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Funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Graduate Institute for Design, Ethnography & Social Thought at the New School incubates advanced transdisciplinary research and practice at the intersection of social theory and design and fosters dialogue on related themes across the university.

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Meredith Hall

Meredith Hall is a doctoral candidate in Sociology at The New School for Social Research. Her dissertation research sets out to develop a theoretical framework for the sociological study of attribution—the social process of assigning credit for the creation of an idea or work.

 

MEREDITH HALL is a doctoral candidate in Sociology at The New School for Social Research. Her dissertation project, Do Colors Have Owners, Authors, Neither or Both? Case Studies in Attribution as a Social Process, sets out to develop a theoretical framework for the sociological study of attribution—the social process of assigning credit for the creation of an idea or work. Are colors treated as inventions, resources, or commodities? Do we regard them as created or discovered? Who gets credit for innovations in color?

As a GIDEST fellow, Meredith aims to answer these questions by examining three case studies related to the market in color as part of a larger economic sociology of attribution. Her dissertation brings together the sociological literature on standardization and classification, social studies of scientific and artistic production processes, and critical legal studies on property rights to help explain how color developed as an object of ownership and credit in the United States from the early 1900s to the present.

Alongside of this work, Meredith has held positions in the field of human rights advocacy, including internships in the Governance, Peace, and Security section of the former United Nations Development Fund for Women and the PEN American Center’s Freedom to Write Program. She holds Master’s degrees in Women’s and Gender Studies from Rutgers University and Sociology from the New School and has most recently co-­authored, along with Robin Wagner-­Pacifici, “The Resolution of Social Conflict” for the Annual Review of Sociology (2012).