Socy news vol 8 (1) Fall 2013

Imagine. sociology news volume 8 . issue 1. Fall 2013 department of sociology university of maryland

“BEFORE YOU ARE THROUGH WITH ANY PIECE OF WORK, NO MATTER HOW INDIRECTLY ON OCCASION, ORIENT IT TO THE CENTRAL & CONTINUING TASK OF UNDERSTANDING THE STRUCTURE AND THE DRIFT, THE SHAPING & THE MEANINGS, OF YOUR OWN PERIOD, THE TERRIBLE & MAGNIFICENT WORLD OF HUMAN SOCIETY.” - from THE SOCIOLOGICAL IMAGINATION by C.W. MILLS

Contributors Contribut

2013-2014 Graduate Cohort Ann Horwitz Anya Galli Beth Mattingly Bill Falk Javier Garcia-Manglano Joseph Waggle Kris Marsh Liam Farrell (Terp Magazine) Lucia Lykke Mady Segal Melissa Brown Melissa Milkie Patricio Korzeniewicz Reeve Vanneman Reeve Vanneman Sara Raley Shengwei Sun Stanley Presser Victoria Marie Ortiz Wan He Wendy Wang

The Fall 2013 semester has been an eventful one for the Sociology Department at the University of Maryland. Anya is returning as the editor of your newsletter, and this semester she has welcomed aboard Joe Waggle as her partner in crime. The timing couldn’t be better, because this edition of the newsletter is one of our biggest yet.

With the arrival of new students, the development of new research centers, the wealth of events and lectures throughout the semester, and the exciting work of our faculty, students, and alums, there’s a lot to cover. We hope this newsletter provides a snapshot of our department as we move into a new semester.

This year, our department lost an exceptional friend, mentor and colleague with the passing of Suzanne Bianchi. The warm response to our request for contributions in her memory is evidence of the lasting impression she has left on our community. She will be greatly missed.

Many thanks go to our all of our contributors, without whom we’d have no choice but to publish 40 pages of kitten photos. In this issue, look for advice from our faculty on productivity and the creative process, a summary of Annette Lareau’s talk at the annual Rosenberg Forum, and the exciting results of a highly empirical analysis of famous sociologists and their celebrity doppelgangers. This issue also includes profiles of the incoming gradate student cohort, new staff member Gaye Bugenhagen, 2008 alum Wendy Wang, current grad student Dave Paul Strohecker, and current undergrad Victoria Marie Ortiz. Look for information about five of our department’s research centers, as well as a letter from Jeff Lucas, who is filling the new Director of Research Position.

Warmest wishes for the New Year, Anya Galli & Joseph Waggle galli@umd.edu jwaggle@umd.edu

Anya M. Galli & Joseph Waggle

letter from the editors

Constantine Chiffon, our ghostwriter, hard at work during one of his grueling 30 second work sessions.

Joseph and Anya taking a “kitteh break� before publishing the newsletter.

It is almost obligatory and somewhat trite to begin this kind of message by exclaiming: This is an exciting time for our department! But indeed it is! We are in the midst of a major assessment within our unit about our future goals regarding our research, our graduate program, and our undergraduate teaching, and I expect our dialogue to produce a renewed vision for our department as we enter 2014. More details will be forthcoming.

In the meantime, I would like to highlight three recent developments. This coming Spring, we will be joined by Professor Mansoor Moaddel (Ph.D. University of Wisconsin), who studies culture, ideology, political conflict, revolution and social change. Previously at Eastern Michigan University, Professor Moaddel has a long trajectory of collaboration with the Population Studies Center and the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, conducting important value surveys in Africa and the Middle East. Besides working in our department, he will be collaborating with our University’s START Center.

Professor Moaddel is one of a series of successful hires we have conducted over the past year (and will be officially announcing soon).

Our graduate students and faculty have been working productively on a Critical Race Initiative. This initiative aims to bring together people within our department and the university who incorporate a substantive interest in race and/or ethnicity in their research and/or teaching. The initiative is especially interested in identifying scholars who cast a critical eye on the use of race and ethnicity sociological research and practice, and is organizing various events and seminars providing a space for substantive discussion and collaboration around relevant issues. The initiative will have its official launch with a major event to be held in our department in April 2014.

Patricio Korzeniewicz, PhD

Letter from the chair Finally, our great office staff has been strengthened by the addition of two new members.

Gaye Bugenhagen is our new Director of Administrative Services. Jessica Lee is our new Administrative Assistant. We extend a very warm welcome to both. And we also are grateful for the speedy recovery and return to our office of Mini Rajan!

On a sadder note, Professor Suzanne Bianchi passed away last November 4th.

Suzanne chaired our department between 2006 and 2009 and was a founding director of the Maryland Population Research Center. Throughout her career she produced outstanding research on the intersections of gender, work and family. She was a great mentor of our junior faculty and graduate students, and a very esteemed colleague within our department and the university. She will be very much missed.

Patricio Korzeniewicz korzen@umd.edu

This year, the University of Maryland sociology community lost a valued colleague, a formative influence, and a beloved friend. Suzanne Bianchi changed our ideas of how American families function with her contributions to demography, feminist theory, and time use studies. Her most notable work debunked the long-held notion that mothers’ labor force participation had an adverse effect on children by demonstrating that working mothers make concessions in their leisure time and their work expectations to be able to spend more time with their children.

Suzanne lived her work. Before she was the Dorothy Meier Chair in Social Equities at the University of California at Los Angeles, she was a professor of sociology and a population scholar here at the University of Maryland. The department recruited her directly from the United States Census Bureau, where she was Assistant Division Chief for Social and Demographic Statistics in the Population Division. When she transitioned to UMd, she juggled her duties as a professor of sociology with her position as Founding Director of the Maryland Population Research Center, as well as President of the Population Association of America and Editor of Demography. Coupled with a prolific and highly regarded publishing history, Suzanne kept busy, but was never too busy to raise her three children with husband Mark Browning.

Suzanne passed in early November shortly after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

She was 61 years old. She will be dearly missed by her family, and her absence will be keenly felt by the men and women who have called her a colleague, a mentor, and a friend. We asked a few of her former collaborators and students to reflect on Suzanne’s life, her influence on their lives, and her lasting impact on the field.

In memory of Suzanne Bianchi “I think my favorite story about Suzanne is the time Al Gore (yep, the vice president) called her because he was working on a book about the American Family and of course she was one of the nation’s leading experts on family demography.

“She was in her office at the time and when he told her who he was, she said, ‘Yeah, right!’ She suspected it was one of her male colleagues in the economics department playing a trick on her. Then he said, ‘No really. I get that a lot. I’m working on a book about the American family,’ and proceeded to ask her several questions. I think she was on the phone with him for about a half hour or so, but I think it reflects her Midwestern humility that she didn’t believe Al Gore would be calling on her expertise.”

- Sara Raley

“Suzanne was a phenomenal mentor. She understood the challenges faced balancing work and family having studied them, but also lived them. I remember how frightened I was as a graduate student to tell her I was expecting my first child...worried I would be seen as less serious. Such worry was wholly unnecessary as Suzanne’s reaction was pure joy. Over the years she grew into a colleague and cherished friend. Suzanne was intense, but had such keen interest in the world around her and brought others

into her investigations, be they academic,

travel, foodie or otherwise. Though she was

a passionate scholar, determined and

unwavering in her standards, she was also

kind, thoughtful and looked out to bring others, especially junior colleagues and

graduate students, opportunities for A memorial photobook can be viewed at: advancement. Her untimely death is a loss http://app.picaboo.com/WebView/Project. to her students, friends, family and to our aspx?clientID=6ef6ae207a40e3f6e390606 06193024d&version=357820&siteID=ViaP field. She is sorely missed.”

