Cassandra Sever is a cultural sociologist and social theorist whose work investigates how cultures generate shared meaning and why that shared basis can weaken even amid intense symbolic production. Drawing on classical and twentieth-century thought alongside cultural sociology, she develops a structural account of symbolic integration and its limits.
Her research examines how authority, interpretive criteria, and experiential credibility align—or fail to align—across publics, and how breakdowns in that alignment generate polarization, nostalgia, and recurrent struggles over legitimacy.
Her current book project, The Architecture of Despair: Culture, Authority, and Meaning in Crisis (working title), explains why modern societies experience cycles of integrative strain and why attempts to restore coherence can both stabilize and destabilize plural public life.
She serves as Managing Editor of the American Journal of Cultural Sociology.