Student & Faculty Accomplishments
Extending sociology throughout the year: student and faculty accomplishments 2018
Summers are a particularly busy time for participating in seminars and other activities that encourage learning new ideas and skills as well as sharing the results of one’s creativity with others.
In this report we share the accomplishments of both faculty and graduate students, including participation in professional activities, collaborations with colleagues, and serving as a resource to others. These activities help shape new ideas for projects, dissertations, and writing activities.
As editors we are struck by the diversity of topics being addressed by graduate students and faculty in trainings, presentations, and service activities occurring locally, throughout the United States, and internationally.
The March 2019 issue of Sociology News will share the year’s written work, much of which is a natural follow-up to the activities described here.
Graduate student training activities
Yikang Bai was awarded the Foley Graduate Fellowship from the Thomas S. Foley Institute at WSU. Bai used this award to attend a statistics course in longitudinal methods taught by Paul Allison (University of Pennsylvania; Statistical Horizons).
Ashley Colby (PhD, ’18) received a renewed contract to host University of Idaho’s Alternative Winter Break program for Colby’s Rizoma Field School in Uruguay, South America.
Morgan Montañez attended the CER Workshop for Intensive Ethnography, a one-week workshop led by Martín Sánchez-Jankowski and Corey Abramson, with guest lectures from scholars such as Nancy Scheper-Hughes. It provided insight from other qualitative researchers on what is expected when doing fieldwork, current debates on how to best utilize particular methods, and data analysis tools that are allowing this form of research to take new directions.
Adam Roth participated in the LIVES workshop, “Social Networks, Social Participation, and Life Transitions: A Life Course Perspective” at the Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences (March 2018, Bremen, Germany).
Namrata Ray is one of ten individuals selected to receive a Network Science Fellowship for the Visible Network Labs and University of Colorado Denver’s Center on Network Science and participation in a fully sponsored workshop in Denver, CO.
Christopher Santucci successfully completed the Network Science Fellowship for Visible Network Labs under Dr. Danielle Varda, culminating in a three-day network analysis workshop at the University of Colorado – Denver.
Faculty grants and recognition
Christine Horne received funding (with Emily Kennedy, University of British Columbia) from the National Science Foundation’s Time Sharing Experiments in the Social Sciences (TESS), for their research on accidental environmentalists.
Julie Kmec received a National Science Foundation (NSF) Human Resources Development (HRD) Award #1561430. “COLLABORATIVE: Women’s Engineering Participation in the US: What can the US Learn from Women’s Decisions to Pursue Engineering in Diverse Cultural Contexts?” ($589,200). Kmec is a PI along with Dr. Jennifer DeBoer (Purdue University), and co-PIs Dr. Ashley Ater-Kranov, and Dr. Nehal Abu-Lail (WSU-Engineering)
Clay Mosher received the Epperson Award from the WSU College of Arts and Sciences to support his work analyzing racial and ethnic disparities in juvenile justice system processing in Clark County (with wider applications to the state), and racial/ethnic disparities in school discipline policies in Clark County (as well as within school districts in the county, and schools within each district).
Jennifer Sherman’s edited volume, Rural Poverty in the United States, has been awarded the Rural Sociological Society’s (RSS) Frederick H. Buttel Outstanding Scholarly Achievement Award. Sherman has signed a contract with University of California Press for her upcoming book, Dividing Paradise.
Erik Johnson was mentioned in the Pacific Standard and on various radio programs for research with Phil Schwadel (Nebraska) looking at individuals’ declining willingness to spend money in support of protecting the environment, as they age. Radio mentions come from Public News Service.
Graduate student presentations at professional meetings
Eric Allen. “The Gendered Health Consequences of Workplace Discrimination” Pacific Sociological Conference in Long Beach, CA. Allen also organized and presided over a session titled “Preparing Graduate Students for Teaching-Focused Colleges and Universities,” at the Pacific Sociological Conference in Long Beach, CA.
Yikang Bai. “The Sociology of Ecologically Unequal Exchange and Plastic Waste Trade” presented at Environmental Injustice in the World-System Session at the 68th Annual Meeting of the Society for the Study of Social Problems, Philadelphia. Bai also prepared invited presentations for the 2018 Integrated Network for Social Sustainability Graduate Student Symposium, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and the Duck Family Graduate Workshop in Environmental Politics and Governance, Center for Environmental Politics, University of Washington.
Lindsey Beltz and Professor Jennifer Schwartz. “Trends in Female and Male Drunk Driving Prevalence over Thirty Years: Triangulating Diverse Sources of Evidence.” Section on Sociology of Alcohol, Drugs and Tobacco at the American Sociological Association Annual Meeting, Philadelphia, PA, August 2018.