-Beth Mattingly review

“Suzanne was more than a mentor and advisor: she was an academic mother, who knew how to be both understanding and demanding, depending on whether her students needed encouragement or correction. There are three aspects of her work and her character in which she will always be a role model for me: “Not making herself indispensable: she knew she didn’t ‘own’ the students whom she was supervising, and was very keen in getting them connected with other people.

Two examples, among many, exemplify this aspect of her character. The first example takes us back to January of my first year at Maryland, when she told me that she would be leaving us to take a position at UCLA. It was bad news for me, since she was key to my research plans at UMd. Moreover, the other professor with whom I had worked during my first months at Maryland also left the department about the same time.

Suzanne took it upon herself to make the transition easy for me, and helped me connect with Joan Kahn, with whom I had had little contact during the first semester of my PhD studies. Even better, she volunteered to stay in my Dissertation Committee, and later on suggested that I spend time with her at UCLA after my dissertation proposal was approved. In Los Angeles, she helped me connect with a number of scholars. The second example takes us to the end of my degree, when I was looking for postdocs: she fully accepted my decision to return to Europe, and helped me make the necessary connections that would land me in Oxford.

“Giving thorough feedback and not dodging the difficult piece of advice: if you gave her something to read, you knew what to expect: a printout of your work, full of comments at the margins about all sorts of things, from grammatical errors (very much appreciated by foreign students) to substantial challenges to your arguments and methods. Some people found this daunting and a bit scary (I know this well, from conversations with fellow students), since Suzanne would not leave anything unsaid, if she believed there was something you could do to improve your work. I always appreciated her straightforward advice.

“Being always there: she responded promptly to messages and emails, and made a real effort to be available to talk on the phone or in person whenever possible.

This applies equally to the past few months, after she was diagnosed with her illness.

At the time, I was making my transition to my new position in Europe, and knew that she enjoyed (with a good amount of healthy pride) to read about my whereabouts in Oxford. So I kept her posted periodically about life on the other side of the Atlantic.

She send me a total of six emails between July and October, the last one less than a month before she passed away. Up to this last email, she encouraged me to make good connections in my new department and College, suggesting over the last few months a total of 5 people with whom I could collaborate.”

- Javier Garcia-Manglano

In memory of Suzanne Bianchi “Suzanne and I collaborated on many projects...I think we co-authored 7 articles together, plus the book, over the years. Our last published piece together was 2012.

“A very memorable period with Suzanne was when we were working on Changing Rhythms of American Family Life (2006) together, with John Robinson and with many graduate student researchers. It was a great team—a demographer, a time use scholar, a social psychologist, and these very bright students—all of us looking at the data, brainstorming about the layout of the book, and how it would all be argued.

Suzanne was brilliant in figuring out great angles, as well as the best tables to present. I admired that and learned from it.

ended up with a lot of kids. I learned three was ‘a lot’ because she often looked at me with a knowing smile and said, ‘three kids is a LOT of kids!’ At that time (and still today), there were very few academic women with three.

“Suzanne would do these lovely things. She gave me gifts of children’s books with little yellow post-it notes inside them explaining why her children had loved them. Favorites included ‘Five Minutes of Peace’ (probably minutes that never get measured in a time diary....) and ‘A Quiet Night In’ by Jill Murphy, about the ‘Large Family,’ three kid elephants and their exhausted elephant parents. We still have these books on our shelf, with the Post-Its. I realize that the fact that Suzanne helped make me who I am professionally actually pales in comparison to the small acts like these that showed me that she saw the whole picture of who I was—not just the scholar—and her grace about and respect for life outside Art-Socy showed me it was OK to fit my professor role in around my life. And except for the exhausted part, it would all work out fine.

“It was an exhilarating time, because we knew the book would be excellent—we already had a lot of outside interest in the ideas, we had already published together on some of the topics, and we had great new data to analyze (not to mention a book contract). Our meetings were long, but it was a real high to discuss and debate our ideas within the team. There was time for stories to share and tangents happened.

“Because Suzanne was such an imporNo doubt we got a little slap happy after re- tant mentor and part of my work life for so ally long meetings. long, and because I guess I assumed she would be around forever, it has been very “Over the main years of the book project hard to lose her. She was a joyful presence (2002 to 2005 was when we actively genin my life, and I am extremely lucky to have erated the data and wrote/edited), I added shared such a long time at Maryland (and two new babies to our family (and we albeyond) with her. We are planning an ASA ready had one). Suzanne, on the other session in Suzanne’s honor in San Francishand, launched two of her older kids off co next August. Anyone wishing to talk with to college, leaving her youngest, who was me about this or to help out should please in high school, as the only one home. So contact me.” while we were writing, she started with a

- Melissa Milkie lot of kids in her household, but somehow I

“I will, of course, be always grateful for Suzanne stepping up to initiate the rotating chair ‘tradition’ when the department all agreed that rotation should be the norm but no one volunteered. For my term, she left me a specific, prioritized list of objectives the department should pursue. Eighty percent of what we were able to achieve during my three years (and probably much of what we didn’t!) was on that list.

“Perhaps less well recognized is my intellectual debt to Suzanne. I have a strong memory of a presentation Suzanne gave at the Population Reference Bureau years ago. This was pre-intergenerational transfers, pre-time use, maybe even pre-Maryland Suzanne Bianchi. She was talking about time trends in US gender inequality, perhaps as preparation for her book with Daphne Spain, Balancing Act. I remember thinking that this is exactly the kind of work I should be doing because of its mix of micro- and macro-processes and its obvious importance for understanding changes in inequality. The result was a string of papers with Maryland alums David Cotter and Joan Hermsen and our web page of gender inequality trends: http://www.vanneman. umd.edu/endofgr/matrix.html. I am still trying to understand those trends and thank Suzanne for providing years of interesting questions.”

- Reeve Vanneman

“I was fortunate to become one of Suzanne’s earliest students in UMD 20 years ago, and am honored to be one of her earliest pupils to graduate and proud winner of the ASA Best Dissertation Award under her guidance and tutelage. But Suzanne was not only my academic advisor and mentor.

She was also my friend.

“I still remember the many meetings we had in her office on the third floor of ArtSocy Building. Our conversations went beyond my research and dissertation; we also talked about our lives and our kids. I had always marveled how she managed to do it all – besides publishing in the Census Bureau, she had written books in her ‘spare’ time, did running, swimming, skiing, piano… and above all, raised three wonderful kids. Whenever I asked her how she did it, she would just smile.

“Fittingly, her research on time diaries solved the puzzle. She just slept less and had less leisure time for her own. Her drive and selfless devotion to work, family, students, and friends were a perfect case exemplifying the modern day mothers. If they are not ‘superwomen,’ then who are?

“I will miss you, Suzanne. Rest in peace.

You had walked miles and earned your sleep.”

- Wan He

In memory of Suzanne Bianchi “I was the Chair when Suzanne was recruited from Census to join our faculty. I remember, still, discussing with her the freedom and autonomy she would have as a professor versus being a Census employee. It would be fair to say that at Maryland, Suzanne’s sociological imagination flourished. She was already a well-known demographer and in a short time, her reputation as both demographer and more general sociologist increased dramatically. She was elected President of the Population Association of America, served as Editor of Demography, published prolifically, but as much as anything, when I think of her time at Maryland, her most important role and contribution may have been the era during which she led the demography program from being departmental to becoming a university-wide activity. She helped craft a proposal for University funding to enlarge and establish the Maryland Population Research Center.

ours was the most successful proposal they had funded. It gave us considerable credence when we subsequently made other requests for University funding.

“In my nearly 40 years of being a professor, I can honestly say that Suzanne Bianchi is one of the two most selfless, prominent colleagues I have ever had the good fortune to know. She gave more and asked less than she needed to or, perhaps, should have.

