Today is the first day of the annual meetings of the American Sociological Association (ASA), held this year in Chicago. I’m not attending this year, and I don’t know if or when I’ll attend again. That saddens me because I identify strongly as a sociologist and I regularly enact that identity (the majority of my papers are in sociology journals, and I write pretty much all my papers with ASR and AJS in mind; I have one just out with wonderful coauthors that’s expressly designed to prod sociological progress) and the ASA was long an important moment in my year.
In my experience, ASA has been a time to reconnect with old friends from grad school and beyond; to see old professors I’m fond of; to meet with coauthors; to participate in public-goods creation for subdisciplines I care about; to meet with young scholars; to support my students in various ways; and to just plain recharge my batteries and ‘feel’ like a sociologist (which is especially meaningful to me since I’ve spent my career since PhD in business schools.
Oh yeah, there are also sessions at the ASA. But the cliché is correct that it’s the interaction outside the sessions that’s central. (Smaller conferences are better in that respect) That said, I often get something out of the sessions I attend, and it’s been valuable to participate in various sessions over the years. In particular, while I had similar reasons to skip last year’s ASA as I do this year, I went because I had committed to participate in a session on “post-truth.” Indeed, that was a great opportunity I thoroughly enjoyed preparing for and participating in it (here are my slides, fyi; my argument dovetails with points I’m making here, with some other points I haven’t really seen others make).
Recalling the great interaction in the panel (including with sociologists whose work I so greatly admire and am privileged to know as wonderful scholars and people [Ann Swidler and Gary Alan Fine most notably] makes me especially wistful this weekend.
As does thinking of visiting the city of Chicago. My wife and I lived there for the five years of my grad school, four years in Hyde Park and one year in Lakeview. Our oldest child was born and lived the first year of his life there. (And awesomely, his first wholesale client is there!!!) I have always loved returning there over the years in a way that recalls how my good friend (and easily one of the best living sociologists) Catherine Turco captures and theorizes so well, in her recent book Harvard Square: A Love Story. (You haven’t read it yet? I feel sorry for you; go buy it and read it!!)
Ok, so why am I not at ASA?
Before answering, let me say that I certainly support any colleagues’— especially junior colleagues’— decision to attend. Indeed, I’d encourage them to go. Not attending major conferences doesn’t come with much cost to a senior faculty member such as myself. Sure, the less “selling” I do of my work (directly by myself, but especially indirectly via colleagues and students), the less likely am I to get the attention for my work I need to keep my employability/market value up. But I’m not looking to move, and as long as I continue to publish, I think I’ll be relatively OK. I’m also constantly reaching out to people and asking them about their work, so I can better understand it and its relevant to mine; that doesn’t always pan out (some scholars are shockingly uninterested in scholarly interchange), but conferences don’t help much with such barriers.
And while I can manage fine without attending conferences, junior scholars really cannot afford to take themselves out of circulation. They have to get their work out there, press the flesh, etc. They need to meet peers and senior faculty; get a better sense of what kind of work ‘the field’ is looking for so they can fit their work into it, etc.
In fact, that’s the biggest issue for me in not attending. It can be hard for junior scholars to make these sorts of connections. (It was for me; while it’s hard for many who know me now to believe it, I was very shy at the beginning of my career.) And so it’s an important role that senior colleagues play, in facilitating those connections. I really worry that by not going, I’m not being as useful a resource as I can be to advisees and junior colleagues. (If you’re junior and you want to connect with me, or think I can help facilitate a connection, send me an email!!) A consolation is that conferences are probably much less essential for junior scholars than they used to be given the ability to connect (and facilitate such connections) via zoom etc.
So why am I not in Chicago?
The answer is pretty straightforward:
I can’t get over the fact that the majority of the ASA membership voted for this cease fire resolution in May 2024. And I can’t stomach spending serious coin (ASA is crazy expensive— when you incorporate dues and fees for attendance; that’d be MIT’s money, but my research budget isn’t unlimited) to attend a conference of a group that voted for that resolution and hasn’t looked back.
