Berkeley Sociology hosts talk on 2024 Election and MAGA Movement

Berkeley Sociology and the College of Letters and Science will host an inaugural lecture on the 2024 Election in remembrance and celebration of the late Sociology Emeritus Professor Neil J. Smelser. The event, open to the public, will feature Sociology Professor Emerita Arlie Hochschild, a distinguished member of Berkeley Sociology, friend and colleague of Professor Smelser. In this talk, Hochschild will pay tribute to Smelser by drawing on his extraordinary cornucopia of ideas to help understand the forces at work in the 2024 election. How has the MAGA movement come to dominate the Republican Party (Smelser’s Collective Behavior), ally with the far right (Smelser’s The Faces of Terrorism) and win support from rural, white, blue-collar red-state Americans (The Social Edges of Psychoanalysis.)

Professor Smelser, who died in 2017, was a distinguished sociologist. Educated at Harvard and Oxford, he came to Berkeley in 1958 and retired in 1994. During that time he held the prestigious position of University Professor. He was the author of many classic treatments in comparative history, collective behavior, economic sociology, higher education and psychoanalysis. Professor Smelser understood the importance of supporting our graduate students and enabling the next generation.  Please consider supporting Sociology's Graduate Student fund, established by and named for Professor Smelser.

Neil Smelser and the 2024 Election
Thursday, November 9, 2023, 5-7 p.m.
Social Science Matrix, 8th floor Social Sciences Building, UC Berkeley

About Arlie Russell Hochschild 

Arlie Russell Hochchild is an American sociologist and academic. She is a professor emerita of sociology at the UC Berkeley. Hochschild has long focused on the human emotions which underlie moral beliefs, practices, and social life generally. She is the author of nine books including, most recently Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, a finalist for the National Book Award, and The Second Shift, The Managed Heart, and The Time Bind. In the tradition of C. Wright Mills, Hochschild continually tries to draw links between private troubles and social issues.