She was always willing to take on thankless tasks that others might have avoided. This led to chairing search committees, chairing promotion committees and, in time, chairing the department. It was a huge loss for us when she left for UCLA. But my sense of her is and will, I suspect, always be that in her heart, Suzanne was a Terp. Further support for my saying this is a brief personal anecdote.

“When she had only been in L.A. for a short time, I met her for coffee while visiting my “It’s worth noting and reminding people (or oldest son who lives in Redondo Beach. perhaps, they will learn this for the first time) She had told me on the phone that I might not recognize her. Why? ‘I’m a Califorthat our proposal was ranked first among nia girl now – blond hair, lots of make-up!’ all UMd proposals in a competition for She wasn’t of course but we had a good ‘enhancement’ funds. This led to us getting two new faculty lines and the money to laugh over the idea of this. When I met with her again in L.A., shortly before she died, fund them; it provided support for MPRC she said as I left, ‘Still not a California girl, staff, renovated space, and graduate stuBill.’ Whether Californian or Washingtonian dents; it also led to our initial proposal to or Terp or Iowan, Suzanne Bianchi was a the National Institute for Child Health and treasure. It was truly a privilege to know and Human Development for a ‘Center’ grant.

It was truly a joyful occasion when we were work closely with her.”

- Bill Falk informed that the proposal would be fund ed, something which happened a second time under Suzanne’s leadership. When it was initially funded, the Dean told me that the Provost and President had stated that

On Friday, October 18th, Dr. Annette Lareau spoke at the Department’s Rosenberg Forum. Lareau is the Stanley I. Sheerr Term Professor in the Social Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania, and is the current president of the American Sociological Association. Her talk was entitled, “Housing, Schools, and the Maintenance of Inequality: How Upper Middle Class Parents Can Afford to be Nonchalant.” In her current work, the intellectual seed of which was planted during her tenure in the sociology department here at UMd, Lareau asks how people form neighborhood preferences when they move to a new area. In essence, she wants to know, how do people end up where they do?

Lareau used the concept of “concerted cultivation” as her starting point in the talk.

Concerted cultivation—which she first wrote about in her seminal work, Unequal Childhoods—refers to middle class parents’ habit of designing their children’s schedules to be packed with extracurricular activities meant to “cultivate” well-rounded individuals. So, little Johnny might go to soccer practice, then to trombone lessons, then to his math tutor, and so on. She related her finding that middle class parents can be quite anxious micromanagers, worrying over every last detail of their kids’ lives.

Departing from the notion of concerted cultivation, Lareau hypothesized that, in her current work, she would find similar behavior among parents when they were choosing which neighborhoods to call home; that there would be very deliberate, careful fact-finding and research about a given district’s schools, for example. To further illustrate the point, she cited the statistic that 73% of American children attend their neighborhood school. In other words, choosing your residence is tantamount to choosing your children’s school, which seems all the more reason to expect parents to be very thorough in their decision-making process. To test this idea, Lareau undertook in-depth interviews with parents in three suburban school districts outside of a large northeastern city. One district was heavily upper-middle class, another was solidly middle class, and the third was lower-middle, working class. The sample of parents was 50% white, 50% black.

To her surprise, Lareau’s findings up to this point suggest that there is actually very little hand-wringing among parents when choosing neighborhoods. In the interviews,

Ann Horwitz

Rosenberg forum: Annette Lareau she said, what parents didn’t say was more telling than what they did say. Rather than waxing on about how they had researched an area’s schools, property values, etc., many parents shrugged when asked about their decision of where to live. The responses tended toward statements about social connections in the area (e.g., My cousin/sister/college roommate/etc. lives here and says it’s a good area). Ultimately, then, people often depend on their social networks—rather than in-depth research—to inform them of the “good” areas. Because networks are inherently stratified, though, what this translates to is the seamless reproduction of inequality.

The very idea of having “choices” in the moving decision did not resonate with Lareau’s subjects. Social networks imparted the impression that certain neighborhoods were “obvious” choices. Given the relatively stark stratification of suburban districts along racial and socioeconomic lines, “obvious” choices, in effect, are neighborhoods whose residents generally match one’s own background. In answering the question of how people end up in the neighborhoods they do, then, it seems that informal social networks play a large role in the process. Lareau’s findings indicate that this process occurs across all SES groups. While the process may be the same across groups, though, what is important to note is that the end result is upper-middle class children attending better-funded schools.

The nonchalance of even the affluent parents in the choice of where to live is somewhat baffling, considering the habit of concerted cultivation in so many other aspects of their children’s lives. In the end, it appears that parents practice such concerted, deliberate thinking in a vast array of areas, but not when deciding where to live and send their children to school. Where to live is a major, consequential decision, and yet parents who are otherwise very involved micromanagers defer to the wisdom of their social networks in this regard. Interestingly, and further illustrating the inherent stratification of networks, many of Lareau’s upper-middle class subjects knew of and had considered other well-off districts 30 or 40 miles away, but had never heard of middleor working-class districts ten minutes’ drive away. To Lareau, these findings show the extent to which people’s decisions of where to live reify a stratified system of privilege.

Ann is a 3rd Year Graduate Student.

Lucia Lykke

Staff spotlight: Gaye Bugenhagen Did you know that the newest employee in the sociology main office can run thirty to forty miles of hiking trails in one shot?

Pretty impressive, right? It’s even more impressive when you find out that she only picked up running after her third son was born. These are just a few of the interesting tidbits I learned about Gaye Bugenhagen, our new Director of Administrative Services, when I sat down with her recently for an interview. When I asked her for a “fun fact” about herself, she informed me that she is so boring that her son thinks she must be a secret agent… then casually let me know that she is an “ultra runner,” which means running thirty miles at a time, and has also completed a half Ironman triathlon. Clearly, I did not find this boring!

Gaye has been with our department since June. Before her current spot in the sociology department, she worked for the Center for Addictions, Personality, and Emotion Research (CAPER) in the psychology department. Gaye has a background in international business, and she’s in charge of all the financial stuff for our department, from payroll to grants (grad students, she’s the one to talk to if you’re trying to figure out how much money to ask for in a grant proposal!). She sees her role as dealing with all of the bureaucracy and financial lingo so that the sociologists can focus on methods and ideas when seeking funding. She praises our department for being welcoming and accommodating since she started, though she says she hasn’t yet learned enough about sociology to pick a favorite specialty area (I tried really hard to get her to pick one, but she was ever so diplomatic and declined to comment).

Gaye lives in Annapolis with her husband of 26 years. She has four children, three human and one canine: three sons (the oldest is a sophomore at Maryland!) and a rescue Lab named Cooper. Of course, we ended up spending much of our chat discussing dogs, so I can reveal to you that Cooper also enjoys trail running and watching The Dog Whisperer.

We are lucky to have Gaye here with us –she has lots of plans for how to contribute to our department behind the scenes over the next few years. Stop by and say hello, maybe get some running tips – just don’t ask for any Thanksgiving cooking advice. She told me that she has never cooked a turkey in her life and has no idea how. Join the club, Gaye. And welcome to sociology!

Lucia is a 3rd Year Graduate Student

ROSEnberg forum reception , October 18 2013

Dr. Wendy Wang is currently a Research Associate at the Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan, non-advocacy “fact tank” in Washington, DC. She conducts demographic research on issues pertaining to family, gender, work, aging, health, and time use. She also leads questionnaire and sample designs for public opinion surveys. Prior to joining Pew in 2008, Wendy was a Research Assistant at the Maryland Population Research Center here at the University of Maryland. She graduated from our department in 2008, specializing in Demography and Gender, Work & Family.

