Nina Eliasoph
Biographic Data
| ID | 3596816 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Nina Eliasoph |
| GIVEN NAMES | Nina |
| FAMILY NAME | Eliasoph |
| SIGNATURE | ELIASOPH N |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Southern California |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 39 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 790 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 39 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1988 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
Working Class Experiences of Social Inequalities in (Post-) Industrial Landscapes: Feelings of Class
Paradoxes Within the Management of Volunteers
While scholars of management have extensively discussed paradoxes, scholars of volunteer management have given them little systematic attention. This special issue brings together the field of paradox studies with the research field of volunteer management. While many studies highlight paradoxes between different “missions” and mandates within volunteer-involving organizations, this introduction suggests using a “dramaturgical” approach that high…
Extended Case Method
The extended case method (ECM) is a broad approach to ethnographic research. Like all ethnographic methods, the ECM examines people in the course of “real‐life” action, in their own times and places, rather than in interviews or laboratories. Like other ethnography, the ECM emphasizes understanding people's own interpretations, as helping to constitute our shared reality. The ECM adds an emphasis on comparisons (between, for example, different ac…
Bringing the Civic Landscape into Being: How Varied Patterns of Civic Action Respond to and Create Dilemmas in Empowerment Projects
Doing Comparative Ethnography in Vastly Different National Conditions: The Case of Local Grassroot Activism in Russia and the United States
Recognition of Rural Pride and Poverty: Better Late than Never
Since the election, journalists have become like new Columbuses, proudly claiming to have discovered a part of America that the natives already knew was there—the White, often impoverished, rural p
The mantra of empowerment talk: An essay
Projects around the world use the ‘mantra of empowerment talk’, calling for engagement that is civic, appreciative of local diversity, transformative, sustainably self-reliant, helpful for alleviating suffering, and transparent. These noble missions clash in everyday practice, so organizations that share the mantra also share predictable dilemmas. By gathering together studies of projects that share the mantra, and observing their typical efforts…
Spirals of Perpetual Potential: How Empowerment Projects’ Noble Missions Tangle in Everyday Interaction
Democratizing Inequalities: Dilemmas of the New Public Participation
Opportunities to “have your say,” “get involved,” and “join the conversation” are everywhere in public life. From crowdsourcing and town hall meetings to government experiments with social media, participatory politics increasingly seem like a revolutionary antidote to the decline of civic engagement and the thinning of the contemporary public sphere. Many argue that, with new technologies, flexible organizational cultures, and a supportive polic…
Culture, Society, and Democracy: The Interpretive Approach
Making things political
The Handbook of Cultural Sociology provides a comprehensive overview of contemporary scholarship in sociology and related disciplines focused on the complex relations of culture to social structures and everyday life. With sixty-five essays written by scholars from around the world, the book draws diverse approaches to cultural sociology into a dialogue that charts new pathways for research on culture in a global era. Contributing scholars addres…
Direct Action, Deliberation, and Diffusion: Collective Action after the WTO Protests in Seattle
Measuring the Grassroots: Puzzles of Cultivating the Grassroots from the Top Down
Does a participatory, open-ended organizational format inspire creativity and draw on participants' local knowledge? Many nonprofits operate under this assumption, and many of their financial sponsors agree, and therefore demand precise accounts documenting the nonprofits' "participatory" formats. In the U.S. youth civic engagement projects described here, the practice of accounting itself had an effect, regardless of funders' goals. Volunteers d…
Civic Action
Commonly, researchers have looked for civic life in a distinct sector in which they assume that voluntary associations will cultivate special skills and virtues. Gathering together many challenges to this approach, and using ethnographic cases of housing advocacy and youth civic engagement projects, the authors reconceptualize “the civic” as civic action and show how patterned scene styles shape it. Doing so reveals patterns of action in complex …
The Politics of Volunteering
Introduction: What Are Civic Associations? Chapter 1: Why Do Theorists Say Associations Are Crucial for Democracy? Chapter 2: Volunteering and Political Activism Chapter 3: Civic Association, the Market and Government: How Do Different Societies Balance Them Differently? Chapter 4: Neoliberalism and Grassroots Organizations Chapter 5: What Happens to Civic Participation in Conditions of Vast Social Inequality? Chapter 6: Opening Up Civic Particip…
Coordinating Futures: Toward a Theory of Anticipation
