Colin Jerolmack
Biographic Data
| ID | 76551 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Colin Jerolmack |
| GIVEN NAMES | Colin |
| FAMILY NAME | Jerolmack |
| SIGNATURE | JEROLMACK C |
| AFFILIATIONS | New York University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5998-1083 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 33 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 907 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 33 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
The Goffman Nobody Knows
Erving Manuel Goffman: Biographical Sources of Sociological Imagination By Dmitri N. Shalin (Routledge, 2024). It is about time a comprehensive biography of Erving Goffman was written. Perhaps the most canonical American sociologist, Goffman's appeal certainly endures more than his most famous contemporaries—David Riesman, Lewis Coser, Robert Merton—even though he died well before them. Dmitri Shalin calculates that Goffman is the most cited Nort…
Dashed dreams: Climate change comes for the middle class
The Interactional Zoo: Lessons for Sociology from Erving Goffman's Engagement with Animal Ethology
Erving Goffman is one of sociology's most influential thinkers. Scholars debate the extent to which he worked in competing theoretical traditions (e.g., interactionist or structuralist), yet few acknowledge his intellectual indebtedness to animal ethology. This article traces how naturalistic studies of paralinguistic animal communication influenced Goffman's corpus and specifies the ideas he built on from that field, especially territoriality an…
Frame Analysis and Animal Studies: Erving Goffman's Overlooked Thesis on Animal Metacommunication and Mind
Erving Goffman's concept of framing is one of his most enduring contributions to social science. Despite the canonical status of Frame Analysis (1974) in multiple fields, few acknowledge its intellectual engagement with animal studies. It was Gregory Bateson, in an analysis of animal play, who first posited the idea of frames as metacommunicative propositions that signal the meaning of behavior. In this paper, we show that Goffman did not just op…
What Good is Qualitative Literacy Without Data Transparency
Ethnographic and interview research have made significant contributions to cumulative social science and influenced the public conversation around important social issues. However, debates rage over whether the standards of positivistic social science can or should be used to judge the rigor of interpretive methods. I begin this essay by briefly delineating the problem of developing evaluative criteria for qualitative research. I then explore the…
Underwater: Loss, Flood Insurance, and the Moral Economy of Climate Change in the United States
Up to Heaven and down to Hell: Fracking, Freedom, and Community in an American Town
Ethnography, Data Transparency, and the Information Age
The conventions ethnographers follow to gather, write about, and store their data are increasingly out of sync with contemporary research expectations and social life. Despite technological advancements that allow ethnographers to observe their subjects digitally and record interactions, few follow subjects online and many still reconstruct quotes from memory. Amid calls for data transparency, ethnographers continue to conceal subjects' identitie…
The Ethical Dilemmas and Social Scientific Trade-offs of Masking in Ethnography
Masking, the practice of hiding or distorting identifying information about people, places, and organizations, is usually considered a requisite feature of ethnographic research and writing. This is justified both as an ethical obligation to one's subjects and as a scientifically neutral position (as readers are enjoined to treat a case's idiosyncrasies as sociologically insignificant). We question both justifications, highlighting potential ethi…
Please in My Backyard: Quiet Mobilization in Support of Fracking in an Appalachian Community
Environmental justice and social movements scholarship demonstrates how not-in-my-backyard activism by more privileged communities leaves the disadvantaged with “locally unwanted land uses.” Yet it overlooks instances of local support for risky industries. Our ethnographic case shows how a rural, white, mixed-income Pennsylvania community adopted a please-in-my-backyard stance toward shale gas extraction (fracking). Residents invited development …
The Analytic Lenses of Ethnography
It is almost axiomatic that there are two contrasting theoretical approaches to ethnography: induction and deduction. However, regardless of whether ethnographers build theory from observations (induction) or use observations to test theory (deduction), they approach the field armed with one or more particular analytic lens that leads them to focus on a distinct thread of the social fabric. We outline the suite of analytic lenses that typify ethn…
