Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz

Cultivating Consent: Nonstate Leaders and the Orchestration of State Legibility

In recent decades, the sociology of the state has become engrossed in the relationship between knowledge and modern statecraft. Heeding recent calls for “society-centered” approaches, this article investigates the role of nonstate leaders in the production of state knowledge. It takes up the following question: How have nonstate leaders (i.e., civil leaders and community advocates) contributed to what James Scott has termed “state legibility”? While historical traces suggest that these actors have worked to lessen opposition to state projects, this activity remains empirically understudied and conceptually underdeveloped. Addressed to this problem, this article introduces the concept of consent building and proposes an analytic approach that focuses on the motivations of nonstate leaders, the obstacles of noncompliance they confront, and the persuasive tactics used to foster public cooperation. To illustrate the purchase of this approach, it presents a case study of local Latino promoters of the 2010 U.S. census. This analysis reveals how nonstate leaders can enable, rather than impede, the capacity to “see like a state.”

Book review: Aaron Panofsky (2014), Misbehaving Science: Controversy and the Development of Behavior Genetics

Aaron Panofsky (2014), Misbehaving Science: Controversy and the Development of Behavior Genetics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. 321 pp.,

Expert for a day: Theory and the tailored craft of ethnography1

27.50 (Paperback), ISBN: 9780226058450.

From hip-hop to humanization: Batey Urbano as a space for Latino youth culture and community action

89.00 (Hardcover), ISBN: 9780226058313.

Actor-Network Theory and the ethnographic imagination: An exercise in translation

Sociologists exhibit growing interest in the politics of expertise. Analyses of evaluations, economic paradigms, blueprints, censuses, policy instruments and the like have come to occupy an important position in recent research. While much of this emergent scholarship has drawn on historical methods, a growing number of scholars have turned to ethnography. A close reading of this work reveals that ethnographers have actively tailored rather than passively transposed ethnography to the study of expertise. Departing from traditional conceptions of ethnography, these works exhibit growing attentiveness to movement, mediation, and materials. We argue that this retooling of ethnography is not merely a response to empirical realities but rather stems, at least in part, from the influence of science and technology studies, specifically Actor-Network Theory. This case provides the occasion to make a broader point about ethnography as a ‘theory/method package’: theory does not only shape what ethnographers study, but also how they conduct research.