Wendy is an author of many widely cited, influential Pew Research Center reports, such as Breadwinner Moms, Modern Parenthood, and The Rise of Intermarriage. She also engages in academic research, with publications in journals such as the American Journal of Sociology and the Journal of Marriage and Family. She has been quoted by the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, NPR and numerous other media outlets. She frequently talks about the Pew reports in print and broadcast media, and presents research findings at national conferences.

Shengwei Sun, a second-year doctoral student, had the opportunity to conduct an interview with Dr. Wang to learn about her academic experiences, professional trajectories, and her advice to current graduate students.

What motivated you to pursue a PhD degree in sociology and what are your academic interests?

Sociology has been my long-term passion. I studied sociology as an undergrad in China, and my master’s degree was also in Sociology. So it was not a hard decision for me to pursue a doctoral degree in sociology. Growing up with a single parent, I am especially interested in the role of family in one’s life. I have tried to combine research topics with

Shengwei Sun

Alumnus Spotlight: Wendy Wang

my personal interests, with the recognition that my experience is not totally unique – It is shared by a lot of other people. So when there is a new issue coming up, I try to capture what drives such change.

At Maryland, under the influence of my advisor, Suzanne Bianchi, I chose to do my dissertation about time use, looking at how fathers spend their time on childcare and what factors affecting father’s involvement. It was also the time when the American Time Use Survey data first became available I feel fortunate that I am one of the earlier researchers who were able to make use of the data.

What extra-curricular or professional activities were you engaged with back at grad school? How did you come to pursue your current career path?

I enjoyed social gatherings, going to the gym, and also participating in conferences. I had fond memories of sharing hotel rooms with fellow students and we would chat the whole night and then realized that we had presentation to do the next morning!. The Maryland Population Research Center used to have weekly social hours when students could interact with faculties from other departments. I was able to make friends with several students from the economics department.

I’ve been very fortunate to work with great mentors at Maryland, including my advisor Suzanne Bianchi and Rebeca Wong at the MPRC. My very first publication on the Journal of Marriage and Family (2005) was based on a term paper in Suzanne’s class. It was about parental monitoring of teenager’s internet use. Interestingly, I was using Pew data for that project.

I still remember the moment I found out about Pew’s job openings. One afternoon I was taking a break from my dissertation writing, I did some random job search and googled about Pew. I saw that they just started this new project on Social and Demographic Trends and they were hiring It sounded like a great match. (continued on next page)

(Alumnus Spotlight continued from previous page...)

Maryland has a strong program in social demography which is highly recognized in the field of demographic research. I think the fact that I have worked with great mentors and colleagues in the field adds to my credential. So it was an easy decision for me.

What are some highlights of your current position as a research associate at the Pew Research Center? How has your experience at UMD helped/influenced you professionally?

A rewarding part of my job is to work on research projects that could connect with a larger audience. Last year, after we published a report on interracial marriages in America, I received phone calls from people telling me about their very own stories of interracial marriage. It shows that our report is really connecting with the people.

Another unique part of my job is that in the process of producing a report, I get to work with people with diverse professional backgrounds. For example, working with the journalists helped me greatly improve my storytelling skills so that I could better convey our message to the public.

What are some key pieces of advice you might have for the current PhD students?

I would say my number one advice for the current graduate students is to take good care of your health –both body and mind. Getting a Ph.D. is not an easy task. Keeping up with exercising is a great way to relieve stress as well as to stay energetic and productive.

Number two, I would say, don’t worry too much about what you want to do in the future.

Speaking from my own experience, I think it’s more important to focus on what skills you want to learn (building a “tool box”), what topics actually interest you, and knowing what you are capable of doing so that you would be prepared when it comes to career choice. This brings me to my third point that it is important to know your own interests.

I wouldn’t have made through two hundred pages of my dissertation if it’s not for my actual interest on the topic. Having some internal source of motivation makes the whole research process more enjoyable. Finally, I think it would be nice if you could find a role model to follow during your time in graduate school – either a professor or a peer mentor who can provide you with advice as to how they got there.

Wendy contributes regularly to the Pew Research Center blog “Fact Tank.” She also blogs about research findings on her personal blog (wendyrwang.wordpress. com). She is on twitter: @WendyRWang.

Shengwei is a 2nd year graduate student.

Graduate student awards & honors Our graduate students do some fascinating work, and this year that work has earned them some incredible recognition. We’d like to recognize them here as well. Keep up the good work, grads!

• Kendra Barber received the 2013 University of Maryland’s College of Behavioral and Social Sciences (BSOS) Teaching Excellence Award.

• Molly Clever is receiving the Elise Boulding Award for Best Graduate Student Paper by the Peace, War and Social Conflict Session at the 2013 ASA Annual Meeting in New York, NY. • Kathleen Denny was awarded the Graduate Dean’s Dissertation Fellowship for the 2013-2014 academic year •Valerie Chepp and Kathleen Denny were awarded the Wylie Dissertation Fellowship for 2013 •Mark Gross was awarded the Graduate School’s International Graduate Research Fellowship •Tuesday Barnes and Moriah Willow were awarded the 2013-14 McNair Graduate Fellowship •Gheda Temsah received the Robert W. Janes Commemorative Award in spring 2013 •Scott Albrecht received the Milton Dean Havron Social Science Award Keep an eye on the UMd Sociology Department website for future awards and accolades! http://socy.umd.edu/graduate/graduate-student-awards-publications

The University of Maryland Sociology department produces some cutting-edge and innovative research, thanks in no small part to the collaborative work of our research groups. Whether these are returning research centers or new additions to our research community, these initiatives are producing a diverse and fascinating body of work for the social sciences here at the University of Maryland and all over the world.

THE CULTURE LAB The Culture Lab is a research and training lab for the systematic study of culture.

Professor Melissa Milkie founded the lab in the fall of 2012 and it has accomplished much since then. Directed by Professor Milkie, graduate students Kathleen Denny and Joanna Pepin, with input from Valerie Chepp, created a website (http://www. theculturelab.umd.edu/) as a resource with relevant tools and information for researchers seeking to theorize, analyze and measure culture. Since the establishment of the Lab and its website, the Culture Lab routinely fields requests for collaboration and technical assistance from scholars from diverse and broad theoretical backgrounds and interests. There is a good deal of interest in the site from international scholars.

Margaret Austin Smith

New andstaff Returning Research Centers spotlight: Orienta Huger With a spotlight on content analysis as a methodological approach for measuring culture, last spring Professor Milkie taught a graduate methods course overviewing the benefits and challenges of conducting content analyses. Students learned specific procedures relevant to carrying out this type of research and undertook their own research projects.

They benefited from sharing their approaches to designing research, generating and analyzing data, and presenting results linked to their research questions. They also discussed the multitude of challenges with their samples (including YouTube videos, advertisements in China, and US newspapers, to name a few). Ultimately, these students gained skills to continue their research, with the purpose of turning them into published papers.

The Culture Lab also has an active speaker series. A highlight from last year’s speaker series was a visit from Assistant Professor Neal Caren, from the University of North Carolina, who presented his expertise in the use of “big data.� This semester Professor Jo Paoletti, from the Department of American Studies joined us to present parts of her forthcoming book Fashion and Feminism: A Tale of Three Authors. Sociology Professor Sonalde Desai shared results from research conducted with graduate student Gheda Temsah on their paper titled Gender Performance and Religious Identity Formation in India. Multiple graduate students who participated in the Content Analysis methods class also shared their findings, including Margaret Austin Smith and Lucia Lykke. New graduate student Shengwei Sun also joined as a lab affiliate and is working with Professor Christine Bachrach at the Pop Center who has begun a Culture and Population Working Group, which is now in conversation with the Culture Lab. If you are interested in learning more about the Culture Lab, stop by our office in 4127A and/or take a careful look at the website (and please provide feedback!) at http://www.theculturelab.umd.edu/join-the-conversation.html#/ (New & Returning Research Centers continued on following page...)