The Slaughterhouse: A Hall of Mirrors
American Zoo
Fracking Communities
This photo-essay examines how the leasing of private and public land for shale gas extraction ("fracking") in Pennsylvania has initiated a "tragedy of the commons" in historically communal locales, degrading common-pool resources and weakening long-standing norms of sovereignty and reciprocity
Molds and Totems: Nonhumans and the Constitution of the Social Self
The role of nonhumans in social life has recently generated significant scholarly interest. The two main paradigms for explaining the sociological significance of nonhumans are constructivism and actor-network theory. We propose a pragmatist synthesis inspired by George Herbert Mead, demonstrating how interactions with nonhumans help constitute the social self-that is, the identity one constructs by imaginatively looking upon oneself as others wo…
Toward an Understanding of the Relationship Between Accounts and Action
Talk Is Cheap: Ethnography and the Attitudinal Fallacy
This article examines the methodological implications of the fact that what people say is often a poor predictor of what they do. We argue that many interview and survey researchers routinely conflate self-reports with behavior and assume a consistency between attitudes and action. We call this erroneous inference of situated behavior from verbal accounts the attitudinal fallacy. Though interviewing and ethnography are often lumped together as 'q…
The Global Pigeon
"The pigeon is the quintessential city bird. Domesticated thousands of years ago as a messenger and a source of food, its presence on our sidewalks is so common that people consider the bird a nuisance--if they notice it at all. Yet pigeons are also kept for pleasure, sport, and profit by people all over the world, from the "pigeon wars" waged by breeding enthusiasts in the skies over Brooklyn to the Million Dollar Pigeon Race held every year in …
Saying Meritocracy and Doing Privilege
This article describes the relationship between saying and doing. It argues that focusing on the discrepancy between participants' accounts and their actions is one of the greatest analytical strengths of ethnography. We make this case by drawing upon an ethnography of an elite boarding school. We also reflect on the way that two ethnographers worked together to better understand the social significance of accounts that are incongruent with situa…
Who's worried about turkeys? How 'organisational silos' impede zoonotic disease surveillance
Though emerging infectious diseases ignore boundaries between species, the agencies that respond to them do not. Based on interviews with state and federal epidemiologists, veterinarians, and physicians and on case studies of disease events, this article examines how the jurisdictional and cultural divides that exist among human and animal health agencies hinder efforts to successfully contain species-jumping diseases (zoonoses). I argue that new…
Toward A Sociology of Nature
Although we often believe that nature stands apart from social life, our experience of nature is profoundly social. This paper unpacks this paradox in order to (1) explain sociology's neglect of the environment and (2) introduce the articles in this special issue on "the sociology of nature." I argue that sociology's disinterest in the biophysical world is a legacy of its classical concern with tracing society's "Great Transformation" from gemein…
Interview with Colin Jerolmack
Colin Jerolmack is an Assistant Professor at New York University in Sociology and Environmental Studies. He is the author of The Global Pigeon (forthcoming) and an alumnus of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholars in Health Policy Program at Harvard University
Meaning and Morality in Everyday Life: Beyond “The Social Construction of …”
Primary groups and cosmopolitan ties: The rooftop pigeon flyers of New York City
■ This article examines a group of working-class men who breed and fly pigeons from their rooftops in New York City. It explores how the flyers experience their neighborhoods through their animal practices and shows how ethnic whites transmitted this practice to non-whites. It also documents their gatherings at a pet shop, where the flyers campaign for status based on their birds' performance. These men form a distinct collective that is strongly…
Humans, Animals, and Play: Theorizing Interaction When Intersubjectivity is Problematic
Simmel (1949) argues that humans have an 'impulse' toward sociability, defined as noninstrumental, playful association that is enjoyed as an end in itself. While sociability as conceived of by Simmel necessitates a shared definition of the situation, recent studies problematize symbolic interactionist assumptions by documenting the ways humans engage in analogous sociable play with animals. Drawing from ethnomethodological and pragmatist perspect…
