Chasing Events: 9/11 and Other Cases in the American, French, and Dutch Public Spheres (2001 – 2021) - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Thijs van Dooremalen is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs, Leiden University, the Netherlands. He previously worked at the University of Amsterdam, KU Leuven, and Harvard University.

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“With clarity and imagination, Thijs van Dooremalen develops a major new approach for the study of events. The approach goes beyond existing formulations that see events as sudden ruptures by reconceptualizing them as potentially long-term phenomena that fundamentally involve meaning-making processes. Through rigorous and painstaking data collection, van Dooremalen reveals how the event of 9/11 set into motion different path-dependent processes of framing and understanding in the United States, France, and the Netherlands. This book offers a brilliant theoretical reorientation, an outstanding empirical analysis, and merits much attention from a broad interdisciplinary social science audience.”
—James Mahoney, Professor of Sociology and Political Science, Northwestern University

“Chasing Events offers an original comparative cultural sociology of events, with a focus on discursive processes that make events differently “real” and consequential for three different national public spheres. The author helps move theorization in novel directions, connecting with disciplinary literatures concerned with understanding historical causality with the help of concepts such as “path dependency,” “critical moments,” and “conjuncture of structure.” Students of social change have much to learn from this book, which I recommend highly.”
—Michèle Lamont, Past President of the American Sociological Association

This book introduces a novel research approach to capture event effects: ‘chasing’ the direct associations actors make with them. Thijs van Dooremalen applies this approach to the meaning-making of 9/11 and a variety of other cases — the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Madrid train and Charlie Hebdo attacks, the Arab Spring, the first Trump election, and COVID — across the American, French, and Dutch public spheres. Combining computational and qualitative text analyses, he ‘chases’ these events from 2001 to 2021. This results in key lessons on how foreign events spark domestic debates, under which conditions they evoke social change, and their long-term, path dependent ‘lives’.

Thijs van Dooremalen is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs, Leiden University, the Netherlands. He previously worked at the University of Amsterdam, KU Leuven, and Harvard University.