USC.edu

Oded Marom

Dornsife Fellow in General Education
Oded Marom
Pronouns He / Him / His Email omarom@usc.edu

Biography

I was born and raised in Israel and have moved to the U.S with my wife in 2013 to study at the University of Chicago. My academic background includes communication studies and comparative literature (B.A) and political science and public communication (M.A.). In University of Chicago, I joined the Master of Arts Program in the Social Sciences (MAPSS), where I focused on political science and sociology.Before moving to the U.S., I worked for ten years as a journalist in Israel, two of which as the chief editor of two of Israel’s leading magazines for children and young adults.

I have two beautiful children, Daniel (6.5) and Avigail (4), who are by far my greatest accomplishment.

Education

  • M.A. Sociology, University of Chicago, 2014
  • M.A. Political Science, Bar-Ilan University, 2010
  • DIPL Communication, Bar-Ilan University, 2007
  • B.A. Comparative Literature, Bar-Ilan University, 2005

  • Summary Statement of Research Interests

    I am a cultural and political sociologist and a current postdoctoral fellow at the Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Science at the University of Southern California. My research focuses on how complex social problems such as political polarization, partisan intolerance, and radical extremism take shape in people’s everyday lives. In my work, I use various qualitative methods, including participant observation, focus group discussions, and content analysis, to explore the daily cultural mechanisms that guide people’s political behaviors and attitudes.

    My previous work used the American libertarian movement as a case study to show how cultural variations in local civic groups lead to meaningful differences in their political outcomes. As I show in a series of articles, even though they share the same ideology in theory, libertarian groups adopt varying patterns of interaction with meaningful implications for their political outcomes. As I show, as civic groups develop local interaction cultures, they also guide their members toward distinct understandings of their political goals, what counts as appropriate political action, and even what is a legitimate political argument. These local cultures also shape people’s attitudes toward other political camps and their tendencies for radical action.

    My current book project analyses different libertarian civic organizations to explore how cultural variations between their groups help predict differences in their political outcomes. Drawing on insights from other scientific disciplines, the book develops an ecological model for the relationship between culture and action and proposes a new way of thinking about causality in cultural sociology.

    My other projects explore different angles of the relationship between local context and social behavior, whether in online social movements, the microbiome industry, or professional advocacy groups.

    Research Keywords

    Political sociology, Sociology of culture, Sociological theory, Media sociology, Collective behavior, Social media, Civic engagement, Ideology, American libertarian movement

  • Journal Article

    • Marom, O. (2024). Situational Orders: Interaction Patterns and the Standards for Evaluating Public Discourse. Sociological Theory. Vol. 42(1) (https), pp. /doi.org/10.1177/07352751231218479.
    • Marom, O. (2024). Patterns of tolerance: how interaction culture and community relations explain political tolerance (and intolerance) in the American libertarian movement. Theory and Society. Vol. 53 (547-570)
    • Marom, O. (2022). Prefigurative politics. Mafteakh: Lexical Review of Political Thought. (18) Full Text (Hebrew)
    • Winner of the American Political Science Association’s Section on Civic Engagement Best Paper Award, 2022-2023
    • Winner of the 2019 Center for Communal Studies Graduate Paper Prize, 2019-2020
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