Talk Is Cheap: Ethnography and the Attitudinal Fallacy
This article examines the methodological implications of the fact that what people say is often a poor predictor of what they do. We argue that many interview and survey researchers routinely conflate self-reports with behavior and assume a consistency between attitudes and action. We call this erroneous inference of situated behavior from verbal accounts the attitudinal fallacy. Though interviewing and ethnography are often lumped together as 'q…
How Pigeons Became Rats: The Cultural-Spatial Logic of Problem Animals
How do animals become problems? Drawing on interactionist theories of social problems and cultural geography, I argue that the construction of animals as problems relies upon cultural understandings of nature/culture relationships, which in turn entail “imaginative geographies.” Specifically, modernity posits a firm boundary between nature and culture. Animals have their place, but are experienced as “out of place”—and often problematic—when they…
Ethnography, Data Transparency, and the Information Age
The conventions ethnographers follow to gather, write about, and store their data are increasingly out of sync with contemporary research expectations and social life. Despite technological advancements that allow ethnographers to observe their subjects digitally and record interactions, few follow subjects online and many still reconstruct quotes from memory. Amid calls for data transparency, ethnographers continue to conceal subjects' identitie…
Molds and Totems: Nonhumans and the Constitution of the Social Self
The role of nonhumans in social life has recently generated significant scholarly interest. The two main paradigms for explaining the sociological significance of nonhumans are constructivism and actor-network theory. We propose a pragmatist synthesis inspired by George Herbert Mead, demonstrating how interactions with nonhumans help constitute the social self-that is, the identity one constructs by imaginatively looking upon oneself as others wo…
The Ethical Dilemmas and Social Scientific Trade-offs of Masking in Ethnography
Masking, the practice of hiding or distorting identifying information about people, places, and organizations, is usually considered a requisite feature of ethnographic research and writing. This is justified both as an ethical obligation to one's subjects and as a scientifically neutral position (as readers are enjoined to treat a case's idiosyncrasies as sociologically insignificant). We question both justifications, highlighting potential ethi…
Humans, Animals, and Play: Theorizing Interaction When Intersubjectivity is Problematic
Simmel (1949) argues that humans have an 'impulse' toward sociability, defined as noninstrumental, playful association that is enjoyed as an end in itself. While sociability as conceived of by Simmel necessitates a shared definition of the situation, recent studies problematize symbolic interactionist assumptions by documenting the ways humans engage in analogous sociable play with animals. Drawing from ethnomethodological and pragmatist perspect…
Animal Practices, Ethnicity, and Community: The Turkish Pigeon Handlers of Berlin
Though largely overlooked by scholars of ethnicity and culture, animal practices can structure and reflect identity and social relations. Based on individual and group interviews and observations in Berlin, Germany, this study examines how a group of Turkish men experience and assign significance to the activity of caring for domestic pigeons. Building on approaches to ethnicity that follow the "cognitive turn," as well as recent studies of human…
Please in My Backyard: Quiet Mobilization in Support of Fracking in an Appalachian Community
Environmental justice and social movements scholarship demonstrates how not-in-my-backyard activism by more privileged communities leaves the disadvantaged with “locally unwanted land uses.” Yet it overlooks instances of local support for risky industries. Our ethnographic case shows how a rural, white, mixed-income Pennsylvania community adopted a please-in-my-backyard stance toward shale gas extraction (fracking). Residents invited development …
The Analytic Lenses of Ethnography
It is almost axiomatic that there are two contrasting theoretical approaches to ethnography: induction and deduction. However, regardless of whether ethnographers build theory from observations (induction) or use observations to test theory (deduction), they approach the field armed with one or more particular analytic lens that leads them to focus on a distinct thread of the social fabric. We outline the suite of analytic lenses that typify ethn…