Marisa Cervantes and Associate Professor Jennifer Sherman. “‘Isn’t That the Cycle?’ An Examination of the Intergenerational Transmission of Violence Among Low-Income Women.” Formal paper presentation at the Pacific Sociological Association Annual Meeting, Long Beach, CA.
Gina Castillo and Marisa Cervantes. “Starting a URM Mentoring Program for Undergraduate Sociology Majors at a PWI in the Inland Northwest: Experiences of First Generation Latinx Graduate Students.” Panel Presentation at the Pacific Sociological Association Annual Meeting, Long Beach, CA.
Marisa Cervantes and Associate Professor Jennifer Sherman. “‘Isn’t That the Cycle?’ The Normalization of Intergenerational Domestic Violence Among Low-Income Women.” Roundtable presentation at the Sociologists for Women in Society Annual Winter Meeting, Atlanta, GA.
Ashley Colby. “‘It connects me to the Earth’: Marginalized Environmentalism, Ecological Embeddedness and a Resistance to Capitalist Logic.” Center for Environmental Research, Education, and Outreach (CEREO), Washington State University, August 2018. Colby also presented, “Marginalized Resilient Futures,” Integrated Network for Social Sustainability Conference, Charlotte, NC, June 2018; and “‘It connects me to the Earth’: Marginalized Environmentalism, Ecological Embeddedness and a Resistance to Capitalist Logic,” at the Rural Sociological Society 2018, Portland, OR, July 2018.
Jonathan Dahlem. “The Social Construction of Ocean-space and Sea Level Rise Policy in Aberdeen and Bainbridge Island, Washington.” Session on Environmental Sociology: Case Studies of Natural Resource Extraction, Conservation, and Contestation. Pacific Sociological Association Annual Meeting in Long Beach, CA, March 2018. Dahlem also presented, “Exploring Cultural Determinants of Species Extinction: Relating Ecological Alienation and Biodiversity Loss.” Roundtable Session on Ecological Crisis and Environmental Justice at the American Sociological Association Annual Meeting, Philadelphia, PA, August 2018.
Alana Inlow. “Land Use Zones and Homicide in Portland, Oregon.” Session on Macro-Level Factors Associated with Crime and Enforcement. Pacific Sociological Association Annual Meeting in Long Beach, CA, March 2018.
Xiao Li. “American Rural-Urban Differences in Motherhood Wage Penalty.” Rural Sociological Society Annual Meeting, Portland, OR, July 2018.
Adam McKee. “Queering the Family: Gay Fathers and Their Children’s Experiences Negotiating Heteronormativity.” Section on the Sociology of the Family, Paper Session: LGBT Families. American Sociological Association Annual Meeting, Philadelphia, PA, August 2018.
Morgan Montañez. “A Hand Up, Not a Hand Out: Moral Capital and Safety-Net Usage.” Section on Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility, American Sociology Association Annual Meeting, Philadelphia, PA, August 2018. Montañez also presented, “Contradiction in the Use of Middle Class Identity for Low-income People Experiencing Inequality in Oregon” at the Society for the Study of Social Problems Annual Meeting, Philadelphia, PA, August 2018; and “A Hand Up, Not a Hand Out: How Low-Income Oregonians Negotiate Class and Social Policy” in the Section on Social Stratification, Inequality and Poverty Session on Poverty and Inequality: Exploring Institutions at the Pacific Sociological Association Annual Meeting, Long Beach, CA, March 2018.
Namrata Ray. “The Education-Occupation Nexus: Examining inter- and intra-generational mobility using India Human Development Survey.” Presented at the 4th Asian Population Association Conference held in Shanghai, China, July 2018. Ray’s participation was hosted and funded by the Asian Demographic Research Institute.
Aleksey Reshetnikov. “Bonded Through Space: An Analysis of Residential Stability on Perceived Social Support in a Neighborhood Context.” Section on Urban and Community Studies: Social Change in Urban Neighborhoods at the Pacific Sociological Association Annual Meeting in Long Beach, CA, March 2018.
Adam Roth. “Informal Caregiving and Network Turnover Among Older Adults.” Population Association of America, annual meeting, Denver, CO. Roth also delivered this paper at the Duke Network Analysis Center’s Social Networks and Health workshop, May 2018, Durham, NC. In addition, Roth presented “Social Capital in Academia” at the American Sociological Association’s Annual Meeting, Philadelphia, PA, August 2018.
