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 and grants, emphasizing her active engagement in advancing understanding of civic engagement and social organization.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Artificial Intelligence
• Computer Science
• Public relations
• Economics
• Mathematical analysis
• Law
• Mathematics
• Psychology
• Environmental ethics
• Social psychology

Selected publications

• :<i>Working Class Experiences of Social Inequalities in (Post-) Industrial Landscapes: Feelings of Class</i>

  American Journal of Sociology · 2024

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Sociology
  • Computer Science
  PublisherDOI

• Paradoxes Within the Management of Volunteers

  VOLUNTAS International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations · 2023 · 6 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Sociology

  Abstract While scholars of management have extensively discussed paradoxes, scholars of volunteer management have given them little systematic attention. This special issue brings together the field of paradox studies with the research field of volunteer management. While many studies highlight paradoxes between different “missions” and mandates within volunteer-involving organizations, this introduction suggests using a “dramaturgical” approach that highlights the interplay between different actors, audiences, instruments for communication and action, and the broader moral, institutional frameworks in which the organizations operate. We review the field of paradox studies in management, then connect it to volunteer management, and then suggest ways that the dramaturgical approaches might help systematize some of the paradoxes that scholars have found in organizations that use volunteers. Next, the introduction summarizes this issue’s articles. Finally, we suggest that paradoxes take a more prominent role in studies of volunteer management.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Extended Case Method

  The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology · 2022-04-30

  other1st authorCorresponding

  The extended case method (ECM) is a broad approach to ethnographic research. Like all ethnographic methods, the ECM examines people in the course of “real‐life” action, in their own times and places, rather than in interviews or laboratories. Like other ethnography, the ECM emphasizes understanding people's own interpretations, as helping to constitute our shared reality. The ECM adds an emphasis on comparisons (between, for example, different actors, moments in the flow of action, organizations, or national contexts); on seeing connections between different field sites; on entering with, and revising, a theory; and on reflexivity to one's own social position with openness to dialogue. The goal is not to locate an ultimate truth, but to find the ways that multiple, varied realities, dispersed across multiple places and times and people, create each other over time.

  PublisherDOI

• Bringing Morality Back in: Three Interviews

  Nonprofit and civil society studies · 2022-11-07 · 1 citations

  book-chapterOpen access

  Abstract This chapter presents three interviews with three influential voices in the field of social movement and civil society studies, namely, those of Doug McAdam, Jeffrey Alexander, and Nina Eliasoph. They all share their perspectives on social movements’ role in society’s moral development, the role of morality internally in social movements, and the role of morality for social science as a practice. In addition, they each discuss the moral foundations and implications of three global contentious struggles: Doug McAdam discusses the background and implications of the 2021 riot at Capitol Hill as related to a global right-wing backlash protest cycle. Jeffrey Alexander discusses the cultural and moral significance of the #MeeToo movement and how it demonstrates the potentials of a global civil sphere. Finally, Nina Eliasoph discusses how the climate crisis presents itself as unimaginable in the sense that it will change everyone’s way of life so profoundly that we cannot imagine what the future may be like and suggests that prefigurative communities is one way activists can approach such a political issue.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• <i>Above the Fray: The Red Cross and the Making of the Humanitarian NGO Sector</i>. By Shai M. Dromi. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. Pp. 240. $82.50 (cloth); $27.50 (paper).

  American Journal of Sociology · 2021-09-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Bringing the Civic Landscape into Being: How Varied Patterns of Civic Action Respond to and Create Dilemmas in Empowerment Projects

  International Journal of Politics Culture and Society · 2020 · 6 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  PublisherDOI

• 25. What Do Volunteers Do?

  Stanford University Press eBooks · 2020-09-09

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• 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

• “Navigation Techniques”: How Ordinary Participants Orient Themselves in Scrambled Institutions

  2019-11-25 · 5 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract In organizations that have to meet demands from multiple sponsors, and that mix missions from different spheres, such as “civic,” “market,” “family,” how do participants orient themselves, so they can interact appropriately? Do participants’ practical navigation techniques have unintended consequences? To address these two questions, the authors draw on an ethnography of US youth programs whose sponsors required multiple, conflicting logics, speed, and precise documentation. The authors develop a concept, navigation techniques: participants’ shared unspoken methods of orienting themselves and appearing to meet demands from multiple logics, in institutionally complex projects that require frequent documentation. These techniques’ often have unintended consequences.

  PublisherDOI

• Making things political

  2018-11-01 · 5 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  While asking “who wields power over whom” is crucial, researchers need to take a prior step, to ask how people politicize or depoliticize other people, relationships, ideas, or institutions. Through what shared methods does politicizing or depoliticizing happen? Those methods, central to political culture, involve two combined kinds of political-cultural work: actors use shared if often contested moral vocabularies and/or narratives to characterize political acts and relationships. Those discourses become fully meaningful, in turn, as actors coordinate interaction in social scenes, guided by implicit understandings of “what we are doing here.” Scene style is participants’ implicit way of coordinating action and defining the meaning of action in a scene. A society’s political life hosts a finite number of scene styles. Focusing especially on scene style, the chapter reveals methods by which people make things political, drawing illustrations from church-based community service groups and youth civic engagement projects. Different methods afford different openings for politicized expression that could neither be predicted simply by actors’ social location nor understood purely in terms of domination and resistance. By focusing on how actors make things political, researchers may grasp globally varied, patterned ways that political action inhabits different institutions and social spaces.

  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…