This article presents a theoretical approach for studying the coordination of futures. Building off theories of temporality and action, the authors map three different modes of future making—protentions, trajectories, and temporal landscapes—that actors need to coordinate in order to make sense of action together. Using a wide range of empirical evidence, they then show that these modes of future-coordination are autonomous from each other, so th…
Civil Society and Civility
Ethnographies de la participation
Dans le contexte d’un renouveau de l’ethnographie du politique, le passage en revue d’enquêtes ethnographiques sur des terrains ayant trait à la participation permet de baliser un domaine de recherches en développement. L’enjeu de ce numéro n’est pas seulement méthodologique. Les ethnographies de la participation interrogent les frontières mêmes de leur objet. Elles invitent à explorer, au-delà des dispositifs identifiés comme participatifs, les …
Making Volunteers: Civic Life after Welfare's End
Volunteering improves inner character, builds community, cures poverty, and prevents crime. We have all heard this kind of empowerment talk from nonprofit and government-sponsored civic programs. But what do these programs really accomplish? This book offers an in-depth, humorous, wrenching, and at times uplifting look inside youth and adult civic programs. The book reveals an urgent need for policy reforms in order to improve these organizations…
Making Volunteers: Civic Life after Welfare's End
Civic Life Online: Learning How Digital Media Can Engage Youth
The relationship of participation in online communities to civic and political engagement.Young people today have grown up living substantial portions of their lives online, seeking entertainment, social relationships, and a place to express themselves. It is clear that participation in online communities is important for many young people, but less clear how this translates into civic or political engagement. This volume examines the relationshi…
Top-Down Civic Projects Are Not Grassroots Associations: How The Differences Matter in Everyday Life
Research on civic associations blurs an important distinction between the unfunded, informal, ongoing associations that theorists like de Tocqueville described versus current participatory democracy projects that are funded by the state and large nongovernmental organizations, are open to all, and are usually short-term. Based on a long-term ethnography of youth programs in the United States, this paper shows that entities like these, which parti…
New Jersey Dreaming: Capital, Culture, and the Class of '58
Theorizing from the Neck Down: Why Social Research Must Understand Bodies Acting in Real Space and Time (and Why It's So Hard To Spell Out What We Learn from This)
Can We Theorize the Press Without Theorizing the Public?
(2004). Can We Theorize the Press Without Theorizing the Public? Political Communication: Vol. 21, No. 3, pp. 297-303.
Culture in Interaction
How does culture work in everyday settings? Current social research often theorizes culture as “collective representations”—vocabularies, symbols, or codes—that structure people’s abilities to think and act. Missing is an account of how groups use collective representations in everyday interaction. The authors use two ethnographic cases to develop a concept of “group style,” showing how implicit, culturally patterned styles of membership filter c…
Coordinating Futures: Toward a Theory of Anticipation
This article presents a theoretical approach for studying the coordination of futures. Building off theories of temporality and action, the authors map three different modes of future making—protentions, trajectories, and temporal landscapes—that actors need to coordinate in order to make sense of action together. Using a wide range of empirical evidence, they then show that these modes of future-coordination are autonomous from each other, so th…
Everyday Racism' in a Culture of Political Avoidance: Civil Society, Speech, and Taboo
This ethnographic study brings together theories of civil society and race scholarship, to ask how people talk about race in conversations that are not exclusively devoted to talking about race. In theory, civic participation in voluntary associations expands citizens' horizons; but in practice, thoughtful conversation about race can be impossible in public. In showing this process, the two U.S. civic groups studied here become springboards for r…
Routines and the making of oppositional news
This participant observation study takes a critical look at the idea of “news routines.” By looking at a politically oppositional news room, it is possible to sort through the elements of production to discover just which ones make this radio station's news “oppositional.” Some scholars say that news routines, like the need to show balance or to report events instead of long‐term trends, make it difficult to say anything deeply critical of the st…
Civic Action
Commonly, researchers have looked for civic life in a distinct sector in which they assume that voluntary associations will cultivate special skills and virtues. Gathering together many challenges to this approach, and using ethnographic cases of housing advocacy and youth civic engagement projects, the authors reconceptualize “the civic” as civic action and show how patterned scene styles shape it. Doing so reveals patterns of action in complex …
Making a Fragile Public: A Talk-Centered Study of Citizenship and Power
Understanding how citizens create contexts for open-ended political conversation in everyday life is an important task for social research. The lack of theoretical attention to political conversation in the current renaissance of studies of civil society and the public sphere precludes a thoroughly social understanding of civic life. Participant-observation in U.S. recreational, volunteer, and activist groups shows how the very act of speaking it…
