Division of Social Studies Events

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Film Screening: "Harlan County, U. S. A."

Monday, November 10, 2025
7:30–9:30 pm

Preston Theater
Please join the members of PS276 "From Strike to Revolution: The Politics of Work and Work Refusal" for a screening of Harlan County U.S.A. (1976, dir. Barbara Kopple). This classic film—which won the 49th Academy Award for Best Documentary—documents an Eastern Kentucky mine-workers' strike unfolding in real time. As they fight to win union recognition and a contract, workers and their families must confront not only violence from scabs and the local police, but also internal struggles about strike strategy and the racial and gender dynamics of the movement. See the trailer for the film here.
For more information, call 845-758-6822, or e-mail [email protected].

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An Image of Colonial Violence Pulled from the Air

A talk by Nabil Ahmed, co-director, INTRPRT

Thursday, November 20, 2025
5 pm

Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium
Sponsored by: Environmental and Urban Studies Program; Human Rights Project.

For more information, call 845-758-6822, or e-mail [email protected].

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What do people complain about when they complain about banks?
Text Analysis of Consumer Complaints Submitted to the CFPB

Kathy Copas, PhD Candidate in Sociology, Northwestern University

Monday, November 24, 2025
5 pm

Olin Humanities, Room 102
Consumer complaints are a powerful window into how individuals experience and contest financial institutions. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), established after the 2008 financial crisis, was founded to protect consumers from unfair practices, in part by mediating disputes between firms and consumers. The recent federal attacks on the CFPB underscore the importance of leveraging this unique data source. This study compares complaints lodged against banks and credit unions using grounded computational theory, which is a method that blends qualitative and computational techniques to generate more robust and replicable findings. Credit unions are cooperative, not-for-profit institutions that present themselves as more customer-focused, raising the expectation that their complaints will differ from those about commercial banks. Structural topic models, qualitative coding, and word embedding regressions reveal that credit union complaints more frequently invoke moralized language, emphasizing how institutional actions created a “burden” or how the treatment is “unfair.” Although bank customers also used this language, they did not do it to the same extent, and most of their complaints focused on the personal issue at hand. Findings from this study emphasize the value in examining credit unions separately from banks and demonstrate the value of using complaint data.Sponsored by: Dean of the College; Sociology Program.

For more information, call 845-758-6822.