THE CRITICAL RACE INITIATIVE (CRI) The Critical Race Initiative (CRI) is a group of scholars who center critical race theory (CRT) as an important framework by which to understand inequality in society. CRT addresses the ways that race permeates social institutions to maintain systemic forms of inequality. Under this framework, racism not only operates through social interaction stemming from individual prejudice but also through institutional conditions rooted in the culture of social life. Entrenched in white privilege, these conditions maintain an ideology of inferiority among minorities that dictate status, power, and prestige structures.

In addition to focusing on what race is, CRI more so focuses on what race does, how it is used, and how it operates via individual, social/ cultural, and institutional conditions that manufacture and maintain racial inequality within political, social, and economic spheres.

Correspondingly, race is treated as a social process rather than simply a variable to control for in a statistical model. In this social process, race operates not only as a point of departure to differentiate individuals and groups but as socially constructed destinations: that is, we all experience an ongoing process of racialization in our daily lives.

Accordingly, CRI has six primary aims: • Form a collective wisdom about critical race theory and its analytic focus • Shift the discourse past the Black/White narrative to highlight processes and mechanisms of racial inequality that affect all racial/ethnic minorities • Focus on race as a set of experiences, racialized identities, and social processes that are mutually facilitated by individual, social/cultural, and institutional conditions • Transform victimization into empowerment • Foster racial uplift activism through scholarship, teaching, community-based participatory research, and social policy • Draw upon core strengths of faculty and students in the Department of Sociology, BSOS, and UMD

The CRI affiliated faculty are Rashawn Ray, Patricia Hill Collins and Kris Marsh. CRI has approximately 50 faculty, students and non-academics who are on the CRI listserve; however the CRI activities, workshops and initiative are carried out by a core group of Sociology faculty and students organized into working groups. Currently CRI has three active working groups: Brownbags (lead by Lucia Lykke), Parren Mitchell Symposium (lead by Rashawn Ray) and the CRI Website (led by Karina Havrilla and Jonathan Cox). Shanna Brewton-Tiayon serves as the CRI administrator.

Please reach out to any of the working group leads or the CRI administrator to join or if you have questions.

AMERICAN TIME USE SURVEY LAB In the spring of 2013, Liana Sayer founded the University of Maryland Time Use Laboratory (MTUL), building on work done at Maryland by prominent time use scholars such as John Robinson and Suzanne Bianchi. The lab conducts innovative research on new approaches to collecting time use data and investigates time use across the life course and among under-researched groups.

Along with Dr. Sayer, graduate students Mandi Martinez and Ewa Jarosz, a predoctoral Fullbright scholar and PhD student in the program at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of Polish Academy of Sciences, are members of the lab.

Ewa’s Fulbright-funded research project, titled ‘Temporal Orientations, Time Use Patterns and Social Inequality, combines survey data and Time Use Survey data for Poland to examine perceptions and attitudes towards time and behaviors across social classes. Jarosz also works on leisure complexity in time use in Poland in a cross-sectional perspective, examining how it differs across SES and gender.

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The Maryland Time Use Lab seminar series features presentations by leading and emerging time use scholars. In the Fall 2013 series, Ewa Jarosz presented her paper titled Societal Determinants of Temporal Complexity in Personal Leisure: A Comparative Study of Germany and Poland. Dr. Sandra Hofferth, a professor in the Family Science department and affiliate of the MTUL, and graduate student Yoonjoo Lee shared results from their research on, Reliability, validity, and variability of the subjective well-being questions in the 2010 well-being module of the American Time Use Survey, and Liana Sayer shared her research on continuity and change in children’s time use. The series will continue Spring 2014 every other Friday at noon in ASY1101.

The Time Use Lab is currently focusing on three projects. One project under development is a small pilot study to investigate benefits of using personal computing devices to collect time use data in less burdensome ways than current methods. In a second project, the Time Use Lab is comparing time use among immigrants and native citizens that will include some mixed methods to explore how patterns of time use reflect changing family and social dynamics as immigrants adapt to life in their new communities. The third project of the Time Use Lab focuses on how patterns of time use change over time among children and adolescents.

Students interested in exploring using time use data in their research or working on time use lab projects should contact Dr. Sayer for more information.

THE PROGRAM FOR SOCIETY & THE ENVIRONMENT (PSE) The Program for Society and the Environment creates a home at the University of Maryland for research on the study of the society-environment relationship. PSE is grounded in Maryland’s and BSOS’s strategic plan priorities to “be a force in fostering greater understanding of human relations and the natural environment.” The Program serves as a hub for social scientists and students who study all aspects of the society-environment relationship. The PSE is an interdisciplinary program, bringing together University of Maryland scholars from Sociology, Government and Politics, Public Policy, Geographical Sciences, and Anthropology.

The PSE also engages scholarship from outside of the University, most notably with the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC), in a continuing effort to connect the social sciences to the physical sciences.

The Program for Society and the Environment coordinates socio-environmental research and education in a number of ways. First, the PSE hosts a bi-monthly workshop for social science faculty and graduate students working on environmental issues. Here, presenters and spectators meet to discuss a wide range of social science work, from community-level adaptations to climate change, to international comparative cases of nuclear energy adoption and compliance. These workshops allow interested scholars to network with experts in other fields, connecting their work to larger questions of society and the environment, and produce collaborative and trans-disciplinary work.

The PSE also supports graduate student research on the society-environment relationship through its seed grant program, available to graduate students from any department who are pursuing projects that investigate the relationship between society and the environment.

The Program is currently directed by Professor Dana R. Fisher of Sociology, along with the input of the executive board, including Kurt Finsterbusch of Sociology, Jennifer Hadden of Government and Politics, and Nathan Hultman of the School of Public Policy. Research fellows include Anya Galli, Ann Horowitz, Joseph Waggle, and William Yagatich of Sociology, and Rachel Berndtson of Geographical Sciences. The PSE is also hosting visiting scholar Lorien Jasny.

For more information about the PSE, contact Dr. Dana Fisher or Anya Galli.

Follow the PSE on twitter: @PSE_UMD

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THE CENTER FOR INNOVATION

Currently, the Center for Innovation has three members, the co-directors Jerald Hage and Wilbur Hadden, and research assistant Patrick Liu. The objectives of the Center are both to write theories and to test them. The major themes are: Inequalities of Health Care: Bill Hadden is working on two projects. One with the School of Public Health at UM on an analysis of the spread of HIV/AIDS in the Washington metropolitan area. The other is a project with the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine to analyze the impact of developments in the health care system of Uganda. Hage will Nathan andto Les – as two rogue social scientists visit Uganda evaluate in healthat–care sociologically describelocal anddistricts’ analyzeeffectiveness their experiences John Stewart’s to Restore Sanity.

Enjoy!with a community delivery.

TogetherRally Hadden and Hage are working health center in South Carolina in a field experiment to see if it is possible to increase social capital among African-Americans to change their health behavior.

Effectiveness of Public Research Organizations: Again, the Center has had two projects, one funded by the STAR division of NOAA over an eight year period and the other by the National Science Foundation. Articles are being written on knowledge exchanges of scientists, the impact of organizational size on effectiveness, the determinants of morale among scientists, organizational change, etc. This work involves Jeff Lucas, Patrick Liu, and Jonathan Mote as well.

Socio-Economic Theory of Social Change: Hage is writing a book on evolution with four themes in each chapter: review of theory, a theory of evolution, a theory of failed evolution, and a theory of agency overcoming failure caused by structure. Chapters examine the evolution of societies, organizations, individual minds, states and social movements, educational systems, economies, and economic performances. The intent is to update the work of Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Mead, Goffman, and Collins, as well as the theories of neo-classical economics.