Making Volunteers: Civic Life after Welfare's End
Ethnographies de la participation
Dans le contexte d’un renouveau de l’ethnographie du politique, le passage en revue d’enquêtes ethnographiques sur des terrains ayant trait à la participation permet de baliser un domaine de recherches en développement. L’enjeu de ce numéro n’est pas seulement méthodologique. Les ethnographies de la participation interrogent les frontières mêmes de leur objet. Elles invitent à explorer, au-delà des dispositifs identifiés comme participatifs, les …
Top-Down Civic Projects Are Not Grassroots Associations: How The Differences Matter in Everyday Life
Research on civic associations blurs an important distinction between the unfunded, informal, ongoing associations that theorists like de Tocqueville described versus current participatory democracy projects that are funded by the state and large nongovernmental organizations, are open to all, and are usually short-term. Based on a long-term ethnography of youth programs in the United States, this paper shows that entities like these, which parti…
Close to home: The work of avoiding politics
Political culture and the presentation of a political self: A study of the public sphere in the spirit of Erving Goffman
The mantra of empowerment talk: An essay
Projects around the world use the ‘mantra of empowerment talk’, calling for engagement that is civic, appreciative of local diversity, transformative, sustainably self-reliant, helpful for alleviating suffering, and transparent. These noble missions clash in everyday practice, so organizations that share the mantra also share predictable dilemmas. By gathering together studies of projects that share the mantra, and observing their typical efforts…
Theorizing from the Neck Down: Why Social Research Must Understand Bodies Acting in Real Space and Time (and Why It's So Hard To Spell Out What We Learn from This)
Doing Comparative Ethnography in Vastly Different National Conditions: The Case of Local Grassroot Activism in Russia and the United States
The Necessity of Politics: Reclaiming American Public Life
Book reviewed in this article: The Necessity of Politics: Reclaiming American Public Life by Christopher Beem. For Common Things: Irony, Trust, and Commitment in America Today by Jedediah Purdy
Direct Action, Deliberation, and Diffusion: Collective Action after the WTO Protests in Seattle
Voice and Equality: Civic Voluntarism in American Politics
Bringing the Civic Landscape into Being: How Varied Patterns of Civic Action Respond to and Create Dilemmas in Empowerment Projects
New Jersey Dreaming: Capital, Culture, and the Class of '58
Recognition of Rural Pride and Poverty: Better Late than Never
Since the election, journalists have become like new Columbuses, proudly claiming to have discovered a part of America that the natives already knew was there—the White, often impoverished, rural p
Routines and the making of oppositional news
This participant observation study takes a critical look at the idea of “news routines.” By looking at a politically oppositional news room, it is possible to sort through the elements of production to discover just which ones make this radio station's news “oppositional.” Some scholars say that news routines, like the need to show balance or to report events instead of long‐term trends, make it difficult to say anything deeply critical of the st…
Political culture and the presentation of a political self: A study of the public sphere in the spirit of Erving Goffman
Voice and Equality: Civic Voluntarism in American Politics
Making a Fragile Public: A Talk-Centered Study of Citizenship and Power
Understanding how citizens create contexts for open-ended political conversation in everyday life is an important task for social research. The lack of theoretical attention to political conversation in the current renaissance of studies of civil society and the public sphere precludes a thoroughly social understanding of civic life. Participant-observation in U.S. recreational, volunteer, and activist groups shows how the very act of speaking it…
Close to home: The work of avoiding politics
Avoiding Politics: How Americans Produce Apathy in Everyday Life
Nina Eliasoph's vivid portrait of American civic life reveals an intriguing culture of political avoidance. Despite the importance for democracy of open-ended political conversation among ordinary citizens, many Americans try hard to avoid appearing to care about politics. To discover how, where and why Americans create this culture of avoidance, the author accompanied suburban volunteers, activists, and recreation club members for over two years…
Avoiding Politics: How Americans Produce Apathy in Everyday Life
‘We Begin with Our Favorite Theory …’: Reconstructing the Extended Case Method
Michael Burawoy's extended case method is a wonderful model for participant observation and for social research in general. It is not just a a cookbook for doing social research; it is also a social theory in its own right. As a theory in its own right, it deserves the kind of treatment that Burawoy suggests researchers should offer other theories: it deserves reconstruction in light of anomalous cases. How does one reconstruct a theory? begin wi…
Everyday Racism' in a Culture of Political Avoidance: Civil Society, Speech, and Taboo
