Meredith Hall

Meredith Hall is a doctoral candidate in sociology at The New School for Social Research. Her dissertation, The Claiming of Color: An Inquiry into the Processes of Modern Possession 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 inventions, resources, or commodities? Are they created or discovered? Who gets credit for innovations in color? Meredith aims to answer these questions by examining the market in color as part of a larger economic sociology of attribution. Her work brings together sociological literature on standardization and classification, research on 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 during the twentieth century. She also holds a master’s degree in Women’s and Gender Studies from Rutgers University and most recently co-authored, along with Robin Wagner-Pacifici, “The Resolution of Social Conflict” for the Annual Review of Sociology (2012).