Given the nature of the field of political psychology, the participant group is interdisciplinary and consists of political scientists and psychologists ,and occasionally scholars in sociology or business from SUNY-Stony Brook, Princeton, Yale, Rutgers, CUNY, New York University, and Columbia. The workshop on contentious politics has been running in various guises a various universities for thirty years. In its current guise, it reviews work in progress on contentious politics, broadly defined, mainly by faculty and graduate students in history and social sciences at Columbia and other New York area institutions. Its usual format is to circulate a paper at least a week in advance, begin a session with two critiques, turn to a response by the author before opening the floor for questions and comments, first to graduate students then to all present. We employ comment sheets on which participants can write bibliographical suggestions, technical notes, and summaries of their oral remarks.
Some members usually supper together after the workshop.
Papers available at the Contentious Politics site. This is a sociology of economic action and institutions that, rather than taking up residual issues left by economists, has developed fresh models for centrally important phenomena, such as flows through production markets, the effect of social networks on stock prices, the role of social structure in product innovation, and the like. The field of economic sociology is inherently cross-disciplinary, drawing on the models and perspectives of management, structural sociology, microeconomics, and the natural sciences. Speakers invited to present at the workshop are drawn from these fields. We do the last by choosing several issues each term, distributing relatively brief readings in advance, and meeting to discuss them in a two-hour seminar on Thursday afternoons.