Our Animals, Our Selves? Chipping Away the Human–Animal Divide
Toward an Understanding of the Relationship Between Accounts and Action
Fracking Communities
This photo-essay examines how the leasing of private and public land for shale gas extraction ("fracking") in Pennsylvania has initiated a "tragedy of the commons" in historically communal locales, degrading common-pool resources and weakening long-standing norms of sovereignty and reciprocity
Religion, Rationality, and Experience: A Response to the New Rational Choice Theory of Religion
This paper is a critical response to the newest version of the rational choice theory of religion (RCTR). In comparison with previous critiques, this paper takes aim at RCTR's foundational assumption of psychological egoism and argues that the thesis of psychological egoism is untenable. Without that thesis, the normative aspects of religious commitment cannot be reduced validly to instrumental reason. On neither conceptual nor empirical grounds …
Toward A Sociology of Nature
Although we often believe that nature stands apart from social life, our experience of nature is profoundly social. This paper unpacks this paradox in order to (1) explain sociology's neglect of the environment and (2) introduce the articles in this special issue on "the sociology of nature." I argue that sociology's disinterest in the biophysical world is a legacy of its classical concern with tracing society's "Great Transformation" from gemein…
Tracing the Profile of Animal Rights Supporters: A Preliminary Investigation
A question about the "moral rights" of nonhuman animals in the 1993 and 1994 General Social Survey (GSS) effected an understanding of some of the demographics of those supporting animal rights. This study checked results against related questions concerning attitudes toward animal testing and meat consumption. The stereotypical profile of an animal rights supporter is female, well educated, upper-middle class, middle-aged, and white. The data in …
Primary groups and cosmopolitan ties: The rooftop pigeon flyers of New York City
■ This article examines a group of working-class men who breed and fly pigeons from their rooftops in New York City. It explores how the flyers experience their neighborhoods through their animal practices and shows how ethnic whites transmitted this practice to non-whites. It also documents their gatherings at a pet shop, where the flyers campaign for status based on their birds' performance. These men form a distinct collective that is strongly…
Animal archeology: Domestic pigeons and the nature-culture dialectic
This paper historically traces the purposive domestication of pigeons in order to examine the dialectical relationship between nature and culture. It is demonstrated that each instance of the domestication of the pigeon for a new function (i.e., food, messenger) also entailed the construction of a role of the bird in human society, replete with symbolic representations and moral valuations. Yet it is also argued that, though animals are repositor…
The Interactional Zoo: Lessons for Sociology from Erving Goffman's Engagement with Animal Ethology
Erving Goffman is one of sociology's most influential thinkers. Scholars debate the extent to which he worked in competing theoretical traditions (e.g., interactionist or structuralist), yet few acknowledge his intellectual indebtedness to animal ethology. This article traces how naturalistic studies of paralinguistic animal communication influenced Goffman's corpus and specifies the ideas he built on from that field, especially territoriality an…
Frame Analysis and Animal Studies: Erving Goffman's Overlooked Thesis on Animal Metacommunication and Mind
Erving Goffman's concept of framing is one of his most enduring contributions to social science. Despite the canonical status of Frame Analysis (1974) in multiple fields, few acknowledge its intellectual engagement with animal studies. It was Gregory Bateson, in an analysis of animal play, who first posited the idea of frames as metacommunicative propositions that signal the meaning of behavior. In this paper, we show that Goffman did not just op…
Underwater: Loss, Flood Insurance, and the Moral Economy of Climate Change in the United States
Who's worried about turkeys? How 'organisational silos' impede zoonotic disease surveillance
Though emerging infectious diseases ignore boundaries between species, the agencies that respond to them do not. Based on interviews with state and federal epidemiologists, veterinarians, and physicians and on case studies of disease events, this article examines how the jurisdictional and cultural divides that exist among human and animal health agencies hinder efforts to successfully contain species-jumping diseases (zoonoses). I argue that new…
