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Andrew Chalfoun

@achalfoun.bsky.social
678 followers 939 following 122 posts

Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology at Ripon College. I study social interaction, organizations and religion. PhD from UCLA. Find me at www.andrewchalfoun.com

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Reposted by Andrew Chalfoun
Michael Clemens @mclem.org · 14/09/2026
A federal judge just enjoined one of the US Administration’s sharpest attacks on international students. The ruling references research by me & my stellar co-authors six times. Facts matter. Facts are necessary for democracy, accountability, and the rule of law. Research delivers them.
storage.courtlistener.com
Memorandum & Order – #50 in Presidents' Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration v. United States Department of Homeland Security (D. Mass., 1:26-cv-13799) – CourtListener.com
District Judge F. Dennis Saylor, IV: MEMORANDUM AND ORDER ON MOTION FOR PRELIMINARY INJUNCTION. Plaintiffs' motion for APA § 705 relief, a preliminary injunction, or, in the alternative, summary judgm...
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Andrew Chalfoun @achalfoun.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
The other day, I said to my intro students: "You remember what it was like during the Great Recession." Blank stares. Finally, one brave student raises his hand: "I was born in 2008." I have never felt older
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Nathan Hoffmann @nathanihoff.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
My paper "Double robust, flexible adjustment methods for causal inference: An overview and an evaluation" is out in Social Science Research. Spoiler: In simulations, double robustness appears less important than flexibility, and OLS does pretty well! 🧵👇 1/7 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
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Shobita Parthasarathy @shobitap.org · 01/09/2026
Exciting news! Michigan is hiring another science and technology policy fellow! The fellow will work in MI's Dept of Agriculture and Rural Development on PFAS and other contaminants. Note: the position is open wrt field, but PhD required. Sept 21 deadline. 🚨Pls circulate!🚨 #scipolicy #techpolicy
careers.umich.edu
Civic Science Fellow (Michigan Science, Technology, and Public Policy Fellowship Program (MiST)) | U-M Careers
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Andrew Chalfoun @achalfoun.bsky.social · 03/08/2026
I liked the Odyssey and all, but if pee breaks were good enough for David Lean, they should be good enough for Christopher Nolan
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Andrew Chalfoun @achalfoun.bsky.social · 16/07/2026
Big talk from someone who hasn't made a watchable movie in my lifetime
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Andrew Chalfoun @achalfoun.bsky.social · 25/06/2026
With all due respect to our northern neighbors, Boston Pizza is a terrible name for a fast food chain
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Matthew @mapoochoo.bsky.social · 07/06/2026
The Met put its entire collection online for free so I made a game out of it! 10 artifacts a day, and you guess where and when each one's from. Anthropeum.com if anyone wants to give it a shot and leave feedback :) #history #archeology #arthistory #museums
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Giovanni Zampieri @giozzam.bsky.social · 16/06/2026
I know you've always wondered: how were confessionals managed in modern Italy? My latest article, just published in Church History, reconstructs the use, maintenance, and negotiation of confessionals in late eighteenth-century Verona. (SPOILER: Their administration was surprisingly bureaucratic!)
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bradfordgladstone.bsky.social @bradfordgladstone.bsky.social · 17/05/2026
New(ish) in Philosophy & Social Criticism: an intervention on realist “unveiling narratives” and their associated prescriptive claims within critical philosophy of race. doi.org/10.1177/0191...
doi.org
Eyes and Darkness: Race and Idealism Through Cinga Samson’s Okwe Nkunzana 6 - Bradford Gladstone, 2026
This article critiques a strain of critical philosophy of race that presumes an ability to remove the evaluative “distortions” of race-based judgements from per...
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Eddie Yang @eddieyang.bsky.social · 13/05/2026
New paper in Nature. The more a government controls its domestic media, the more it dominates AI training data, the more pro-regime outputs we get from AI. By scraping the open web, LLMs are unwittingly laundering state-coordinated narratives into seemingly objective answers.
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Andrew Chalfoun @achalfoun.bsky.social · 06/05/2026
Really thrilled to have contributed to this great collection of papers!
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Arndt Leininger @aleininger.bsky.social · 30/04/2026
📢 We're hiring for my project RESPOL on residential mobility & electoral realignment 📍 University of Hamburg 📅 4y, 75% FTE 🔍 pol behavior, comp politics, regional inequalities 📊 quant, administrative & survey data Please share with talented MA students! 🔗 www.uni-hamburg.de/en/stellenan...
uni-hamburg.de
Job advertisement
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Andrew Chalfoun @achalfoun.bsky.social · 22/04/2026
Copyediting my dissertation and it appears that past me was fundamentally incapable of using apostrophes correctly.
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Andrew Chalfoun @achalfoun.bsky.social · 11/04/2026
New from me in Church History! I trace an early split between Southern Baptist conservatives over charismatic practices. The split shows how important Baptist identity (rather than generic evangelicalism) was to SBC conservatives in the 1980s. @aschurchhistory.bsky.social doi.org/10.1017/S000...
Photo of abstract for article, "The Limits of Cooperation Inside the Christian Right" by Andrew Chalfoun. 