I won’t spend a lot of time here rehearsing the reasons why I deplored this resolution since I provided those reasons in detail in March of that year, in an earlier post. All my points from back then still stand.
What’s that you say, Ezra? Don’t you agree now that there needs to be a ceasefire, and that there needed to be one back then? The suffering by Gazan Palestinians is intolerable!
Yes I agree.
But as I— and anyone who thought about the situation in pragmatic and/or sociological terms rather than through the lens of Manichean leftist moralizing— the question was always how to reach a sustainable, just ceasefire between Israel and Hamas (or, ideally, some other Palestinian or Arab party that has effective control over Gaza and the Gazan population, and even more ideally, is capable and willing to be a party to peace. Say what you want about the Netanyahu government (and I have a lot of criticisms, especially pertaining to its governance of the West Bank, not to mention its playing into Hamas’s hands by accomplishing little while inflicting death and suffering in Gaza; and of course, Bibi has authoritarian tendencies and is compromised by political motives), but it can’t do a ceasefire on its own— certainly not one that ensures the return of the hostages (you know, these fellow humans you neglected to mention in your resolution, fellow ASA members) or one that accomplishes what the Arab League recognizes as necessary— i.e., the disarmament of Hamas and its removal from power in Gaza, something that’s necessary for Palestinians to live a decent life (News flash: that Hamas uses the Palestinian population as human shields isn’t just an inconvenient fact for you, ASA members, to ignore as you condemn Israel; it’s a basic fact of life for terrorized Gazans that everyone who speaks freely about the region knows).
(Of course, this is also necessary for any Israeli government (whether run by Netanyahu or not) to have a shot at winning an election. What’s that you say? You don’t care about Israeli voters? Very realistic approach you got there. And yeah, any resolution should have the support of the relevant Palestinian public[s] too. Which is why anyone serious about the conflict worries not only about Israelis’ right-wing voting patterns but about Hamas’s popularity in the Palestinian public.)
Then there’s the matter of the ASA’s silence over the past year. Here’s the thing:
I went to the ASA in Montreal last August, expecting to see a lot of protest activity. A lot of kaffiyehs. Watermelons. Etc. I mean, this was right on the heels of the encampments on many (elite) campuses, and the ASA’s ceasefire resolution. But by all accounts from colleagues and friends, it was very quiet. Where were the “Sociologists 4 Palestine” who led the drive on behalf of the ceasefire resolution and who held a series of ‘teach-ins’ leading up to it?
(I have zero respect for any supposed scholar who participates in a teach-in as these are— as far as I can tell— about preaching to the faithful why they believe what they believe. This should be anathema to any serious scholar).
To be sure, when I arrived on Sunday (I don’t attend on Shabbat), I heard there had been a panel the day before. And (like the teach-ins), it had no actual debate, certainly no representation by anyone who might speak on behalf of the 40% or so of sociologists who didn’t vote for the resolution (not to mention the many sociologists who have lapsed their ASA membership because of its predilection for privileging left-activism over scholarship). (If you were there and I’m wrong about this, feel free to reach out and correct me).
But besides that session, there was (apparently) nothing. Why not? Why, in particular, did the activists give up pushing for divestment of ASA’s portfolio of investments in Israel and defense contractors (a demand that was ruled out of bounds by ASA council, leading to the predictable charges of complicity)?
Moreover, S4P and the ASA have been strangely silent about Gaza and Israel-Palestine for the last year. From a review of its website, it seems S4P has gone dormant, with the exception of one more teach-in in January. Strange, no? I mean, it’s not like nothing has happened in the last year. And it’s not like the fate of Gazans has gotten better. Tragically, the contrary is the case. (Which Israel deserves some blame for, though the primary culprit is the terrorist group the ASA apparently has no problem with, Hamas).