This ethnographic study brings together theories of civil society and race scholarship, to ask how people talk about race in conversations that are not exclusively devoted to talking about race. In theory, civic participation in voluntary associations expands citizens' horizons; but in practice, thoughtful conversation about race can be impossible in public. In showing this process, the two U.S. civic groups studied here become springboards for r…
Immeasurable Pleasure and Meaningful Imperfection: Raising Good Citizens in a Bad State
Keywords: Caregiving Childraising Citizenship Moral Education Politics Of Care Social Service
Avoiding Politics: How Americans Produce Apathy in Everyday Life
The Necessity of Politics: Reclaiming American Public Life
Book reviewed in this article: The Necessity of Politics: Reclaiming American Public Life by Christopher Beem. For Common Things: Irony, Trust, and Commitment in America Today by Jedediah Purdy
Citoyens du quotidien
According to theorists of "daily life politics", citizens should focus their private concerns on general interest. But what are now, in the United-States, the places and the institutions that enhance this sort of broadening of individual point of view ? Generally speaking, NGO are supposed to provide all the goods likely to lead to a civic involvement. However empirical research makes it possible to grasp the mechanisms of evaporation of politics…
Culture in Interaction
How does culture work in everyday settings? Current social research often theorizes culture as “collective representations”—vocabularies, symbols, or codes—that structure people’s abilities to think and act. Missing is an account of how groups use collective representations in everyday interaction. The authors use two ethnographic cases to develop a concept of “group style,” showing how implicit, culturally patterned styles of membership filter c…
Can We Theorize the Press Without Theorizing the Public?
(2004). Can We Theorize the Press Without Theorizing the Public? Political Communication: Vol. 21, No. 3, pp. 297-303.
Theorizing from the Neck Down: Why Social Research Must Understand Bodies Acting in Real Space and Time (and Why It's So Hard To Spell Out What We Learn from This)
New Jersey Dreaming: Capital, Culture, and the Class of '58
Civic Life Online: Learning How Digital Media Can Engage Youth
The relationship of participation in online communities to civic and political engagement.Young people today have grown up living substantial portions of their lives online, seeking entertainment, social relationships, and a place to express themselves. It is clear that participation in online communities is important for many young people, but less clear how this translates into civic or political engagement. This volume examines the relationshi…
Top-Down Civic Projects Are Not Grassroots Associations: How The Differences Matter in Everyday Life
Research on civic associations blurs an important distinction between the unfunded, informal, ongoing associations that theorists like de Tocqueville described versus current participatory democracy projects that are funded by the state and large nongovernmental organizations, are open to all, and are usually short-term. Based on a long-term ethnography of youth programs in the United States, this paper shows that entities like these, which parti…
Making Volunteers: Civic Life after Welfare's End
Volunteering improves inner character, builds community, cures poverty, and prevents crime. We have all heard this kind of empowerment talk from nonprofit and government-sponsored civic programs. But what do these programs really accomplish? This book offers an in-depth, humorous, wrenching, and at times uplifting look inside youth and adult civic programs. The book reveals an urgent need for policy reforms in order to improve these organizations…
Making Volunteers: Civic Life after Welfare's End
Civil Society and Civility
Ethnographies de la participation
Dans le contexte d’un renouveau de l’ethnographie du politique, le passage en revue d’enquêtes ethnographiques sur des terrains ayant trait à la participation permet de baliser un domaine de recherches en développement. L’enjeu de ce numéro n’est pas seulement méthodologique. Les ethnographies de la participation interrogent les frontières mêmes de leur objet. Elles invitent à explorer, au-delà des dispositifs identifiés comme participatifs, les …
The Politics of Volunteering
Introduction: What Are Civic Associations? Chapter 1: Why Do Theorists Say Associations Are Crucial for Democracy? Chapter 2: Volunteering and Political Activism Chapter 3: Civic Association, the Market and Government: How Do Different Societies Balance Them Differently? Chapter 4: Neoliberalism and Grassroots Organizations Chapter 5: What Happens to Civic Participation in Conditions of Vast Social Inequality? Chapter 6: Opening Up Civic Particip…
Coordinating Futures: Toward a Theory of Anticipation
This article presents a theoretical approach for studying the coordination of futures. Building off theories of temporality and action, the authors map three different modes of future making—protentions, trajectories, and temporal landscapes—that actors need to coordinate in order to make sense of action together. Using a wide range of empirical evidence, they then show that these modes of future-coordination are autonomous from each other, so th…
Sociology (35 works) · Political science (30 works) · Law (21 works) · Politics (21 works) · Psychology (13 works) · Law (10 works) · Epistemology (9 works) · Public relations (9 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · Social Psychology (7 works)