Meaning and Morality in Everyday Life: Beyond “The Social Construction of …”
Tracing the Profile of Animal Rights Supporters: A Preliminary Investigation
A question about the "moral rights" of nonhuman animals in the 1993 and 1994 General Social Survey (GSS) effected an understanding of some of the demographics of those supporting animal rights. This study checked results against related questions concerning attitudes toward animal testing and meat consumption. The stereotypical profile of an animal rights supporter is female, well educated, upper-middle class, middle-aged, and white. The data in …
Religion, Rationality, and Experience: A Response to the New Rational Choice Theory of Religion
This paper is a critical response to the newest version of the rational choice theory of religion (RCTR). In comparison with previous critiques, this paper takes aim at RCTR's foundational assumption of psychological egoism and argues that the thesis of psychological egoism is untenable. Without that thesis, the normative aspects of religious commitment cannot be reduced validly to instrumental reason. On neither conceptual nor empirical grounds …
Moral, Believing Animals: Human Personhood and Culture
Our Animals, Our Selves? Chipping Away the Human–Animal Divide
Animal archeology: Domestic pigeons and the nature-culture dialectic
This paper historically traces the purposive domestication of pigeons in order to examine the dialectical relationship between nature and culture. It is demonstrated that each instance of the domestication of the pigeon for a new function (i.e., food, messenger) also entailed the construction of a role of the bird in human society, replete with symbolic representations and moral valuations. Yet it is also argued that, though animals are repositor…
Animal Practices, Ethnicity, and Community: The Turkish Pigeon Handlers of Berlin
Though largely overlooked by scholars of ethnicity and culture, animal practices can structure and reflect identity and social relations. Based on individual and group interviews and observations in Berlin, Germany, this study examines how a group of Turkish men experience and assign significance to the activity of caring for domestic pigeons. Building on approaches to ethnicity that follow the "cognitive turn," as well as recent studies of human…
Turf Wars: Discourse, Diversity, and the Politics of Place - By Gabriella Gahlia Modan
How Pigeons Became Rats: The Cultural-Spatial Logic of Problem Animals
How do animals become problems? Drawing on interactionist theories of social problems and cultural geography, I argue that the construction of animals as problems relies upon cultural understandings of nature/culture relationships, which in turn entail “imaginative geographies.” Specifically, modernity posits a firm boundary between nature and culture. Animals have their place, but are experienced as “out of place”—and often problematic—when they…
Meaning and Morality in Everyday Life: Beyond “The Social Construction of …”
Primary groups and cosmopolitan ties: The rooftop pigeon flyers of New York City
■ This article examines a group of working-class men who breed and fly pigeons from their rooftops in New York City. It explores how the flyers experience their neighborhoods through their animal practices and shows how ethnic whites transmitted this practice to non-whites. It also documents their gatherings at a pet shop, where the flyers campaign for status based on their birds' performance. These men form a distinct collective that is strongly…
Humans, Animals, and Play: Theorizing Interaction When Intersubjectivity is Problematic
Simmel (1949) argues that humans have an 'impulse' toward sociability, defined as noninstrumental, playful association that is enjoyed as an end in itself. While sociability as conceived of by Simmel necessitates a shared definition of the situation, recent studies problematize symbolic interactionist assumptions by documenting the ways humans engage in analogous sociable play with animals. Drawing from ethnomethodological and pragmatist perspect…
Interview with Colin Jerolmack
Colin Jerolmack is an Assistant Professor at New York University in Sociology and Environmental Studies. He is the author of The Global Pigeon (forthcoming) and an alumnus of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholars in Health Policy Program at Harvard University
Toward A Sociology of Nature
Although we often believe that nature stands apart from social life, our experience of nature is profoundly social. This paper unpacks this paradox in order to (1) explain sociology's neglect of the environment and (2) introduce the articles in this special issue on "the sociology of nature." I argue that sociology's disinterest in the biophysical world is a legacy of its classical concern with tracing society's "Great Transformation" from gemein…