Jeff Lucas

A note from the Director of Research The department recently created the Director of Research position to be available to assist members of the department (faculty, students, and affiliates) in their research activities. I’m filling this position this year.

Because the position is so new, we’re still figuring out just what the range of activities the Director of Research carries out will be. The position will certainly largely consist of helping department constituents with grant activities. Over the summer, Hsiang-Yuan Ho and I put together a database of funding sources from which faculty and students in the department might seek funds (it can be found on the department webpage under the Quick Links tab). Jenelle Clark is working this semester on making the database easier to navigate. Jenelle has also become an expert in SPINPlus, a funding search database to which the university recently subscribed. The database is a great tool for seeking out funding sources, and Jenelle has already gotten several graduate students in the department set up on using it. Just contact Jenelle if you would like to learn how to use SPINPlus.

In assisting with grant activities, I also have been working with Gaye Bugenhagen to determine how the department can give more support to faculty and students who are seeking and who have secured grant funding. Gaye has already gone a long way in this regard, including in helping in proposal preparation, transitioning our online funding systems to new formats, interacting with online grant submission systems for investigators, reading funding announcements to make sure proposals satisfy requirements, and closely monitoring grant budgets. I have been spending time this semester reading drafts of grant proposals from graduate students and faculty, helping students target their funding requests to the right locations, and meeting with other units on campus about possibilities for funding and/or collaborations.

As I continue in the Director of Research position, I hope to begin to make more efforts to reach out individually to department members about support that would help them in finding funding sources and submitting grant proposals. I am also in the process of setting up workshops in the department on various topics, including applying for NSF Dissertation Improvement Grants, Mechanical Turk, data visualization, and Prezi. It is also my hope that we can begin to explore applying for training grants and other sorts of infrastructure support to the department.

Again, the position is new, and I’m just starting to feel my way in it. If you have any ideas for activities in which you think it would be valuable for the Director of Research to engage, or if there are any ways I can help with your research activities, please let me know.

-Jeff Lucas

jlucas2@umd.edu

Advice from professors: productivity & creative process Inspiration is a fleeting thing, especially in graduate school. At any given moment, grad students are juggling class deadlines, pressures to publish, and the soul-crushing existential crisis that is the imposter syndrome. In the face of all of that, it seems damn near impossible to pound out eight thousand words critiquing the male gaze in the latest episode of Game of Thrones. And yet, every day, scholars tackle projects large and small. This semester, your editors decided to turn to the experts, our own faculty, for advice on how to get the creative juices flowing without drowning in all of the high standards and expectations of the job.

What’s your creative process? Under what conditions do you produce your best work? How/when are you most productive? How do you manage challenges to your productivity? How do you maintain momentum and motivation during the course of a project?

My creative process is to write, and write some more when a new idea comes to mind.

The first thing I do is write all that I know, want to know and do not know about the topic. Sometimes this process can yield well over 20 pages. I then step away from the document and bounce my ideas off of both academics and non-academics. After talking and gaining multiple points of view, I am ready to revisit the “brain dump” document – as one graduate student calls the process. I revise the document and then turn to the literature to fill in the gaps and provide the theoretical framework for the paper.

I find that my best work is produced when I am excited about a topic.

Therefore, I am very reluctant to take on projects that do NOT move me because it would be a disservice to the project and the potential collaborator(s) as well as myself. I am most productive on a Monday morning, which I term “Mental Health Monday.” I call my Mondays that because I use Mondays as my writing day and my day to decompress from the weekend while preparing for the upcoming week. If I have a successful “Mental Health Monday” it keeps me balanced and sets the tone for a productive week. If the beginning of my week lacks a “Mental Health Monday” my productivity is often challenged until the next “Mental Health Monday.” My initial excitement will often carry me through the course of a project. If my excitement begins to waver, the notion of getting my work out to a broader audience carries me the rest of the way to the finish line.

-Kris Marsh

“Presser’s Productivity Prescription: Most of us are familiar with writer’s block: the point at which we spin our wheels without making any progress. No matter how much one tries to solve the problem, a solution eludes us. A good way to deal with writer’s block is to work on two tasks at the same time -- not literally simultaneously, as there is compelling evidence that multi-tasking interferes with performance, but rather having a second task to switch to as soon as writer’s block sets in. The second task might be another paper or project or another section or chapter of the same paper or project. Switching to the second task as soon as it is clear you are spinning your wheels accomplishes two ends.

First, it enables you to waste less time, as you make progress on the second task.

Second, when you return to the original task (for instance, when you again run into writer’s block, but now on the second task), you look at it from a fresh perspective (sometimes informed by having worked on the second task) and thus are much more apt to solve the problem that initially led to the block.”

- Stanley Presser “I most often get new ideas or new words to better express old ideas while walking to and from the office from the College Park Metro (that’s when I composed this!). Psychologists tell us that new insights come best when we aren’t concentrating fully on an issue but can let our brains wander around various ideas floating around in the back of our minds. Walking to or from the office, I am thinking about work but am not especially focused so that leaves room for new combinations.

Interestingly, this does not happen driving to work. I guess I end up focusing too much on the jerk in the next lane about to cut me off in order to think much about sociology.”

- Reeve Vanneman “One of the tips I have for writing may be a surprising one, but it works for me and many others. We have a tendency to leave our writing when we hit a rough patch and don’t know what to do next. That makes it hard to get back to it because you know you were stumped.

My suggestion is to leave your writing when you know exactly what you want to do next. Write some notes to yourself on where you are going next. Then leave the work. You’ll know you can ease right back into it, so you won’t procrastinate as much!

“I used to hate writing. I loved conducting research and finding things out. I hated writing it up. With years of practice, I’m amazed that I actually enjoy writing now! That goes for sociological writing, fiction writing, and even sending letters to friends and family. Yes, some of us old-fashioned types still send letters, but I must admit I often write the letter and then send it in an e-mail. “I used to be a perfectionist about writing of all kinds. Now I am demonstrating my attempt to lighten up on myself by not going over this message and editing it multiple times. I think it’s good enough for the purpose and I know it’s keeping me from some work I have to do. (But I have proofread it!)”

-Mady Segal

Liam Farrell, Terp Magazine

Wearing your art on your sleeve: grad student sees changing picture for tattoos Recently, UMd Alumni magazine The Shell profiled sociology doctoral candidate, rising cultural theorist, and all-around nice guy Dave Paul Strohecker and his work on tattoo culture. The article’s author has given us permission to reproduce the piece here.

David Paul Strohecker, a Maryland doctoral student, knows there is a common nickname for his heavily tattooed hands and the ink on his neck and the side of his head: “the everlasting job-stoppers.”

Yet his research into America’s tattoo culture is showing that acceptance of employees with body art is growing and, perhaps, may one day attract no more notice than wearing jeans on Fridays.

“You can draw parallels to any subculture which has become ‘fashion,’” he says.

Strohecker’s academic area is “deviance”—he gives a book definition of “actions, beliefs or even conditions that are morally discrediting and likely to result in negative actions”—and he has specialized in tattooing and its growing approval in the culture at large. A 2010 report from the Pew Research Center estimated nearly 40 percent of Americans in the millennial generation (ages 18–29) have a tattoo, versus about 32 percent of Generation X (ages 30-45) and 15 percent of baby boomers (ages 46–64).

Strohecker has been keeping apprised of companies like Urban Outfitters that don’t care if workers have tattoos, and watches for mainstream businesses like Starbucks that may want them covered up but can be lax in enforcement from store to store. He says local businesses such as coffee shops and bars often try to build cachet by hiring workers who are adventurous in appearance.

“Employers are starting to realize having interesting people work for them is in their interest,” he says. “They are trying to tap into the youth who are really into that.”

