Center for Interpretive and Qualitative Research Event

(E-mail memo: Jan. 26, 2006)

Feb. 16 (Thurs.), 2006, 4:00-5:30PM, Berger Gallery, 207 College Hall, Duquesne University.

All interested faculty, graduate students, and other parties are invited. Refreshments will be served.

Agenda: Dr. Kathleen Blee, Racism as Social Movement
Abstract: In this talk, I will explore what we can understand about racist groups by thinking of them as social movements and what we can learn about social movements by understanding racist groups. I draw on data collected from ethnographic observations and life history interviewing of women activists
in a range of Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazi, white power skinhead and other white supremacist groups in the U.S.Kathleen Blee is Professor of Sociology, Womens Studies, and History at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research explores questions within the fields of gender and race; social movements; historical sociology; and qualitative methodologies. She is now studying how social movement groups develop distinctive interpersonal, ideological, and organizational characteristics and how, over time, these are consolidated and become regarded within the group as unproblematic aspects of what the group is. She is the author of three books: Inside Organized Racism: Women in the Hate Movement (2002); The Road to Poverty: The Making of Wealth and Hardship in Appalachia (2000); and Women of The Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920s (1991); co-editor with France Winddance Twine of Feminism and Anti-Racism: International Struggles for Justice (2001) and editor of No Middle Ground: Women & Radical Protest (1998).