Isaac Reed, Assistant Professor of Sociology

University Of Colorado At Boulder

Research and Papers

I work in social theory, cultural sociology, and historical sociology, with a particular interest in theories of interpretation and causal explanation, transitions to modernity, and the cultural and social transformation of Colonial America. 

My work on the Salem Witch Trials examines the intersection of culture, gender, and power in Puritan society. My theory papers critically engage with a variety of realist epistemologies for social research, and develop the conceptual methods of and justifications for interpretive alternatives.

I retain an enduring interest in the interrelation of social power, collective representations, and subjectivities, and  in the massive transformations in culture and society—including the colonial encounter—that ushered in modernity in  the West.

I advise graduate students at the University of Colorado working on a variety of empirical and theoretical sociological projects.

 

 

Update (4/30/2009): Good News! My paper, “Why Salem Made Sense: Culture, Gender, and the Puritan Persecution of Witchcraft” has been awarded a Sage Innovation and Excellence Award for the best paper published in Cultural Sociology in 2007 and 2008.

 

If you have trouble accessing these papers, please email me. For a full list of publications,  see my CV.

 

Isaac Reed. “Epistemology Contextualized: Social Scientific Knowledge in a Post-Positivist Era.” Sociological Theory. Forthcoming. Penultimate version.

Develops the concepts “the context of investigation” and “the context of explanation” for understanding what positivism, attacks on positivism, and “post-positivism” really mean for how we construct and evaluate sociological knowledge claims. 

 

Isaac Reed and Jeffrey Alexander. “Social Science as Reading and Performance: A Cultural-Sociological Understanding of Epistemology.” European Journal of Social Theory. 12(1): 21-41. 2009.
Considers the rise and fall of social theory over the last fifty years in the Anglophone academic world, and proposes an epistemological basis for theory’s reinvigoration as an essential part of the empirical investigation of social life.

 

Isaac Reed and Jeffrey Alexander, eds. Meaning and Method: The Cultural Approach to Sociology. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. 2009. (contains my chapter "Culture as Object and Approach in Sociology")
A book about the relationship of methodological considerations attending the interpretation of meaning and the standard theories and methods of American sociology.

Isaac Reed. “Justifying Sociological Knowledge: From Realism to Interpretation.” Sociological Theory. 26 (2): 101-129. 2008.
An extended critique of realism in social theory, philosophy of social science, and social research, followed by a proposed alternative, interpretivism.

Isaac Reed. “Maximal Interpretation in Clifford Geertz and the Strong Program in Cultural Sociology: Towards a New Epistemology.” Cultural Sociology. 2 (2): 187-200. 2008.
Argues that Clifford Geertz’s vision for social science was neither just descriptive nor relativist. Instead Geertz proposed a pluralist, meaning-centered way to use theory to develop deep or ‘maximal’ interpretations of social action (which he sometimes called ‘thick descriptions’).

Isaac Reed. “Review Essay: Social Theory, Post-post-positivism, and the Question of Interpretation,” International Sociology. 23 (5): 665-675. 2008.
A review essay of four new books in social theory that are part of a broad, dispersed and contested intellectual movement to articulate new, positive models of social knowledge. Books reviewed: Steve Fuller, The New Sociological Imagination, John Goldthorpe, On Sociology (Second Edition), T.M.S. Evens and Don Handelman, eds., The Manchester School: Practice and Ethnographic Praxis in Anthropology, Syed Farid Alatas, Alternative Discourses in Asian Social Science: Responses to Eurocentrism.

Isaac Reed. “Why Salem Made Sense: Culture, Gender, and the Puritan Persecution of Witchcraft.” Cultural Sociology 1 (2), July: 209-234.2007.
The first publication from a larger project on the social transformation of Colonial America and the origins of American modernity. Argues that the Salem Witch Trials can be explained by unpacking the symbolic elements of the crisis, in particular the relationship between Puritan patriarchy and Puritan cosmology.

Isaac Reed and Jeffrey Alexander, eds. Culture, Society, and Democracy: The Interpretive Approach. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. 2007.
(Contains my chapter, “Cultural Sociology and the Democratic Imperative.”)
A book about the relationship of cultural sociology to critical theory, and to the project of social critique more generally.