Dear RSF:

Please join us Wednesday 5/22 in the library at 11:00 for a presentation by Francesca Polletta entitled “The Trouble with Stories.”

Polletta has been a Professor of Sociology and Graduate Director at the University of California-Irvine since 2008.  Prior to 2008, she was Assistant and then Associate Professor of Sociology at Columbia University. She works in the areas of culture, politics, social movements, and law. Much of her work investigates how culture sets the terms of strategic action, but culture understood less as beliefs and worldviews than as familiar relationships, institutional routines, and conventions of self-expression. Her Freedom Is an Endless Meeting: Democracy in American Social Movements (2002) won the 2003 American Sociological Association Award for Distinguished Scholarly Book.  In this monograph, Polletta showed that activists over the course of a century have styled their radical democracies variously on friendship, religious fellowship, and tutelage—and fractured along the lines of those relationships.

It Was Like a Fever: Storytelling in Protest and Politics (2006), won ASA Distinguished Scholarly Book Awards in 2007 and 2008. In that book, Polletta investigated the political advantages and risks of telling stories, especially for disadvantaged groups. Popular conventions of storytelling have served to reproduce the status quo, she argues, less by limiting what disadvantaged groups can imagine than by limiting the occasions on which they can tell authoritative stories. Polletta currently is working on three projects. She is completing a book, Inventing the Ties that Bind Us: Imagined Relationships in Moral and Political Life, for the University of Chicago Press. With Edwin Amenta, she is working on a second book on the cultural consequences of social movements. And she is continuing her research on storytelling through a series of experiments on the conditions for narrative persuasion.

Polletta holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from Yale University and a B.A. in the Sociology of Law from Brown University.