Stephen Ostertag (Tulane University)

Rethinking Culture and Action: Meaning-Maintaining and the Causal Powers of Culture

Sociology’s approach to culture and action largely avoids questions of motive and causality. While a core theme of research decades ago, sociology’s focus on culture and action pivoted in response to structural functionalism, and victim-blaming interpretations of the culture of poverty framework. Two trajectories emerged. One reframed the question of culture and action into culture in action, and directed attention towards the cultural skills, capacities, and tools involved in action. A second shifted focus to talk of action, the vocabularies, justifications, and accounts we use to explain action. Despite these shifts, openings to explore culture and causality remained, acknowledged during unsettled social conditions and as snippets across sociological subfields (e.g., social movements, deviance). Recent work on cognition and emotions provides a way of returning to questions of culture and causality by introducing new theoretical tools and ways of thinking while avoiding the problems of victim-blaming. I wish to use this workshop to discuss a theory of culture and action I call “cultural work,” where shared meaning systems and emotional energies motivate and guide collective action. I use the unsettled times that followed a massive natural disaster and the months and years of settling that followed to investigate cultural work, and how sociologists might use it to explain collective motivated action across domains in both unsettled times, and in the cracks and crevices between social institutions and structures.

Connecting After Chaos: Social Media and the Extended Aftermath of Disaster