Nina Eliasoph

About

Nina Eliasoph is a Professor of Sociology at USC Dornsife, with a focus on civic and political organizations within diverse societies. Her research encompasses grassroots civic associations, activist groups, nonprofits, and NGOs, employing interpretive approaches that consider the structures of ambiguity in social interactions. Eliasoph's work explores how participants in small civic groups discuss politics and navigate encounters with government, media, and corporate authorities. Her first book, 'Avoiding Politics: How Americans Produce Apathy in Everyday Life,' examines the ways in which individuals in civic groups talk or refrain from talking about politics. She also authored 'Making Volunteers: Civic Life After Welfare’s End,' which theorizes a new organizational form called 'empowerment projects' that aim to cultivate grassroots engagement from the top down, often facing challenges in aligning missions with everyday practices. Additionally, her research compares volunteering and political activism, placing these activities within broader historical and comparative contexts. Eliasoph has contributed to the field through cross-national ethnographic collaborations, and she recently helped launch a new major, NGOs and Social Change. Her sociological subfields include political sociology and communication, cultural sociology, ethnography, sociolinguistics, social theory, emotions, organizations, and nonprofits/NGOs. Her work is supported by various funded research contracts…

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Artificial Intelligence
• Computer Science
• Public relations
• Economics
• Mathematical analysis
• Law
• Mathematics
• Psychology

Selected publications

• Civic Action

  American Journal of Sociology · 2014-11-01 · 226 citations

  articleSenior author

  Commonly, researchers have looked for civic life in a distinct sector in which they assume that voluntary associations will cultivate special skills and virtues. Gathering together many challenges to this approach, and using ethnographic cases of housing advocacy and youth civic engagement projects, the authors reconceptualize “the civic” as civic action and show how patterned scene styles shape it. Doing so reveals patterns of action in complex organizations that may span institutional sectors.…

  PublisherDOI

• Ethnography of Politics and Political Communication

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2014-09-02 · 30 citations

  bookSenior author

  Abstract The ethnographic approach has particular potential for studying political communication through enlarging understandings of political institutions and expanding definitions of “politics.” First, widening institutional understanding takes advantage of ethnography’s capacity to open windows that traditional analysis of political institutions leaves shut. Second, ethnography is uniquely able to examine new forms of engagement that people have not yet defined as “politics.” Third, studying…

  PublisherDOI

• The mantra of empowerment talk: an essay

  Journal of Civil Society · 2016-07-02 · 29 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Projects around the world use the ‘mantra of empowerment talk’, calling for engagement that is civic, appreciative of local diversity, transformative, sustainably self-reliant, helpful for alleviating suffering, and transparent. These noble missions clash in everyday practice, so organizations that share the mantra also share predictable dilemmas. By gathering together studies of projects that share the mantra, and observing their typical efforts at resolving typical dilemmas, this article chara…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Doing Comparative Ethnography in Vastly Different National Conditions: the Case of Local Grassroot Activism in Russia and the United States

  International Journal of Politics Culture and Society · 2019-06-13 · 23 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Measuring the Grassroots: Puzzles of Cultivating the Grassroots from the Top Down

  Sociological Quarterly · 2014-06-06 · 18 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Does a participatory, open-ended organizational format inspire creativity and draw on participants' local knowledge? Many nonprofits operate under this assumption, and many of their financial sponsors agree, and therefore demand precise accounts documenting the nonprofits' "participatory" formats. In the U.S. youth civic engagement projects described here, the practice of accounting itself had an effect, regardless of funders' goals. Volunteers devoted more time to documenting just how participa…

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Paul Lichterman

  11 shared

• Daniel Céfaï

  4 shared

• Marion Carrel

  3 shared

• Iddo Tavory

  2 shared

• Jade Lo

  Drexel University

  2 shared

• Doug McAdam

  University of Arizona

  2 shared

• Julien Talpin

  Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches Administratives, Politiques et Sociales

  2 shared

• Lyndi Hewitt

  University of North Carolina at Asheville

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• Paid Civic Engagement: Young Interns in the Age of the Nonpr…
• The Dynamics of Civic Relationships: A Proposal to Apply Met…
• Démocratie participative. Aspects historiques et contemporai…
• The Dynamic of Civic Engagement (National Science Foundation…
• Connecting Affordable Housing and Green Neighborhoods in Los…

Similar researchers at University of Southern California

• Brian Finchh-40
• Jennifer Hookh-30
• Lynne Casperh-28