He believes that 2005 marked a turning point for tattoo culture, as reality shows like A&E’s “Inked” and TLC’s “Miami Ink” started opening a window into the inner workings and artistry of tattoo parlors. What followed has been the sort of adoption and growing pains that many rebellious trends experience when they become mainstream, from teen pop stars getting tattoos to the old school lashing out at newcomers.

Of course, that’s not to say tattoo progress is always linear. The army, despite the military’s history of popularizing tattoos after coming home from World War II, recently announced a policy to ban tattoos below the knee and the elbow.

“It’s funny,” Strohecker says, “because that’s the population that brought tattooing to America.”

He started getting his tattoos about nine years ago, when he was an 18-year-old college student in Texas. Strohecker had been around friends with tattoos and studying society’s divisions in race, ethnicity and gender, so getting his own ink was a way he could challenge stereotypes and explore culture’s edges.

His first tattoo, a reference to a Bible verse on his wrist, soon had plenty of company.

Today, only isolated areas such as his palms, throat and top of the head are left unmarked, with copious jewelry and ear gauges to accessorize the skin art.

“I’ve kind of fallen into something that has been a big part of my life,” Strohecker says.

“It seemed perfect to study tattooing.”

Liam Farrell is a contributing writer and editor for Terp Magazine and the university’s Office of Marketing and Communications.

Melissa Brown

Undergraduate spotlight: victoria marie ortiz Victoria Marie Ortiz is a junior pursuing a double degree in psychology and sociology. The Texas native asserts that she is happy with her choice in the University of Maryland for her studies. She states, “My dad works at the Pentagon, so even though I had been in Texas all my life, I knew the DMV would still in some ways feel like home.” In this short interview, she offers how sociology impacts her and why graduate school matters for her future career plans.

Why sociology?

I chose sociology because to me, it goes hand-in-hand with psychology. Double majoring in both gives me a whole picture of human activity in our society. So, not only am I able to understand why an individual makes a certain choice and acts on it, but I also understand how that choice impacts their role in the wider society. Sociology also helped me realize how our society functions, which was enlightening for me and allowed me to really re-evaluate my previous beliefs about how people live their lives. Overall, the most interesting thing sociology has taught me is that there are many things that shape our entire life experiences that we typically don’t think about Are you going to graduate school?

If so, what type of program do you hope to be in?

Currently I have not made a final decision about graduate school plans, but I am looking in to programs and I will start prepping for the GRE soon. Most likely I will pursue more education, whether it be my master’s degree or doctorate, I have yet to decide. Right now I think graduate school would be important for a potential career as a counselor to either domestic abuse survivors or military veterans.

What organizations are you involved in and why are they important to you?

I am the Director of Scholarship for the UMd chapter of Delta Gamma. It is important to me because it’s a value based organization. So we all view similar things such as community service and scholarship as important factors in our lives. In addition, since I am an only child, this sorority allowed me to have the sisters I never had. Aside from my sorority, I am also involved with the Dean’s Student Advisory Council for the School of Behavioral and Social Sciences. Being on this council is important to me because it allows me to have a greater impact on this campus that I love so much. I get to learn more about the consideration taken into providing for the student body and I also help give feedback from the perspective of the students.

What type of tips do you recommend for students who want to major in sociology?

Don’t limit your field of study. Take a sociology class covering multiple topics, such as race relations or family demography. There are so many great aspects of sociology that can sometimes be over looked. Also, take advantage of the prestigious professors we have here at the UMd sociology department. For instance, I really enjoyed the class I took with Dr. Rashawn Ray. His lectures were eye-opening and also made me comfortable discussing topics that I previously shied away from. However, not only should you take one of their classes or reach out, but you should also see if they have any opportunities for under grads to get involved with their research.

What do you like to do with your free time?

I enjoy eating Oreos while watching Scandal or Criminal Minds. I also enjoy volunteering in the community with my Delta Gamma sisters and attending sporting events on campus.

Go Terps!

Who’s the most influential person in your life and why?

My mother. She is the most influential person in my life because she believes I can do absolutely anything I want to do. So disappointing her is not an option.

If you had a million dollars, what would you buy and why?

With a million dollars I would pay for the repaving of the College Park sidewalk and streets. They are quite hazardous for women in heels.

Melissa is a 1st Year Graduate Student

Each year, the Department of Sociology welcomes an incoming cohort of PhD students. This year’s incoming graduate students hail from across the US and hold a wide range of research interests.

Read on to learn a bit about our newest UMD sociologists!

E. Young Harrison Hometown: Philadelphia, PA Undergraduate Degree: Bloomsburg University of PA : Sociology and Gender Studies Is a sociologist because: I breathe it Favorite late-night study snack: Protein boxes (from WaWa, Starbucks, 7 Eleven, etc.)

If you could have a drink or coffee with anyone from history, who would it be? Adolf Hitler If you were trapped in the data lab indefinitely and only had one album or song to listen to, what would it be?

Maroon 5, Songs About Jane

Moriah Willow Hometown: Portland, OR Undergraduate Degree: Portland State University Is a sociologist because: nerdy and want to make a difference Favorite late-night study snack: popcorn If you could have a drink or coffee with anyone from history, who would it be? Julia Child If you were trapped in the data lab indefinitely and only had one album or song to listen to, what would it be? Tribe Called Quest, Anthology

Introducing the 2013-2014 cohort!

Mollie Greenberg Hometown: Lexington, KY Undergraduate Degree: Smith College, Northampton MA : BA Sociology, Women’s & Gender Studies Is a sociologist because: I want to teach people about the unspoken hierarchy of ability in society. I want to work to dismantle the myth of the “abnormal” body and show how “disability” isn’t real and is actually a social construction, and hopefully make a difference in the perception of physical impairment.

Favorite late-night study snack: any type of potato chip, or dark chocolate If you could have a drink or coffee with anyone from history, who would it be?

Judith Butler If you were trapped in the data lab indefinitely and only had one album or song to listen to, what would it be? An album of 90s alternative one-hit-wonders

Megan Wilhelm Hometown: Ohio Undergraduate Degree: Kenyan College : Psychology and Classics Is a sociologist because: My 1st grade teacher who inspired me during my two years as a Teach for America corps member.

Favorite late-night study snack: cupcakes If you could have a drink or coffee with anyone from history, who would it be? Homer (the poet) If you were trapped in the data lab indefinitely and only had one album or song to listen to, what would it be? Motown’s Greatest Hits

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Michael Norton

Hometown: Fitchburg, MA Undergraduate Degree: United States Naval Academy : BS Computer Science Is a sociologist because: I’m in the Navy and was selected to teach as a permanent professor at the Naval Academy in the Leadership department with a focus on sociology. Earning a graduate degree is a prerequisite to teach.

Favorite late-night study snack: peanut M&Ms If you could have a drink or coffee with anyone from history, who would it be? Neil Armstrong If you were trapped in the data lab indefinitely and only had one album or song to listen to, what would it be? Macklemore, “Thrift Shop”

Sara Dimmick Hometown: Albuquerque, NM Undergraduate Degree: Georgetown University : BSFS in International Relations: Security Studies and Eastern European Studies Is a sociologist because: Sociology will fill in the gaps from my international relations background, which focused mainly on government actions. The population’s role in conflicts and international relations is largely forgotten. So I’m here!

Favorite late-night study snack: Pringles source cream and onion chips…and anything chocolate If you could have a drink or coffee with anyone from history, who would it be? Elizabeth I If you were trapped in the data lab indefinitely and only had one album or song to listen to, what would it be? Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9

Melissa Brown Undergraduate Degree: Psychology, BS & German, BA Is a sociologist because: I’m a sociologist because I study inequalities among racial groups and feel that sociology provides me the framework for understanding social structure & group processes.

