More than vacation

Faculty, students keep busy summer schedule

 

Summer is often thought of as vacation time, but for Sociology faculty and graduate students, it is peak time for engagement outside the University and the intellectual renewal that goes with it. Although these efforts continue throughout the year, they are most prevalent over the summer months.

These engagements provide insight into the diversity of ideas being investigated in student and faculty research. The learning from these exchanges are likely to become important aspects of courses and seminars taught during the coming year.

This report also shows our department’s involvement in professional organizations, which fosters the meeting of professionals with similar interests. Despite the increasingly easy electronic access we now have to ideas generated by others, conferences such as the one mentioned here have never been more important for sharing and picking up new ideas to guide research and instruction.

Graduate Students

Valerie Adrian presented a paper, “Finding Empathy on Craigslist: Using Technology to Teach Social Problems” in August at the Society for the Study of Social Problems annual conference held in Chicago. She also presided over a roundtable session, “Family Leave and Flexible Work Arrangements” for the Section on Occupations, Organizations and Work, at the ASA annual meeting.

Ashley Colby presented preliminary results from her dissertation, “Structures and Meanings in Subsistence Food Production” at the Society for the Study of Social Problems conference and the ASA Science, Knowledge and Technology (SKAT) section 25^th Anniversary mini-conference in Chicago.

Lauren Scott, and Rayna Sage (PhD, 2012) presented a paper, “Emotional Labor, Healthy Boundaries, and Self-Care in Rural Human Service Work” at the Rural Sociological Society annual meetings.

Jon Schreiner presented a paper, “Measurement Errors that Reduce Accuracy of Racial and Ethnic Identification in the U.S. Decennial Census,” at the ASA Annual meeting in Chicago. He also presented “Hopes and Expectations: The Impact of DNA Ancestry Testing on Identity” at the SKAT section mini-conference.

Anthony Vega spent the summer months in a paid internship at the USDA Economic Research Service in Washington, D.C.

Annika Anderson (PhD, 2015), who will be joining the Department of Sociology at California State University, San Bernardino in September, presented a paper titled “Race/Ethnicity, Cognitive Transformation and Desistance from Crime,” at the annual meeting of the Justice Studies Association in Bridgewater, Mass.

Pierce Greenberg presented a paper entitled “Towards a Resource-Based Environmental Inequality: A Case Study of Coal Waste Impoundments in Appalachia” at an ASA session on dimensions of rural inequality. He also presented a paper entitled “Social Movements Research and Access to Information: Insights and Applications” at the Collective Behavior and Social Movements Workshop at Northwestern University prior to ASA. In October, he is conducting a workshop at the Association for Humanist Sociology annual conference in Portland with Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Nigel Jaquiss titled “Using Public Records Research to Enact Social Change.”

Jarred Williams is presenting a paper, “A Quantitative Analysis of the Effects of Prison Closures on Imprisonment Rates and New Court Commitments, 2000-2013,” at the American Society of Criminology annual meeting in November in Washington, D.C.

Faculty

Jennifer Givens participated in a Statistical Horizons May seminar in on Structural Equation Modeling in Atlanta. In August, she presented a paper, “Global Integration and the Carbon Intensity of well-being: A Cross National Analysis 1990-2011″ at an ASA roundtable session.

Clay Mosher, in collaboration with the Clark County Juvenile Court, received a grant of $100,000 from the Washington State Partnership on Juvenile Justice to reduce racial and ethnic disparities in the juvenile justice system. He also completed an evaluation of the Clark County Juvenile Court’s “Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative that was presented to local judges, juvenile justice system staff and county commissioners on June 19^th.

Katrina Leupp presented a paper titled “Mental Health, Social Roles and the Gendered Life Course” at the ASA annual meeting.

Emily Huddart Kennedy presented a paper, “Small-p politics: Political Apathy and Civic Life in the Eat-Local Movement” at the ASA meeting, and co-taught (with Kari Norgaard and Julie Bacon) a workshop for the Environment and Technology section, “Teaching Race, Gender, and Colonialism within Environmental Sociology.“ In addition, Kennedy received an ADVANCE external mentor grant to work with Dr. Norgaard and is co-principal investigator with Ann Dale on a $290,000 grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Raoul Líevanos and graduate student Pierce Greenberg presented “Treadmill of Production and Rural Political Ecology: The Case of Kentucky Coal Extraction and Waste” at The Dimensions of Political Ecology Conference, at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, KY in February.