Christopher Santucci will present, “Analysis of Plea-Bargaining and Sentencing Outcomes in Washington State,” as part of a roundtable on “Sources of Bias in the Criminal Justice System: Law and Prejudice,” at this year’s American Society of Criminology conference in Atlanta in November 2018.
Faculty presentations at professional meetings
Justin Denney, Mackenzie Brewer, and Rachel Tolbert Kimbro. “Neighborhoods, Relative Social Status, and Food Insecurity in Households with Young Children.” American Sociological Association meetings in Philadelphia, August 2018. Denney also served on a panel titled, “Disparities in Health and Healthcare: Exploring opportunities for collaboration between researchers and practitioners” at the University of Montana in Missoula, April 2018. In addition, he was an invited panelist on Restricted Data Centers and presented a paper, “Sensitive People and Places: Using RDCs to Investigate the Health of Children in Same-Sex Families and to Better Understand Race/Ethnic Mortality Differences by Neighborhood Context,” at the Population Association of America meetings in Denver, CO, April 2018. Denney also is organizing and moderating a session on Debt and Health Disparities for the Interdisciplinary Association for Population Health Science at the National Academies in Washington, DC, in October.
Monica Kirkpatrick Johnson was invited to present at RC34’s session on “Youth in North America” at the World Congress of the International Sociological Association in Toronto, July 2018. There Kirkpatrick Johnson also presented, “Work Value Transmission from Parents to Children: Seeds That Sprout in Adolescence and Bear Fruit in Adulthood.” In addition, Kirkpatrick Johnson, presented on behalf of herself, professor Christine Horne, and Stefanie Mollborn (University of Colorado, Boulder), “The Conditionality of Adolescent Pregnancy Norms” at the Biennial Meetings of the Society for Research on Adolescence, April 2018.
Julie Kmec. “Women’s Motivation to Pursue Engineering Education and Careers: A Case Study of Malaysia.” American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference (with Jennifer DeBoer, Ashley Ater Kranov, Nehal Abu-Lail, Zahra Atiq).
Clayton Mosher. “Save the Children? Marijuana Legalization and Youth Outcomes in Washington State.” Annual International Society for the Study of Drug Policy Conference, Vancouver, BC. Mosher also presented “The Legalization of Recreational Marijuana: Lessons from Washington State” as the invited keynote speaker, at De Transaparante Keten (The Transparent Chain) Congress, Utrecht, Netherlands. Mosher gave another invited presentation, “Issues to Consider in the Construction of a New Jail” to the Clark County Correctional Advisory Commission, June 2018). Mosher (with Jodi Martin) presented, “Clark County’s Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative” to Clark County Law Enforcement Council, June 2018; and “Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Clark County Juvenile Court” to Vancouver Police Chief’s Diversity Advisory Team, July 2018.
Jennifer Schwartz and Erik Johnson. “Sex Stratification in the Criminal Enterprise: Crimes Against the Environment.” Invited brown bag presentation at the Institute for Criminal Law & Criminology, Leiden University, Netherlands, March 2018. Schwartz and Johnson were also invited to present “Women’s and Men’s Participation in Business-related Crimes Against the Environment: Sex-stratification in the Criminal Enterprise” at the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement, Amsterdam, Netherlands, March 2018.
Jennifer Schwartz and Darrell Steffensmeier (Penn State University). “Profile of Top-Executives in Fraudulent Firms Compared to Non-violator CEOs.” Presented at the workshop Toward a Life-course Criminology of Corporate Crime hosted in March 2018 by Leiden University, Netherlands, supported by the European Society of Criminology’s Working Group on Organizational and Corporate Crime and the European Working Group on Development and Life-course Criminology.
Jennifer Sherman. “Labor Market Marginalization and Resisting Stigma in the Amenity-Rich Rural West,” invited presentation to the Working-Class Cultures of Resistance panel at the June 2018 Conference of the Working-Class Studies Association, Stony Brook, New York. Sherman also presented, “Trouble in Paradise: Change, Survival, and Dignity in the Amenity-Rich Rural West,” the keynote talk at the 3rd Annual Sociology and Rural Studies Research Symposium, South Dakota State University, Brookings; and she participated in the Etiology of Suicide Expert Panel, Substance, Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), Rockville, Maryland, March 2018
Jennifer Sherman and Sarah Whitley. “Distribution with Dignity: Rural Food Insecurity and Moral Stigma.” Rural Sociological Society Annual Meeting, Portland, OR, July 2018.