Meanwhile, do the ASA or the S4P activists have views about Israel’s war against Hezbollah (whose outcome Lebanese have generally endorsed, and with good reason)? And how about the war against Iran? It’s tempting to criticize Bibi and Trump on that one, right? On the other hand, does the ASA like the Islamic Republic? And do we want it to have nukes? Are there conditions under which we’d support an authoritarian state that exports violence and instability (indeed, one that can rightly be called colonialist; ironic, huh?) And what about Israel’s attack against Syria a few weeks ago, on behalf and at the behest of the Druse? Did sociologists pay any attention to that highly complex and fraught story, one that’s still hard to find the plot on— not to mention the complexity of Syria more generally? Hmmm.. are sociologists happy that Israel triggered the fall of Assad or would we rather that Assad still be in power? Do we like Shar’a? Would we trust a former Al Qaeda/ISIS guy or do we pretend that jihadis are just bogeymen concocted by Islamophobes? Finally, what do we make of the Houthis? Are we happy that they control much of Yemen and hinder shipping (terrible for Egypt’s economy and European prices; do we care?) and that they send Israelis into their shelters in the wee hours, every other day? (Yep. Check it out. And guess what— they’re terrorizing Arabs as well as Jews. And why precisely do you think they’ll stop when there’s a cease fire? Because they’re such good guys?)
What’s the larger point to the screed in the previous paragraph? It’s this:
The cease fire resolution wasn’t just sociologically obtuse and (willfully) naive, it was immature grandstanding— performative virtue signaling in today’s parlance. If you really care about the region and the issue, you’ll: a) ascribe agency to Arabs and Muslims, not just to Westerners and Israelis/Jews; b) not only focus on Gaza (or the West Bank) but look at the wider set of local and regional dynamics in all their difficult complexity; and c) sustain your attention to the issue and region. But, having salved your conscience (and covered your backsides) by signaling you know who the villain is and that it needs to stop its villainy, you have moved on.
Oh, and check out my first point in my argument against the ceasefire resolution-- that it was awful and callous that it mentioned antisemitism only as a bogeyman used by the right to shut down criticism of Israel. In the interim, there have been three violent attacks on American Jews (in Boulder, in D.C., and at the Pennsylvania governor’s mansion), which have caused three deaths. And they were all leftist/anti-Zionist inspired. So I guess maybe, as I argued, a statement by the ASA (the first one in its history to mention antisemitism at all) could have acknowledged that antisemitism is a real problem. And it could even have acknowledged the reality of leftist antisemitism, and how vilification of Israel can be a gateway drug toward antisemitism. Which (for those of us who can hold multiple ideas in our heads at the same time) in no way denies the reality of right-wing antisemitism (even that tolerated or promoted by the Trump administration) or the fact that antisemitism can indeed be abused as a cudgel to limit criticism of Israel.
(What’s that? Right-wing antisemitism and appropriation of antisemitism allegations to shut down criticism of Israel are so bad that it’s OK to ignore left-inspired antisemitism, even when it leads to violence and the death of innocents? Tell that to those of us who have to worry about security at American synagogues and Jewish community organizations. This is a reality in my life, if not in yours.)
In short, the ASA’s (in)action since the ceasefire resolution has only reinforced my lack of respect for the majority of members who voted for the resolution and for the ASA generally. It’s unthinkable for me right now to pay real money that supports people who are causing me to have less respect for my own colleagues and discipline and who are making a situation that I care deeply about worse even while telling themselves they are making it better.
And so I’ll be spending my Shabbat and weekend with loved ones and friends in Boston.
I hope my many friends, colleagues, and students in Chicago have a good ASA.
And I pray that the efforts under way to address the humanitarian crisis in Gaza (which, yep, Hamas undermines, exploits, and exacerbates in ways that are wickedly hard to combat; just ask your friends at the BBC) are successful.
I also pray that a pathway towards ceasefire, justice, and political resolution even though any honest reckoning with the situation must sorrowfully concede that this is an intractable conflict that has only gotten worse in the last two years, not least because of Manichean left-moralizing taking the place of serious engagement.
Shabbat Shalom, happy weekend, and happy summer.