Abstract reads: The Southern Baptist “conservative resurgence” of the 1980s and 1990s is one of the defining events in the alignment of US evangelicals with the Republican Party. Lacking information about internal decision-making processes, existing studies have tended to exaggerate the cohesiveness of the activist network that ultimately captured the denomination. This paper takes a micro-historical approach to trace how movement leaders responded when one of the movement’s stars, evangelist James Robison, began using his ministry to promote charismatic theology that many in the movement viewed as heretical. Focusing on how Southern Baptist conservatives worked out the boundaries of legitimate cooperation in real time, I show that key conservatives initially tried to convince Robison to walk back his charismatic turn and rejoin the Southern Baptist mainstream. Their ultimate failure set the pattern for the movement’s subsequent opposition to charismatics and clarifies the relationship between the Southern Baptist Convention and the broader Christian Right coalition.
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Andrew Chalfoun @achalfoun.bsky.social · 11/04/2026
New from me in Church History! I trace an early split between Southern Baptist conservatives over charismatic practices. The split shows how important Baptist identity (rather than generic evangelicalism) was to SBC conservatives in the 1980s. @aschurchhistory.bsky.social doi.org/10.1017/S000...
Photo of abstract for article, "The Limits of Cooperation Inside the Christian Right" by Andrew Chalfoun. 

