Meaning & Measurement Mini-Conference

Ann Mische — Rutgers University amische@sociology.rutgers.edu I’ve been working for some time on ways to incorporate formal methodologies into the analysis of richly layered cultural, historical, and ethnographic data. Inspired by John Mohr’s work, as well as by Ron Breiger’s ideas about “duality,” I have used Galois lattice analysis to examine overlapping memberships and event attendance among Brazilian youth activists. I took this work in a cultural direction by using tripartite lattices to explore the three-way relationship between organizations, their projects for social change, and the events at which such projects are expressed. This allowed me to analyze the ways in which changing conjunctions of organizations and their projects at public events contributed to the formation of a broad-based civic convergence in the 1992 Brazilian impeachment movement. (See my 2000 Poetics article with Pip Pattison, “Composing a Civic Arena: Publics, Projects, and Social Settings”). Since then, I have trying to take this approach in a more general theoretical direction by exploring the relationship between social networks, discursive practices, and the composition of social settings. Some of my ideas about this relationship can be found in my chapter in the recent volume edited by Mario Diani and Doug McAdam, Social Movements and Networks: Relational Approaches to Collective Action, as well as in a 1998 Social Research article I co-authored with Harrison White. Currently, I am working on a book about partisanship, political mediation, and institutional change in Brazilian youth politics from 1977 to 1996. In this book, I am interested in the important role played by people who are located in the intersections of multiple networks and institutional sectors in an emerging public arena. I am exploring the ways in which the trajectories of young activists through overlapping institutional involvements contributed to different kinds of leadership skills, and the ways in which these skills contributed to institutional creativity as well as to collaboration and competition in a contentious field. The book will use both interpretive and formal-analytic methods, drawing upon my ethnographic and documentary research as well as lattice analysis of overlapping relations. I am also currently struggling with how to apply formal methods for sequence analysis (like Abbott’s optimal matching techniques) to my data on multi-layered activist trajectories.