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Dr Chana Teeger

Dr Chana Teeger

Assistant Professor

Department of Methodology

Email
c.teeger@lse.ac.uk
Room No
CON.2.12
Office Hours
Please refer to Student Hub for details
Languages
English
Key Expertise
Inequality, Qualitative research methods, South Africa

About me

"At its core, my research [into how young people in South Africa learn about the country's apartheid past and think about race and inequality in the present] grapples with the question of how people understand the causes of—and potential remedies for—inequality."
- Dr Chana Teeger reflects on the key interest in her current research as part of our 30th Anniversary celebrations. Read the full close-up with Methodology faculty.

Chana Teeger is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Methodology and a Faculty Associate of the International Inequalities Institute. She completed her PhD in Sociology at Harvard University in 2013. Prior to joining the LSE in 2016, she held a postdoctoral fellowship in the Sociology Department at the University of Johannesburg.

Research Interests

Chana’s work broadly examines how people understand the causes and consequences of inequality, as well as what policies they are willing to endorse to remedy it. She is currently working on three related projects:

(1) A study of how young South Africans, born into democracy, learn about their country’s apartheid past in school. Her book, Distancing the Past: How History Lessons Teach Young South Africans to Ignore Racial Inequality in the Present is forthcoming in July 2024 with Columbia University Press.

(2) A project on how elites in Brazil and South Africa think about inequality and redistribution (with Graziella Moraes Silva, Matias López, and Livio Silva Muller).

(3) A VW Foundation-funded cross-national project on how people talk about wealth inequality (with David Schieferdecker, Flavio Alex de Oliveira Carvalhaes, Jonathan Mijs, and Jeremy Seekings).

For more information, visit https://www.chanateeger.com/

Publications

Journal Articles

Teeger, Chana. 2023. “(Not) Feeling the Past: Boredom as a Racialized Emotion.” American Journal of Sociology 129(1): 1-40.

Knott Eleanor, Aliya Hamid Rao, Kate Summers, and Chana Teeger. 2022. “Interviews in the Social Sciences” Nature Reviews Methods Primers 2(73): 1-15.

López, Matias, Graziella Moraes Silva, Chana Teeger, and Pedro Marques. 2022. “Economic and Cultural Determinants of Elite Attitudes Towards Redistribution” Socio-Economic Review 22(2): 489-514.

Teeger, Chana. 2015. “‘Both Sides of the Story’: History Education in Post-Apartheid South Africa.” American Sociological Review 88(6): 1175-1200.

Teeger, Chana. 2015. “Ruptures in the Rainbow Nation: How Desegregated South African Schools Deal with Interpersonal and Structural Racism.” Sociology of Education 88(3): 226-243.

Teeger, Chana. 2014. “Collective Memory and Collective Fear: How South Africans Use the Past to Explain Crime.” Qualitative Sociology 37(1): 69-92.

Vinitzky-Seroussi, Vered and Chana Teeger. 2010. “Unpacking the Unspoken: Silence in Collective Memory and Forgetting.” Social Forces 88(3): 1103-1122.

Teeger, Chana and Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi. 2007. “Controlling for Consensus: Commemorating Apartheid in South Africa.” Symbolic Interaction 30(1): 57-78.

Book Chapters

Moraes Silva, Graziella, Matias López, Elisa Reis, and Chana Teeger. 2022. “Who are the Elite? What do they think about Inequality? And why does it Matter?” pp. 151-174 Katja Hugo and Maggie Carter (Eds.) Between Fault Lines and Front Lines: Shifting Power in an Unequal World. London: Bloomsbury.

Vinitzky-Seroussi, Vered and Chana Teeger. 2019. “Silence and Collective Memory” pp. 663-674 in Wayne H. Brekhaus and Gabe Ignatow (Eds.) Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Sociology. Oxford University Press.

Teeger, Chana. 2018. “Transformation as a Matter of State Rather than Degree: Thinking Beyond School Desegregation,” pp. 523-540 in Rob Pattman and Ronelle Carolissen (Eds.) Transforming Transformation in Research and Teaching at South African Universities. Stellenbosch: SUN Press.

Public Sociology

Teeger, Chana. “What Does Boredom Teach Us about How we Engage with History?” Behavioral Scientist, 18 September 2023. 

Teeger, Chana. “History Teachers Must Not Tell ‘Both Sides’ of Apartheid Story.” Mail & Guardian, 4 December 2015.

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