Abstract reads: The Southern Baptist “conservative resurgence” of the 1980s and 1990s is one of the defining events in the alignment of US evangelicals with the Republican Party. Lacking information about internal decision-making processes, existing studies have tended to exaggerate the cohesiveness of the activist network that ultimately captured the denomination. This paper takes a micro-historical approach to trace how movement leaders responded when one of the movement’s stars, evangelist James Robison, began using his ministry to promote charismatic theology that many in the movement viewed as heretical. Focusing on how Southern Baptist conservatives worked out the boundaries of legitimate cooperation in real time, I show that key conservatives initially tried to convince Robison to walk back his charismatic turn and rejoin the Southern Baptist mainstream. Their ultimate failure set the pattern for the movement’s subsequent opposition to charismatics and clarifies the relationship between the Southern Baptist Convention and the broader Christian Right coalition.
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Laiken Jordahl @laikenjordahl.bsky.social · 08/04/2026
BREAKING: we're suing CBP for hiding plans to wall off Big Bend. CBP refuses to release basic details, leaving local communities, outfitters & landowners in the dark. This wall would permanently destroy their livelihoods—and CBP won’t say a word to them. biologicaldiversity.org/w/news/press...
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Yonette Joseph @sugarcane99.bsky.social · 04/04/2026
The server says she was once punched in the face by a customer. She saw someone overdose in the bathroom. A man took all the steak knives and threatened the staff. But she’s never seen anyone teleport into the Waffle House, like the FEMA official says he was. 🎁 www.nytimes.com/2026/04/03/u...
nytimes.com
No One at Waffle House Remembers FEMA Official Who Says He Teleported In
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Seth Abrutyn @sethabrutyn.bsky.social · 09/03/2026
Really interesting piece - check it out! Deals with some old but enduring sociological questions.
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Andrew Chalfoun @achalfoun.bsky.social · 09/03/2026
New from me in Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour! Social theorists have trouble explaining how intersubjectivity is possible if norms are open-ended. I contrast two proposed solutions (offered by Talcott Parsons and Harold Garfinkel), both ultimately unsatisfying. #EMCA 1/4
doi.org
Differentiating Regulative and Constitutive Normativity: Talcott Parsons, Harold Garfinkel and the Sticky Problem of Meaning
In everyday life, individuals regularly confront novel situations which demand their attention and response. In such situations, they routinely deploy portable norms to select between appropriate and....
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Andrew Chalfoun @achalfoun.bsky.social · 20/02/2026
Working on a playlist for my students. What are people's favorite songs about violence? Bonus points if they're cheerful!
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Andrew Chalfoun @achalfoun.bsky.social · 18/02/2026
I have never felt more American than I do working on the proofs for a journal that enforces British spelling.
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Emma Templeton @emmatempleton.bsky.social · 13/02/2026
I will be hiring a full-time pre-doctoral Research Professional to work with me at Chicago Booth. Know someone interested in studying conversation and connection? Please help spread the word! More details, including application instructions, are here: www.chicagobooth.edu/-/media/facu...
chicagobooth.edu
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Dᴜsᴛɪɴ Sᴛᴏʟᴛᴢ @dustinstoltz.com · 02/02/2026
New paper out with Marshall Taylor and @olizardo.bsky.social: Functionaries: A Distributional Approach to Institutional Analysis Instead of institutions as things that contain people, we suggest institutions as expertise distributed across people. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
This paper outlines a distributional approach to institutional analysis, reconceptualising institutions as distributions of knowledge and activity across people. We argue that institutionalisation and institutional change are best understood by focussing on actors with the requisite knowledge and motivation to keep institutional patterns going, fix them when they go awry, or transform them when required, here called functionaries. The distributional approach allows us to distinguish between two main types of institutional change often conflated in the literature: Content-based and formal change. Content-based change, the one most often discussed, involves the importation, recombination, or expansion of specific patterns of activity. In contrast, formal change, often neglected in the literature, refers to shifts in the distribution of knowledge and activity, leading to dynamics of centralisation and decentralisation of institutional patterns. In this way, the distributional approach highlights the role of functionaries in both institutional stability and change, providing a micro-level perspective on institutional dynamics.
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Andrew Chalfoun @achalfoun.bsky.social · 31/01/2026
When cooking with garlic, always remember the fundamental rules: 1) If the recipe calls for 3-4 cloves, use double 2) If the recipe calls for 1-2 cloves, use triple 3) The little cloves are freebies; don't count them
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Andrew Chalfoun @achalfoun.bsky.social · 28/01/2026
New from me in @readingreligion.bsky.social! I reviewed G. Kanato Chophy's book "Christianity and Politics in Tribal India," which documents an interesting case of the relationship between religious identity and ethno-national mobilization.
readingreligion.org
Christianity and Politics in Tribal India - Reading Religion
Through an ethnohistorical study of the Nagas—a congeries of tribes inhabiting the Indo-Myanmar frontier—this book explores an unusually interest...
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The Sociological Quarterly @socquarterly.bsky.social · 02/01/2026
Volume 67, issue 1, of TSQ is now LIVE, featuring articles by @achalfoun.bsky.social, @gio-rossi.bsky.social, @daeunjung.bsky.social, @djhardingsoc.bsky.social, @criminovelist.bsky.social, @mmaroto.bsky.social, @dnpetti.bsky.social, @andiewinnipeg.bsky.social, and more! Read it at bit.ly/45ezfzx
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404 Media @404media.co · 17/11/2025
We can no longer trust that survey responses are coming from real people.”
404media.co
A Researcher Made an AI That Completely Breaks the Online Surveys Scientists Rely On
We can no longer trust that survey responses are coming from real people.”
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Andrew Chalfoun @achalfoun.bsky.social · 05/11/2025
Guess I'm watching a Mira Nair movie tonight
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Katherine Smock @ksmock.bsky.social · 07/10/2025
my paper with my colleague and friend Victoria Tran is finally out!
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Andrew Chalfoun @achalfoun.bsky.social · 02/11/2025
There may be no atheists in foxholes, but there plenty of agnostics in badger setts. And don't get me started all the freethinking that goes on in rabbit warrens
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The Sociological Quarterly @socquarterly.bsky.social · 30/10/2025
FREE TO READ Andrew Chalfoun, Giovanni Rossi, & Tanya Stivers show that everyday requests are made with an optimistic stance. Across seven language communities, people ask as if the answer will be “yes,” revealing a pervasive optimism bias in routine interaction. Read more at bit.ly/4oKjWWs
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Andrew Chalfoun @achalfoun.bsky.social · 30/10/2025
When we ask for something big—time, effort, money—do we hedge against rejection or assume success? With @gio-rossi.bsky.social & Tanya Stivers, we find that people are incurably optimistic, even though big requests often meet resistance. Published open access in @socquarterly.bsky.social. #EMCA
doi.org
Incurable Optimism about Getting What We Want: Anticipating Success in Everyday Requests
When asking for something significant from another person, speakers not only set the tilt of the question toward the affirmative or negative but also display an optimistic or pessimistic stance tow...
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Andrew Chalfoun @achalfoun.bsky.social · 05/10/2025
So glad to get to see Whooping Cranes today! Photo credit goes to @lenayeakey.bsky.social
Photo of whooping cranes through binoculars
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NPR @npr.org · 30/09/2025
JUST IN: President Trump has told top U.S. commanders that the military would be used against "enemy within."
n.pr
Trump defends use of U.S. military against 'enemy within'
Earlier, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the purpose of the department would exclusively be "war fighting."
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Andrew Chalfoun @achalfoun.bsky.social · 26/09/2025
Man, for someone who can't follow a football game, I sure do use a lot of sports references
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Andrew Chalfoun @achalfoun.bsky.social · 25/09/2025
Nothing but love for reviewers who say, "I have principled objections to some of the positions taken in this paper, but it's a good paper that should be published anyway."
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Andrew Chalfoun @achalfoun.bsky.social · 17/09/2025
This is three decades late but the Duran Duran version of "Lay Lady Lay" is absolutely awful
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Dana R. Fisher (aka the Apocalyptic Optimist) @fisherdanar.bsky.social · 12/09/2025
My research has been documenting growing support for political violence across the political Left since January. Here are data from participants at all of the major protests in 2025:
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Andrew Chalfoun @achalfoun.bsky.social · 03/09/2025
In Our Time is an incredible show! My college roommate played us "The Gin Craze" episode during dinner and I've been hooked ever since.
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Andrew Chalfoun @achalfoun.bsky.social · 26/08/2025
My betrothed is REFUSING to use a passage from Song of Songs at our wedding just because the reader would say "my nard gave forth its fragrance." Like, isn't that the whole reason to use it??
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Andrew Chalfoun @achalfoun.bsky.social · 15/08/2025
Once again, seems like we might want to just get rid of the Nobel Peace Prize altogether
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Andrew Chalfoun @achalfoun.bsky.social · 14/08/2025
Grading is never what I'd call "fun" but sometimes students make mistakes that reveal problems with the original arguments in the assigned readings that I would never have caught on my own.
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Ben Kaplow @bkaplow.bsky.social · 06/08/2025
Excited that my article 'Levels of Legibility: Roles and the Flow of State Information in French Morocco' is now out in Social Science History! The paper shows how French administrators' internal communications transformed environmental knowledge and practices in Morocco dx.doi.org/10.1017/ssh....
dx.doi.org
Levels of Legibility: Roles and the Flow of State Information in French Morocco | Social Science History | Cambridge Core
Levels of Legibility: Roles and the Flow of State Information in French Morocco
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Andrew Chalfoun @achalfoun.bsky.social · 10/08/2025
I have one more presentation during #ASA2025! On Monday at 2pm come listen to me talk about how conflict between Christian Right activists and Southern Baptist missionary executives led to bureaucratic centralization that no one wanted: tinyurl.com/29czdf2q
tinyurl.com
Social and Organizational Forces Influencing Religious Actors
This session investigates how religious actors and institutions are shaped by broader social, legal, and organizational forces. Papers explore the impact of legal and cultural shifts on religious beha...
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Andrew Chalfoun @achalfoun.bsky.social · 09/08/2025
Calling all early birds! Check out this great session at the Association for the Sociology of Religion on Sunday at 8:30. I'll be presenting a piece of my book project on covert evangelism and international missions. Hope to see you there!
ASR Panel Session: 