The Global Pigeon
"The pigeon is the quintessential city bird. Domesticated thousands of years ago as a messenger and a source of food, its presence on our sidewalks is so common that people consider the bird a nuisance--if they notice it at all. Yet pigeons are also kept for pleasure, sport, and profit by people all over the world, from the "pigeon wars" waged by breeding enthusiasts in the skies over Brooklyn to the Million Dollar Pigeon Race held every year in …
Saying Meritocracy and Doing Privilege
This article describes the relationship between saying and doing. It argues that focusing on the discrepancy between participants' accounts and their actions is one of the greatest analytical strengths of ethnography. We make this case by drawing upon an ethnography of an elite boarding school. We also reflect on the way that two ethnographers worked together to better understand the social significance of accounts that are incongruent with situa…
Who's worried about turkeys? How 'organisational silos' impede zoonotic disease surveillance
Though emerging infectious diseases ignore boundaries between species, the agencies that respond to them do not. Based on interviews with state and federal epidemiologists, veterinarians, and physicians and on case studies of disease events, this article examines how the jurisdictional and cultural divides that exist among human and animal health agencies hinder efforts to successfully contain species-jumping diseases (zoonoses). I argue that new…
Molds and Totems: Nonhumans and the Constitution of the Social Self
The role of nonhumans in social life has recently generated significant scholarly interest. The two main paradigms for explaining the sociological significance of nonhumans are constructivism and actor-network theory. We propose a pragmatist synthesis inspired by George Herbert Mead, demonstrating how interactions with nonhumans help constitute the social self-that is, the identity one constructs by imaginatively looking upon oneself as others wo…
Toward an Understanding of the Relationship Between Accounts and Action
Talk Is Cheap: Ethnography and the Attitudinal Fallacy
This article examines the methodological implications of the fact that what people say is often a poor predictor of what they do. We argue that many interview and survey researchers routinely conflate self-reports with behavior and assume a consistency between attitudes and action. We call this erroneous inference of situated behavior from verbal accounts the attitudinal fallacy. Though interviewing and ethnography are often lumped together as 'q…
The Slaughterhouse: A Hall of Mirrors
American Zoo
Fracking Communities
This photo-essay examines how the leasing of private and public land for shale gas extraction ("fracking") in Pennsylvania has initiated a "tragedy of the commons" in historically communal locales, degrading common-pool resources and weakening long-standing norms of sovereignty and reciprocity
The Analytic Lenses of Ethnography
It is almost axiomatic that there are two contrasting theoretical approaches to ethnography: induction and deduction. However, regardless of whether ethnographers build theory from observations (induction) or use observations to test theory (deduction), they approach the field armed with one or more particular analytic lens that leads them to focus on a distinct thread of the social fabric. We outline the suite of analytic lenses that typify ethn…
Please in My Backyard: Quiet Mobilization in Support of Fracking in an Appalachian Community
Environmental justice and social movements scholarship demonstrates how not-in-my-backyard activism by more privileged communities leaves the disadvantaged with “locally unwanted land uses.” Yet it overlooks instances of local support for risky industries. Our ethnographic case shows how a rural, white, mixed-income Pennsylvania community adopted a please-in-my-backyard stance toward shale gas extraction (fracking). Residents invited development …
The Ethical Dilemmas and Social Scientific Trade-offs of Masking in Ethnography
Masking, the practice of hiding or distorting identifying information about people, places, and organizations, is usually considered a requisite feature of ethnographic research and writing. This is justified both as an ethical obligation to one's subjects and as a scientifically neutral position (as readers are enjoined to treat a case's idiosyncrasies as sociologically insignificant). We question both justifications, highlighting potential ethi…
Sociology (25 works) · Epistemology (15 works) · Political science (13 works) · Psychology (13 works) · Social science (10 works) · Computer Science (9 works) · Geographies of human-animal interactions (9 works) · Social Psychology (9 works) · Law (8 works) · Law (6 works)