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Boundaries of Knowledge Production: The Transformation of Disciplinary Sociology in the United States 1968-2023

The next seminar session will be presented by Nina Teresa Kiderlin, an invited postdoctoral researcher at the médialab. She will examine knowledge construction in disciplinary sociology since 1968.

Event, Research Seminar

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Salle K.011, 1 place Saint Thomas d'Aquin 75007 Paris

Abstract

This project analyses changes in disciplinary sociology in the United States (US) through its engagement with critical reflexivity in the process of knowledge production. We trace how 1968 provided the initial momentum for US sociologists to rethink their approach to contextual concerns and historical conditions that could contribute to the creation of sociological knowledge. We argue that this historically critical moment inaugurated a new phase in disciplinary sociology, one that further drew a boundary between scholars whose analyses are politically driven and those who believe a neutral position is necessary when producing knowledge.

We begin our analysis by focusing on the 1960s and 1970s, the two decades during which changes in the modes of reflexivity in the US directly informed institutional conflicts within the discipline. We focus on the discipline’s professional association, the American Sociological Association (ASA), given its pivotal role in determining the research and professional conduct of sociologists. First, we conduct an archival analysis of historical records associated with the ASA since the mid-20th century, including issues of The American Sociologist, Footnotes, and ASA presidential addresses. Through this archival analysis, we capture how the rise of political disagreements among ASA members in those decades led to the application of boundary work as a strategy to allow the coexistence of a multiplicity of reflexivities.

The second part of this paper examines the ways young scholars have engaged with section-focused expertise since the mid-20th century. Inspired by the analysis of boundary objects, which evaluates collective transformation through mutual ground among disparate experts, we rely on ASA section graduate student paper awards to analyse changes in disciplinary sociology's section-based boundaries. We built a novel person-year dataset of 1’975 award winners, collected a corpus of the published award-winning articles and book abstracts, conducted structural topic modelling, prevalence of topics across years and sections as well as network analysis of the topics to understand how paper topics shifted over time and to observe the restructuring of ASA and the discipline at large in relation to shifts in paper topics. Our approach follows advances in computational grounded theory, allowing us to capture trends in sociological knowledge production through labels against the inertia of the section system. This renders visible the disciplinary transformation as a result of changing reflexivity.

Biography

Nina Teresa Kiderlin is a SNSF postdoctoral research at the médialab. Her postdoc project explores how in an era of digital finance and rapid digitalisation of financial services, regulation is a site of social interaction across multiple stakeholders that transcend institutional boundaries and challenge categories of neoliberal epistemology of what is defined as public and private, innovation and regulation. It focuses on regulatory sandboxes as key sites of socio-legal developments in regulating the digital transformation. She holds a PhD in Sociology from the Geneva Graduate Institute, Switzerland. Her research relies on mixed methods focusing on computational sociology to explore how the political economy of technology and finance is regulated at the transnational level.

Practical informations

This seminar will be held in person and in English, on Tuesday, May 5, 2026, from 2:00 PM to 3:30 PM, in Room K.011, 1 Place Saint-Thomas d'Aquin, 75007 Paris.

Registration is mandatory via this link.