A5: Religion in and against the State
Room: Lakeshore Ballroom West
Coevolution of Religion and the State: Metaphors of God and
Legitimate Domination
Andrew McKinnon, University of Aberdeen

Learning to Lie: Southern Baptist Missionaries Working with
and against the Chinese State, 1979-1992
Andrew Chalfoun, University of California, Los Angeles

Aristocratic Political Spirituality in the Islamic Republic of
Iran (The Luxury Mausoleum of Khomeini: Reasons and
Representations)
Zahra Khoshk Jan, University of Chicago

A Comparative Analysis of Sacred Stories and Their Impact
in the Iranian and Nicaraguan Revolutions
Jean-Pierre Reed, Southern Illinois Univ; Babak Rahimi,
Univ of California San Diego; Soodeh Mansouri, Univ of
Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Religion and Local Government Officials’ Attitudes toward
Transgender Rights Policies in the United States
Jonathan Coley, Oklahoma State Univ; Gary Adler, Penn
State Univ; Eric Plutzer, Penn State Univ; Damon Mayrl,
Colby College; Rebecca Sager, Loyola Marymount Univ;
Gabby Gomez, Macalester College
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Andrew Chalfoun @achalfoun.bsky.social · 06/08/2025
Happening in a few minutes!
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Andrew Chalfoun @achalfoun.bsky.social · 05/08/2025
If you're going to be in Chicago tomorrow (August 6) come to the Voco hotel at 11am to catch my presentation, "Typical Expectations and the Moral Order: Talcott Parsons, Harold Garfinkel, and the Sticky Problem of Meaning" at the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction @sijournal.bsky.social!
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Giovanni Rossi @gio-rossi.bsky.social · 25/07/2025
1/ 📘 Book alert! 🚨 After a long gestation, extensive rewriting, a complex production process, and life getting in the way, it’s finally out* ➡️ doi.org/10.1093/oso/...
doi.org
Systems of Social Action: The Case of Requesting in Italian
Abstract. This book is about social action as it is carried out in everyday life. To some readers, the phrase social action may evoke the idea of people ta
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Andrew Chalfoun @achalfoun.bsky.social · 16/07/2025
Listening to a truly awful college band and forcing myself to remember that we need to support bad musicians so that a few of them have opportunities to turn into good musicians
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