Lecture "Gender as a Social Structure" by Barbara J. Risman (UIC)
April 25th at 12:30 in the Salón de Graus of the Faculty of Social Sciences (2nd floor)
Opening by Amparo Mañes Barbé, Director of the Equality Unit of the University of Valencia
Presents and moderates Capitolina Díaz Martínez, Professor of Sociology of the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology of the University of Valencia
Organize by:
Equality Unit
Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology
University of Valencia
April 25th at 12:30 in the Salón de Graus of the Faculty of Social Sciences (2nd floor)
Opening by Amparo Mañes Barbé, Director of the Equality Unit of the University of Valencia
Presents and moderates Capitolina Díaz Martínez, Professor of Sociology of the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology of the University of Valencia
Organize by:
Equality Unit
Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology
University of Valencia
Short bio:
Barbara J. Risman is a College of Liberal Arts & Sciences Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She was also a Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies at St. Mary’s College, Durham University in 2018. She is a former Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. Professor Risman’s work has focused on developing a complex theory of gender as a social structure. In her theory, gender is not an identity but it is rather a social structure that has consequences for the individual, for interactional expectations, for cultural logics and the organization of all social institutions. Professor Risman’s empirical work has always been in articulation with theory development. Her first book, Gender Vertigo (Yale, 1998) illustrated her theoretical argument with studies of gender relations within American families. She has published about gender and families in a variety of journals including Gender & Society, Journal of Marriage and the Family, Annual Review of Sociology, Sex Roles, American Sociological Review, Signs, and Journal of Family Theory.
In her newest book Where The Millennials Will Take us :A New Generation Wrestles with the Gender Structure? (Oxford University Press, 2018) Dr. Risman revises her theoretical framework to explicitly address how cultural meanings can be differentiated from the material dimension at each level of the gender structure. She then illustrates this with qualitative life history data from interviews with more than a hundred adults. Other recent work includes a second edition of her textbook, Families As They Really Are (Norton 2015 co-edited with Virginia Rutter), and research on college student’s sexual and romantic practices. Professor Risman is also a public intellectual whose editorials have appeared in the Chicago Tribune, on CNN.com, and the Huffington Post. She has been widely quoted in the press including in the Economist, LA Times, New York Times, and the Atlantic.
Her awards include the 2011 American Sociological Association’s Award for the Public Understanding of Sociology and the 2005 Katherine Jocher Belle Boone Award from the Southern Sociological Society for lifetime contributions to the study of gender. Barbara Risman is currently President of the Board of Directors of The Council on Contemporary Families, a national non-profit whose mission is to bring new research to public conversation. She has recently finished terms as President of the Southern Sociological Society and Vice-President of the American Sociological Association.
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