Contact Information
Urbana, IL 61801 MC-442
Biography
Zsuzsa Gille is Professor of Sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is author of From the Cult of Waste to the Trash Heap of History: The Politics of Waste in Socialist and Postsocialist Hungary (Indiana University Press 2007—recipient of honorable mention of the AAASS Davis Prize), co-editorof Post-Communist Nostalgia with Maria Todorova (Berghahn Press 2010),and co-author of Global Ethnography: Forces, Connections and Imaginations in a Postmodern World (University of California Press, 2000). She was the special guest editor of Slavic Review’s thematic cluster on Nature, Culture, Power (2009). She has published on issues of qualitative methodology as it relates to globalization and new concepts of space, on environmental politics and on the sociology of food.
Research Interests
Environmental Sociology
Eastern Europe
European Union
Global and Transnational Sociology
Sociology of Consumption
Sociology of Food
Sociology of Knowledge
Materiality
Waste
Contemporary Social Theory
Ethnography
Research Description
My research lies at the intersection of transnational sociology (with a focus on the European Union andpostsocialist countries), environmental sociology, and the sociology of consumption. Rather than constituting myself as a narrowly focused specialist in these subdisciplines, I make them speak to each other in ways that open up new research directions. My empirical inquiries have been motivated by theoretical questions concerning the nature of local-global relations, the role cultureplays in large-scale social transformations, and the role of nature and thematerial object world in shaping society. I pursue these questions empirically in my qualitative and historical research, which explores the relationship between identity politics and economic grievances that emerge from the effect of globalization and EU legal harmonization in the areas of the environment andagriculture. I am particularly interested in environmental, safety and ethical standards in food production and their effects on economic inequality. Most recently I have turned to the investigation of materiality, that is how nature and the object world help shape society. The methodological approach I apply, which is informed by the extended case method,relational comparison and global ethnography, allows me to study individualcases in great depth while at the same time tying them to large-scale social transformations.
Education
Ph.D., Sociology, University of California, Santa Cruz. 1999.
Grants
Courses Taught
SOC 596 Nature and Technology from Transnational Perspective
SOC 582 Global Ethnographies: A Graduate Study in Local-Global Relations
SOC 501 Contemporary Theory: Power, Culture and Subjectivity
SOC 522 Recent Developments in the Study of Postsocialism
SOC 447 Environmental Sociology: Nature, Culture, Power
SOC 480 Fieldwork Methods: Consuming Observations
SOC 366 Postsocialism: Economy, Culture and Power in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union
SOC 496ZG Identity, Culture, and Citizenship in the New European Union
SOC 396 Globalization From Below
Additional Campus Affiliations
Professor, Sociology
Professor, Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory
Affiliate, Geography and Geographic Information Science
Professor, Global Studies Programs and Courses
Professor, European Union Center
Professor, Russian, East European and Eurasian Center
External Links
Honors & Awards
BOOK AWARD: 2008. American Association for the Study of Slavic Societies (Predecessor of ASEEES). Davis Prize, honorable mention for From the Cult of Waste to the Trash Heap of History: The Politics of Waste in Socialist and Postsocialist Hungary.
Evaluated as excellent teacher in Spring 2000 and Fall 2000, Fall 2002, Spring 2005, Fall 2006, Fall 2010, Spring 2011 (UIUC).
Highlighted Publications
Gille, Z., & Lepawsky, J. (Eds.) (2022). The Routledge Handbook of Waste Studies. (Routledge Environment and Sustainability Handbooks). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003019077
Gille, Z. (2016). Paprika, foie gras, and red mud: The Politics of materiality in the European Union. Indiana University Press.
Gille, Z. (2007). From the Cult of Waste to the Trash Heap of History: The Politics of Waste in Socialist and Postsocialist Hungary. Indiana University Press.
Burawoy, M., Blum, J., George, S., Gille, Z., Gowan, T., Haney, L., Klawiter, M., Lopez, S., Riain, S., & Thayer, M. (2000). Global Ethnography: Forces, Connections and Imaginations in a Postmodern World. University of California Press.
Gille, Z. (2010). Actor networks, modes of production, and waste regimes: Reassembling the macro-social. Environment and Planning A, 42(5), 1049-1064. https://doi.org/10.1068/a42122
Gille, Z. (2010). Is there a global postsocialist condition? Global Society, 24(1), 9-30. https://doi.org/10.1080/13600820903431953
Recent Publications
Gille, Z. (2023). Europeanising Hungarian Waste Policies: Progress or Regression? In Eu Enlargement and the Environment: Institutional Change and Environmental Policy in Central and Eastern Europe (pp. 114-134). Taylor and Francis. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003416630-9
Gille, Z. (2023). Global waste. In Research Handbook on the Sociology of Globalization (pp. 83-95). Edward Elgar Publishing. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781839101571.00016
Gille, Z., Lepawsky, J., Alexander, C., & Gregson, N. (2022). At home with the waste scholar. In Z. Gille, & J. Lepawski (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Waste Studies (pp. 20-27). (Routledge Environment and Sustainability Handbooks). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003019077-2
Gille, Z., & Lepawsky, J. (2022). Introduction: waste studies as a field. In Z. Gille, & J. Lepawsky (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Waste Studies (pp. 3-19). (Routledge Environment and Sustainability Handbooks). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003019077-1
Gille, Z., & Lepawsky, J. (Eds.) (2022). The Routledge Handbook of Waste Studies. (Routledge Environment and Sustainability Handbooks). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003019077