Isaac Reed

Assistant Professor
Ketchum 207 A, 303.735.4090

Isaac's Vitae | Isaac Reed's Website

 

 

 

Research Interests: Social theory, Cultural sociology, Historical Sociology, Sex and Gender

Recent Publications:
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 not just descriptive or relativist but in fact deep or ‘maximal’ interpretations (which he sometimes called ‘thick descriptions’), that used theory in an innovative fashion to make significant truth claims.

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 broader intellectual movement to articulate new, positive models of social knowledge. Books reviewed: Steve Fuller, The New Sociological Imagination, John Goldthorpe's 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.