Michael Strand (Brandeis University) will be giving a talk as an invited guest in the Department of Sociology and Criminology. His research and teaching interests range from classical and contemporary social theory, to the philosophy of social science, culture, morality, knowledge, and economic sociology. In his recent work, he has examined whether our beliefs and interests actually affect our actions, the way in which social scientists make causal arguments using metaphors, how fans assess and evaluate popular music differently according to genre, and how social justice first emerged during the nineteenth century in Britain.