Colloquium: Neal Caren, UNC Chapel Hill

Dare You Fight: W.E.B. Du Bois in The Crisis

Abstract: In 1910, W.E.B Du Bois founded The Crisis, the official journal of the newly established NAACP. Du Bois commissioned thousands of articles during his twenty-five years as an editor, ranging from poetry and plays to lynching investigations. In addition, he wrote more than a thousand pieces, only a few of which have been made widely available since publication. In this project, I look at how his writing and editorial decisions during this period can inform our theories of social movements and political change.

Bio: Dr. Neal Caren is an Associate Professor in the Sociology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His current research is on contemporary US social movements and the uses of media data for understanding movement processes. With Edwin Amenta, Neal is the author of Rough Draft of History: A Century of US Social Movements in the News(Princeton 2022). His work has also appeared in journals such as American Sociological Review, Social Forces, Social Problems, and the Annual Review of Sociology.

Neal currently serve as the editor of the interdisciplinary social movements journal Mobilization, the premier journal of research specializing in social movements, protests, insurgencies, revolutions, and other forms of contentious politics. Check out our most recent issue.

He teaches graduate courses in computational social science, with a focus on collecting and analyzing text data with Python. At the undergraduate level, Neal teaches Introduction to Sociology and the capstone course for our Social and Economic Justice minor.

Areas of Interest: Social Movements, Computational Social Science, and Python.