Sociology

In her latest book, Tacit Racism, co-written with University of Pittsburgh Associate Professor Waverly Duck and published by the University of Chicago Press, Professor Anne Rawls explores how racism is coded into the everyday social expectations of Americans. Rawls and Duck and argue that these interactions can produce racial inequality, whether the people involved are aware of it or not, and that by overlooking tacit racism in favor of the fiction of a “color-blind” nation, we are harming not only our society’s most disadvantaged — but endangering society itself.

This summer, Professor Dan Everett will make a return visit to SciFoo, an informal annual conference held at Google’s California headquarters. Pioneered by O’Reilly Media, a leading publisher in the field of information technology, the invitation-only event is often hailed as an “unconference” because it has no predefined agenda; instead, attendees — comprising more than 200 leading scientists, technologists, writers and other thought-leaders — collaboratively create one during the first evening.

In How Mediation Works:  Resolving Conflict Through Talk, Professor Angela Cora Garcia explores how mediation is used to resolve conflict. Published by Cambridge University Press, the book is the first to use conversation analysis to study how mediation works. In it, Garcia evaluates the various techniques mediators use to help disputants tell their stories, make and respond to complaints and accusations, and come up with ideas for resolving the dispute, and illustrates how these techniques impact the experience and responses of disputants.