This is a running list of recent publications from SKAT Section members from Fall 2024 to Summer 2025.

To submit an announcement for the Fall 2024 Newsletter, please use this Google Form: https://forms.gle/Jrd9Uodeg5KA3wvz6

To send an announcement out to the Listserv, please email: skatchairasa@gmail.com

Articles

Gil Eyal, Larry Au, and Cristian Capotescu 2024. “Trust is a Verb!: A Critical Reconstruction of the Sociological Theory of Trust”. Sociologica 18(2): 169-191. https://sociologica.unibo.it/article/view/19316 (Published with Commentaries from Elena Esposito and Guido Möllering, with a response)

Zhou, Di &  Zhang, Yinxian. Political biases and inconsistencies in bilingual GPT models—the cases of the U.S. and China. Sci Rep 14, 25048 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-76395-w

“Marginalized measures: The harmonization of diversity in precision medicine research,” by Jeske, Melanie, Aliya Saperstein, Sandra Soo-Jin Lee, and Janet K. Shim. 2024.  Social Studies of Science. 

Benjamin Shestakofsky. 2024. “The Labor of Assetization: Producing ‘Hypergrowth’ Inside a Tech Startup.” Socio-Economic Review. https://doi.org/10.1093/ser/mwae057

Benjamin Shestakofsky. 2024. “Cleaning Up Data Work: Negotiating Meaning, Morality, and Inequality in a Tech Startup.” Big Data & Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517241285372

Books

 Walled-In: Arctic Housing and a Sociology of Walls By Lisa-Jo K. van den Scott (Foreword by Patsy Kowtak Kuksuk). Lexington Books, 2024. 

Walls profoundly shape the spaces we live in and the places we move through, impinge on our everyday lives, and entangle power relations, identity, and hierarchies. Walled-In: Arctic Housing and a Sociology of Walls explores these effects in the context of Arviat, Nunavut. Van den Scott lays out the social processes inherent to their experience, arguing that walls, in addition to concealing colonial power relations, are boundary objects, cultural objects, and technological objects. Van den Scott’s ethnography of Arviammiut’s (people of Arviat’s) contemporary lived experience reveals the ways in which Arviammiut are living in a foreign space, how this impacts their experiences, and how they exercise agency in navigating and reinventing these spaces in resilient and heterogeneous ways.

Our colleague Georg Rilinger has just published Failure by Design: The California Energy Crisis and the Limits of Market Planning. It’s a fantastic case study of how organizational planning and social engineering meant to inspire the right kind of market behaviors have instead combined to create energy markets that are doomed to failure. With brilliant “blurbs” from Diane Vaughan, Marion Fourcade, and others, this is a must-read for those of us working on infrastructures, markets, platforms, socioeconomics, and environment. Pick up your copy (open access also available!) at: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/F/bo219240583.html

Indications of Democracy: The Politics and Promise of Evaluation Expertise in Mexico (SUP 2024)  by Diana Graizbord

Abstract: The spread of democracy across the Global South has taken many different forms, but certain features are consistent: implementing a system of elections and an overarching mission of serving the will and well-being of a country’s citizens. But how do we hold politicians accountable for such a mission? How are we to understand the efficacy of the policies they put forth? In Indicators of Democracy Diana Graizbord exposes the complex, often-hidden world of the institutions that are meant to ensure democratic accountability and transparency. Taking the case of Mexico’s National Council for the Evaluation of Social Development Policy (CONEVAL), Graizbord provides a deep theory of what happens when democratic aspirations intersect with technocratic ambitions. Analyzing what it takes to establish and sustain monitoring and evaluation as a form of official state expertise, Graizbord is able to put forward the contours of technodemocracy—a democratic political project that hinges on the power of experts to shape politics in unexpected but profound ways.

Receive 20% off at www.sup.org with code GRAIZBORD20

Special Collection

A Sociology of Artificial Intelligence: Inequalities, Power, and Data Justice

Special Collection, Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World

Kelly Joyce and Taylor M. Cruz. “Introduction: A Sociology of Artificial Intelligence”

Health and Medicine

Mira D. Vale. “Moral Entrepreneurship and the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence in Digital Psychiatry”

Shira Zilbersten. “Ethical Dilemmas and Collaborative Resolutions in Machine Learning Research for Health Care”

Vera Gallistl, Roger von Laufenberg, and Katrin Lehner. “Vulnerability Assemblages: Situating Vulnerability in the Political Economy of Artificial Intelligence”

Work and Labor

Zhuofan Li. “When Being a Data Annotator Was Not Yet a Job: The Laboratory Origins of Dispersible Labor in Computer Vision Research”

Eric Dahlin. “Who Says Artificial Intelligence is Stealing Our Jobs?”

Research Methods

Thomas Davidson. “Start Generating: Harnessing Generative Artificial Intelligence for Sociological Research”

Crystal Peoples, Paige Knudsen, and Melany Fuentes. “The Use of Facial Recognition in Sociological Research: A Comparison of ClarifAI and Kairos Classifications to Hand-Coded Images”

Tech and Identity

Kenneth Hanson and Hannah Bolthouse. “‘Replika Removing Erotic Role-Play Is Like Grand Theft Auto Removing Guns or Cars’: Reddit Discourse on Artificial Intelligence Chatbots and Sexual Technologies”

Policy Implications

Tina Law and Leslie McCall. “Artificial Intelligence Policymaking: An Agenda for Sociological Research”