Don Dillman. “The Communication Challenge of Creating Better Web-Push Surveys of the General Public.” The Annual Joint Statistical Meetings, in Vancouver, Canada, July 2018. Dillman also delivered an invited presentation on the effect of mixed-mode designs on improving response rates for “Advances in Survey Methodology: Maximizing Response Rates and Representativeness of Customer Assessment Health Providers and Systems Survey Data” in Rockville, Maryland, September 2018. He also delivered a public seminar for the National Center for Social Research/European Social Survey/City University of London sponsored Methods Seminar Series on “How Web-Push Surveys are Changing Survey Methodology,” October 2018.
Graduate Student leadership and community service activities
Eric Allen completed one year of service as student editor of the journal Social Problems.
Marisa Cervantes currently serves as the Intake Advisor for WSU’s chapter of Sigma Lambda Gamma National Sorority, a Latina based, multi-cultural organization that is active within the WSU community and Pacific Northwest and across the nation. Throughout the year, the chapter holds philanthropic events pertaining to breast cancer awareness, and they work closely with TRIO programs at WSU.
Jake Hammond was elected as the graduate student representative on the ASA Teaching and Learning Section Council.
Alana Inlow was elected vice chair of the Board of Directors of the Community Action Center of Whitman County in October. Inlow also chairs the board’s Planning Committee, which works extensively on the creation, distribution, and analysis of the Whitman County Needs Assessment Survey.
Rivers Isaacson has been chosen to serve on WSU’s Presidential Commission on Gender Identity/Expression and Sexual Orientation for the 2018-19 school year. Isaacson is one of only two graduate student representatives on the committee.
Nathan Lindstet was elected the Digital Communications Committee co-chair for the ASA Section on Environmental Sociology.
Morgan Montañez and Sadie Ridgeway helped design the new orientation for incoming graduate students in sociology. Their focus was on creating an orientation session that highlighted the importance of department norms for the incoming cohort.
Morgan Montañez designed a professional development opportunity for all graduate students over the summer: a discussion of teaching techniques and classroom dilemmas based on In the Trenches, with Professor Julie Kmec as the discussant.
Sarah Morton conducted the statistical analysis for a Salary Equity Study at WSU and served on a task force for this same study during the Spring 2018 semester. The study was part of Morton’s involvement with the President’s Commission on the Status of Women.
Kyle Rakowski, Marisa Cervantes, and Alana Inlow serve as co-advisors for the undergraduate Sociology Club, which acts as a resource for students who would like to learn more about applying sociology in the real world and/or who are hoping for careers in sociology after college.
Chris Santucci served as a graduate student researcher at WSU-Pullman’s Division of Governmental Studies and Services (DGSS) over the summer, working on a five-year project for Montana Highway Patrol.
Faculty leadership and community service activities
Christine Horne was elected to the board of the Rational Choice Section of the International Sociological Association. Horne also serves as chair of the Altruism, Morality, and Social Solidarity section of the American Sociological Association.
Monica Kirkpatrick Johnson was elected to a three-year term on the Executive Board for the Society for Longitudinal and Life Course Studies. She has also been appointed as chair of the Interdisciplinary Committee for the Society for Research on Adolescence. Kirkpatrick Johnson also continues to serve as associate editor of Social Psychology Quarterly and on the editorial boards of the American Sociological Review, Social Forces, Journal of Marriage and Family, and Advances in Life Course Studies.
Alair Maclean now serves as an External Review Committee member in the Sociology Department at Portland State University. Maclean is also the advisory editor for the peer-reviewed journal Sociological Perspectives as well as chair of the Peace, War, and Social Conflict section of the American Sociological Association.
Jennifer Sherman was invited to participate at the Rural Sociological Society (RSS) meeting in Portland, where she sat on four panels and emceed the Awards Banquet. Sherman is the current RSS Awards and Endowment Committee chair, as well as an RSS Council member representing a land-grant institution.
Don Dillman continues as a member of the Committee for National Statistics (CNSTST) of the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine and has also been appointed by the National Academies to the Steering Committee for conducting a fall workshop on improving the American Community Survey. He also serves as an editorial board member for Public Opinion Quarterly, International Journal of Market Research, Field Methods, and Social Science and Computer Review. In June, Dillman served as a Guest Professor at the Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences (GESIS) in Mannheim, Germany, continuing his work on developing effective web-push methodologies for conducting household surveys. He also served as a facilitator for the Australian Bureau of Statistics Workshop on improving data collection practices, held at Deakin University in Melbourne in August.
In May, Dillman and Leah Christian (PhD ’07), Nielsen vice president for Data Science, taught a Portal Session at the American Association for Public Opinion Research Annual Conference on the Worldwide Challenge of Developing and Using Web Push Methods for Conducting Surveys.