Jonesville, a collective ethnography with 11 authors, was one of a series of works coming out of the first community study led by W. Lloyd Warner and a few eminent scholars working around the Committee on Human Development in the 1940s. The research was conducted in Morris, a mid-western town, and laid out the class structure of the community and their life organization. This paper argues that Jonesville, being a long-forgotten book, is a remarkable contribution to the transition of Chicago sociology. This transition was impelled by the gathering of a group of scholars in CHD, whose interdisciplinary structure and closeness to Hutchins gave it space to develop a mode of collective ethnography that was not accomplishable in the Sociology Department. We analyze the institutional basis of CHD and its leadership, the composition of the Morris project and its financial structure, and the role of individuals in the collective enterprise. We show how a Chicago style of work highly appraised by Howard Becker came into being, which greatly shaped the direction of Chicago sociology in the 1950s and 60s.

About the speaker:

Liping Wang is Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Education at Peking University. She received her Ph.D. degree in Sociology at the University of Chicago. Her research interests include comparative historical sociology, sociology of education and social theory. She has published articles in American Journal of Sociology, Theory and Society, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Journal of World History, among others. Her book The Imperial Creation of Ethnicity: Chinese Politics and the Ethnic Turn in Inner Mongolian Politics, 1900-1930 was published by Brill in 2022.

Departmental Seminar: Foretelling a New Chicago Sociology? The work of Jonesville in the Committee on Human Development, 1940-1950

Date: 6 May 2025

Time: 10:00am - 11:30am

Venue: CJT-9.29

Speaker: Professor Liping Wang

Registration: https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_hdetail.aspx?ueid=99494