In June, Raoul Líevanos presented a seminar for The Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology at the University of Washington in Seattle: entitled, “Race, Deprivation, and Immigrant Isolation: The Spatial Demography of Air-Toxic Clusters in the United States.” Líevanos also presented, “Within the Master’s House: Cumulative Impact, Precaution, and Contradictory State Spaces in Environmental Justice Policy” at the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, in June, and made a presentation on the same topic at SKAT 25: New Directions after a Quarter-Century of the Sociology of Science, Knowledge, and Technology,” an August mini-conference of the American Sociological Association Science, Knowledge, and Technology Section, in Chicago, IL. He also presented, “Socio-spatial Dimensions of Water Injustice: The Distribution of Surface Water Toxic Releases in California’s Bay-Delta,” at an Environment and Technology Section Roundtable at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association.

Erik Johnson and Phillip Schwadel presented “The Social Origins of Evangelical Protestants’ Opposition to Environmental Spending,” at the American Sociological Association August meeting. Johnson also presented “Environmental Movements” at a roundtable for the Section on Environment and Technology.

Jennifer Sherman presented a paper, “Not Friends with the Right People: Gentrification, Stratification, and Marginalization in Amenity-Rich Rural Washington,” at the Rural Sociological Society Annual Meeting in Madison, Wis. She also co-chaired the RSS Gender Research Interest Group that met during the meeting. Sherman also became a Fellow with the Comparative Research Programme on Poverty (CROP) of the International Social Science Council for 2015-2018. In addition, she has received a $3,000 from the ASA’s Sydney S. Spivack Program in Applied Social Research and Social Policy Community Action Research grant for transcription of interview data on “Amenity Tourism and Inequality in Rural Washington,” collected during her just completed sabbatical.

Julie Kmec was informed that a previously published article, “The ‘State’ of Equal Employment Opportunity Law and Managerial Gender Diversity,” is one of 10 finalists, for the Rosabeth Moss Kanter Aware for Excellence in Work-Family Research. She was also appointed section editor of the social stratification section of the journal, Sociology Compass, and invited to join the editorial board of another journal, Research in the Sociology of Work.

Alair MacLean, Meredith Kleykamp, and John Robert Warren presented: “Historical Change in Labor Market Outcomes among Veterans, 1967-2013” at the International Sociological Association Research Committee on Social Stratification and Mobility in Tilburg, Netherlands in May. MacLean also presented, “Race and Class in the Iraq-Era Armed Forces” at ASA annual meeting in August. In addition, she is a member of the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Strengthening Data Science Methods for Department of Defense Personnel and Readiness Missions.

Jennifer Schwartz will be presenting “Examining 21^st Century Corporate Financial Fraud: Preliminary Findings from SEC Filings” this November in Washington, D.C., at the annual American Society of Criminology meetings.

James F. Short, Jr. and Lori Hughes (PhD, 2003) are presenting a paper, “Female Gangs and the Roles of Females in the Lives of Male Gang Members in Chicago, 1959-1962,” at the American Society of Criminology meetings in November. Short will also chair an author meets critics session at those metings to discuss “Iraq and the Crimes of Aggressive War” (Cambridge University Press by John HAGAN, Josh Kaqiser and Anne Hanson) and “Representing Mass Violence: Conflicting Responses to Human Rights Violationis in Darfur,” (University of Chicago Press by Joachim J. Savelsberg). These works note the operation of group processes in these locales that are similar to group processes in street gang violence that came out of Short’s earlier gang studies in Chicago.

In April, Monica Kirkpatrick Johnson co-authored a presentation, “Parental Education and Child Well-Being: A Prospective Longitudinal Study,” and a poster, “Occupational Uncertainty and the Transition to Cohabitation,” at the annual conference of the Population Association of America. In October, she will present a paper, “The ‘Bank of Mom and Dad”: Patterns of Financial Support to Young Adults in Tough Economic Times,” at the Society for Longitudinal and Life Course Studies in Dublin, Ireland. She also served on the ASA Section on Aging and the Life Course Committee for the Outstanding Publication Award and the ASA Social Psychology Section Cooley-Mead Award Selection Committee.

Christine Horne gave a plenary address, “Social Norms and Institutions,” at Congressi Stefano Franscini, Monte Verita, in Ascona, Switzerland, in May.

Don A. Dillman, presented a paper, “Mistakes Being Made in the Rush to Web Surveys” at the annual conference of the American Association for Public Opinion Research. At the June meeting of the Federal Economic Statistics Advisory Committee, he was the discussant for commissioned papers on the challenges associated with the use of smartphones for responding to surveys. He also gave a keynote address, “Mixed-mode Solutions to the People Problems Facing Web Surveys,” to WEBDATANET, a European Union Conference on internet data collection methodologies in Salamanca, Spain.

Michael Sullivan (PhD 1984), Caren Leong, Candice Churchwell (all from Nexant, Inc. in San Francisco) and Don A. Dillman, presented a paper, “Measurement and cost effects of pushing Household survey respondents to the web for surveys of electricity and gas customers in the United States,” in July at the European Survey Research Association biennial conference in Reykjavik, Iceland.