scalability, replicability, and transparency of large multi-site ethnographic projects conducted in accordance with realist principles.
Neil Gong is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, San Diego, and currently a Junior Fellow at the University of Michigan Society of Fellows. His research uses diverse empirical cases to study power and social control in modernity, with a specific focus on understanding liberal social order. Neils forthcoming book project Mind and Matter: Madness and Inequality in Los Angeles is a comparative ethnography of public safety net and elite private psychiatric services in community settings. He has previously researched a no-rules libertarian fight club, and will next study the construction of free speech in everyday life. His articles have appeared in Social Problems, Theory and Society, and Ethnography.
Contributors:
Alissa Bernstein is a medical anthropologist and research fellow at the Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) and a Senior Atlantic Fellow at the Global Brain Health Institute. Her research focuses on improving access to social services for caregivers of people with dementia, and on building and implementing tools to assist primary care providers in the assessment and management of dementia in the primary care setting. She is a qualitative researcher on a number of studies through the UCSF Memory and Aging Center and the Global Brain Health Institute.
Lynn S. Chancer is Professor of Sociology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is the author and co-editor of seven books, including Sadomasochism in Everyday Life: Dynamics of Power and Powerlessness (1992); Reconcilable Differences: Confronting Beauty, Pornography and the Future of Feminism (1998); High Profile Crimes: When Legal Cases Become Social Causes (2005); The Unhappy Divorce of Sociology and Psychoanalysis (2014, co-edited with John Andrews); and, most recently Youth, Jobs and the Future: Problems and Prospects (2018, co-edited with Martin Sanchez-Jankowski and Christine Trost, Oxford) and After the Rise and Stall of American Feminism: Taking Back A Revolution (2019). She is also the author of articles on varied subjects from criminology, gender, sex and sex work through social and feminist theory.
Aaron V. Cicourel is Professor Emeritus of Sociology, Cognitive Science, and Pediatrics at the University of California, San Diego. Cicourel has been a practicing ethnographer for over 6 decades, and he was a central figure in the emergence and international development of both ethnomethodology and cognitive sociology. He has written myriad papers and books on diverse topics such as sociolinguistics, medical communication, decision-making, juvenile justice, and child socialization. In addition to his empirical works, Cicourel has produced important methodological works, including his now classic book Method and Measurement in Sociology. Cicourel has won various international awards and honorary doctorates and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1992.
Claire Laurier Decoteau is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her research focuses on the social construction of health and disease, the politics of knowledge production, and peoples' grounded experiences with healing and health care systems. Her first book, Ancestors and Antiretrovirals: The Biopolitics of HIV/AIDS in Post-Apartheid South Africa (2013) was awarded three honorable mentions for outstanding book awards from ASA sections: Medical Sociology; Science, Knowledge and Technology; and the Theory Section. Decoteau has articles published in journals such as Sociological Theory, Political Power and Social Theory, European Journal of Social Theory, BioSocieties, Social Science & Medicine, and Social Studies of Science. Decoteau is currently writing her second book, The "Western Disease": Epistemic Contestations over Autism in the Somali Diaspora, which is under contract with the University of Chicago Press.
Thomas DeGloma is Associate Professor of Sociology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY. His research interests fall within the intersecting areas of cultural sociology and symbolic interaction, and include explorations of cognition, memory, time, knowledge, autobiography, identity, and trauma. Professor DeGloma's book, Seeing the Light: The Social Logic of Personal Discovery (2014), explores the stories people tell about life-changing discoveries of "truth" and illuminates the ways that individuals and communities use autobiographical stories to weigh in on salient moral and political controversies. This book received the 2015 Charles Horton Cooley Book Award from the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction. Professor DeGloma has also published articles in Social Psychology Quarterly, Symbolic Interaction, Sociological Forum, and the American Journal of Cultural Sociology, along with several chapters in various edited volumes. He is currently working on his second book, which explores the phenomenon of anonymity and the impact of anonymous actors in various social situations and interactions. He recently served as President of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction (2017-2018) and Secretary of the Eastern Sociological Society (2016-2019).
Daniel Dohan is Professor of Health Policy and Social Medicine at UCSF where he works on understanding and enhancing the culture of medicine. Current projects examine research participation, novel neurotechnologies, and provision of surgery to frail older adults. He teaches medical students and post-doctoral trainees and co-leads the UCSF/UC Hastings MS degree program in Health Policy and Law.
Ching Kwan Lee is Professor of Sociology at UCLA. Her research interests include labor, political sociology, globalization, development, China, Hong Kong, global south and comparative ethnography. She is the author of three award-winning monographs on China's turn to capitalism through the lens of labor: Gender and the South China Miracle: Two Worlds of Factory Women (1998), Against the Law: Labor Protests in China's Rustbelt and Sunbelt (2007), and The Specter of Global China: Politics, Labor and Foreign Investment in Africa (2017). Her articles have appeared in the American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, Theory and Society, New Left Review, The China Quarterly, and The Journal of Asian Studies. Her most recent co-edited volumes include The Social Question in the 21st Century: a Global View (2019) and Take Back Our Future: an Eventful Political Sociology of the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement (2019).
Max Papadantonakis is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the City University of New York, the Graduate Center and Graduate Teaching Fellow at Queens College where he teaches Classical and Contemporary Sociological Theory. His interests are in the areas of Social Theory, Culture, Sociology of Work, and Ethnography. Recently he published a chapter (with Sharon Zukin) in Precarious Work, an edited volume of the series "Research in the Sociology of Work." Max recently carried out an ethnography in seven hackathons in New York City and looked at the different ways workers' consent is manufactured in the "new" economy. His dissertation research focuses on the social formation of the tech workforce in New York City with emphasis on the cultural differences between engineers and entrepreneurs.
Martín Sánchez-Jankowski is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues at the University of California, Berkeley. His research has focused on the sociology of poverty and violence. He has conducted long-term participant-observation field research for 42 years. He has published a number of books and research papers, among them are the books Islands in the Street: Gangs and American Urban Society; Cracks in the Pavement: Social Change and Resilience in Poor Neighborhoods; and Burning Dislike: Ethnic Violence in High Schools. His current field research focuses on the poverty conditions of rural indigenous people in the U.S., Fiji, and India.
Iddo Tavory is Associate Professor of sociology at NYU. A sociologist of culture and an ethnographer, he is broadly interested in the interactional patterns through which people come to construct and understand their lives across situations. His book Abductive Analysis (with Stefan Timmermans) provides a pragmatist account that allows researchers to make the most of the surprises that emerge in the process of research. His second book, Summoned, is an ethnography of a Jewish neighborhood in Los Angeles as well as a treatise on the co-constitution of interaction, identity and social worlds. He is currently working on an ethnography of an advertising agency in New York, and co-authoring a book on pro bono work and notions of worth in the advertising world. Among other awards, Iddo has received the Lewis A. Coser Award for theoretical agenda setting in sociology.
Stefan Timmermans is Professor of Sociology at UCLA. His research interests include medical sociology and science studies. He has conducted research on medical technologies, health professions, death and dying, and population health. He is the author, most recently, of Postmortem: How Medical Examiners Explain Suspicious Deaths (2006), Saving Babies? The Consequences of Newborn Genetic Screening (2013, with Mara Buchbinder) and Abductive Analysis: Theorizing Qualitative Research (2014, with Iddo Tavory). He is also senior editor of medical sociology for the journal Social Science and Medicine.
