ANN SWIDLER (PhD UC Berkeley; BA Harvard) studies the interplay of culture and institutions. She asks how culture works–both how people use it and how it shapes social life. Until recently she has worked on American culture, especially the culture of love and marriage. A recent essay, “Saving the Self” (in Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler, and Tipton, eds., Meaning and Modernity, California, 2001) analyzes the demands that contemporary changes in American institutions place on the individualized self. In 2001, her book, Talk of Love: How Culture Matters (Chicago), examines how actors select among elements of their cultural repertoires and how culture gets organized “from the outside in” by Codes, Contexts, and Institutions. In the co-authored Habits of the Heart and The Good Society, she and her collaborators analyzed the consequences of American individualism for individual selfhood, community, and political and economic institutions. With colleagues from the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, she is currently engaged in an ambitious project to understand the societal determinants of human health and well being.

Swidler’s current research is on cultural and institutional responses to the AIDS epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa. She is interested in how the massive international AIDS effort in sub-Saharan Africa–the infusion of money, organizations, programs and projects–interacts with existing cultural and institutional patterns to create new dilemmas and new possibilities. She is exploring these issues from two directions:

From the international side, she examines how the international AIDS effort is structured (who provides money to whom, how collaborative networks are structured, how programs get organized on the ground); why some interventions are favored over others; and what organizational forms international funders opt for.

From the African side, she is exploring why the NGO sector is more robust in some countries than others; when international AIDS efforts stimulate vs. impede or derail local efforts; and what organizational syncretisms sometimes emerge. She has become fascinated by the “Botswana Paradox”: why Botswana–with ample funding and an honest, effective government committed to fighting AIDS–has utterly failed to slow the epidemic, while other African countries (Uganda most notably, but also Zambia, Tanzania, and parts of South Africa) have had substantially greater success despite much more limited efforts.

Professor Swidler teaches sociology of culture, sociology of religion, and sociological theory. Her interests increasingly touch on political sociology, development, and sociology of science and medicine as well.