Favorite late-night snack: Green tea If you could have a drink or coffee with anyone from history, who would it be? Beyoncé If you were trapped in the data lab indefinitely and only had one album or song to listen to, what would it be? Beyoncé

R. Gordon Rinderknecht Hometown: Adel, Iowa Undergraduate Degree: BA in Sociology from the University of Iowa, Minor in English Is a sociologist because: I have lots of different interests and sociology is broad enough to allow me to find a way to research nearly all of them. It also offers me a way to turn my interests into a future occupation, hopefully in academia.

Favorite late-night study snack: Something with cheese If you could have a drink or coffee with anyone from history, who would it be? Voltaire (not really sure, though) If you were trapped in the data lab indefinitely and only had one album or song to listen to, what would it be? “Madness” – Deltron 3030

Daniel Standridge Hometown: Portland, OR Previous Degrees: Portland State University, BS & MS Sociology Is a sociologist because: circumstance, my past, and studying inequality If you were trapped in the data lab indefinitely and only had one album or song to listen to, what would it be? Tough one but …Like Clockwork

Tuesday Barnes Hometown: Baltimore, MD Undergraduate Degree: University of Maryland College Park : Sociology Is a sociologist because: mentors and the McNair Program Favorite late-night study snack: cookies and cream ice cream If you could have a drink or coffee with anyone from history, who would it be? Ché If you were trapped in the data lab indefinitely and only had one album or song to listen to, what would it be? Nas, Stillmatic

Being inundated by social theory throughout our graduate and undergraduate careers, it is sometimes difficult for sociology students to think about theorists as anything other than vastly influential figures. They have crafted the methods and paradigms of our field, and have had an enormous impact on how we perceive our social world. But did you also know that they shine even brighter than some of our most popular celebrities? That’s not just us saying that, though; that’s science.

Using archival data from an obscure source called “Google Images,” high-tech software from premier social science website Celebrity.MyHeritage.com, and longitudinal macro-data from the US-based think tank Rotten Tomatoes, we are able to empirically demonstrate that popular movies and entertainment would be approximately a thousand times better if they featured social scientists instead of these so-called “celebrities.” We have a $4 million grant proposal out to the NSF to expand on this pilot research—fingers crossed!—but in the meantime, we invite you to consider some of our most fascinating results…

1. Michel Foucault The Theorist: Michel Foucault is a post-structuralist who found that title too wordy and pretentious, even for a French sociologist. His most famous works include Discipline and Punish, where he interrogated the social norms and values that are perpetuated by our criminal justice systems, and The History of Sexuality, where he explained, like, all of the sex. He’s also famous among undergraduates for being “that guy who writes the stuff that’s really hard to read.”

The Celebrity: Jeff Goldblum was a man-sized fly monster, a leather-clad dinosaur puncher, and a 90’s-era computer hacker who took down an alien invasion with naught but an Apple Powerbook and a pre-Scientology Will Smith. In other words, he’s a screen legend.

Seven social theorists who are bigger stars than their celebrity doppelgangers Does the Theorist Outshine the Celebrity?

This is a close one. Both of these men have managed to build highly diversified and successful resumes. Both are tall, gangly sexperts with hipster glasses and a penchant for scarves. And both are famous for being both erudite and also kind of weird.

Consider how Foucault would have done in Goldblum’s most famous roles. When faced with the plot twist in Jurassic Park that the dinosaurs had figured out how to change genders in order to reproduce, he would have grinned that crazy person grin and waxed philosophical about how sexual bodies and social roles both shape and contradict one another. As the alien mothership rained death lasers over our major cities, he would’ve laughed a dismissive, cartooney French guffaw as he explained the ephemeral and totally illusory symbolic importance of our built environment.

As The Fly, he would have… wait, no. Only Goldblum could’ve been The Fly. Still, Foucault wins this one.

2. bell hooks The Theorist: A prominent feminist theorist and activist, bell hooks has published prolifically on how race, class, and gender intersect with one another to construct and reinforce inequality. She has written on sexuality, history, capitalism, education, and mass media, and has produced not just scholarly work, but also film and art projects in an effort to speak truth to power. Not bad for someone with a lifelong allergy to capitalized nouns.

The Celebrity: A perennial star of those wonderfully problematic, gender binary-reinforcing Lifetime Network movies that we all secretly love to watch, Holly Marie Combs is probably best known for playing a witch on television’s Charmed, a late-90’s attempt to capitalize on the “Girl Power” movement that grew out of the simultaneous rise to power of Hillary Clinton and the Spice Girls. The 90’s were a very complicated decade.

Does the Theorist Outshine the Celebrity?

Holly Marie Combs may have portrayed a woman with the power to explode people’s brains with her mind, but hooks has been exploding heads for decades. Her books have made feminism more accessible than any other author’s, and her multimedia approach has given her both impact and breadth. And while Combs may have had Shannen Doherty and Alyssa Milano fighting beside her, hooks counts among her friends Malcom X and Toni Morrison, so hooks obviously wins the Coolest Posse award for this issue.

You may not necessarily want to see hooks in a Lifetime movie, but you sure as hell would love to watch one with her. Imagine sitting on her couch, comfortable in the warm embrace of your matching Snuggies, splitting a bottle of wine and deconstructing all of the problematics involved in Denise Richards’ struggle to keep up with her wedding planner business while denying her feelings for her client’s handsome fiancé (no, really).

3. Karl Marx The Theorist: Seriously? He’s Karl freakin’ Marx.

The Celebrity: Yup.

Does the Theorist Outshine the Celebrity?

You don’t get named the grandfather of an entire discipline of study by being easily upstaged.

4. Talcott Parsons The Theorist: Love him or hate him, you can’t deny that Talcott Parsons has left a lasting impact on the field of sociology. He’s often called a functionalist, usually with a sneer, and he is most often critiqued for basing his organizational and social action research on vaguely eugenicist notions of social evolution. Life for upper-middleclass white men was really rough in the 1960’s.

The Celebrity: Harrison Ford is one of nerd-dom’s most prominent icons. As Indiana Jones, he punched a Nazi ubermensch through an airplane propeller. As Han Solo he most definitely shot first. And as President James Marshall, he restructured Social Security with a revolutionary new tiered pay-in plan (and also told a terrorist to get off his plane).

Does the Theorist Outshine the Celebrity?

Ford is a big name with serious cred among nerds, the only population who would even think to ask the question of how celebrities stack up against social theorists. On the other hand, the franchises that made him most famous have been on the decline in recent years. The Star Wars prequels replaced swashbuckling space adventure with political headbutting and racist caricatures. The upcoming Episode VII threatens to put Ford in the role of over-the-hill Han Solo, admonishing space-kids to stay off of his space-lawn.

And the last Indiana Jones installation introduced such innovations as extra-terrestrials and Shia LaBeouf to a franchise that absolutely did not need either.

Ford’s franchises could perhaps benefit from a functionalist, macro-level analysis of how someone could have the idea for something called “Jar-Jar Binks” and still manage to avoid being fired out of a cannon, never to be allowed back into the city limits of Hollywood ever again. Imagine how much better future installations would be with a self-aware critique of how systems-level structures and micro-level interactions shape institutions. But, like, with lasers, we guess?

No, actually, we think this one has to go to the celebrity.

Damn, we have a counterfactual.

5. Pierre Bourdieu The Theorist:Pierre Bourdieu’s theories of power have been foundational in sociology. His conception of capital as multidimensional and dynamic transformed the way we think of status and the reproduction of privilege. His theories were so groundbreaking that he had to invent a new word to describe it—“habitus”? Come on, Pierre—and his most famous work, Distinction, is still the subject of night terrors for grad students forced to plumb its 600-plus page depths.

The Celebrity: Christopher Reeve was best known as Hollywood’s Superman before Zack Snyder turned Superman into a bearded, city-leveling cataclysmic event. Even sharing the screen with Margot Kidder’s burgeoning insanity, Reeve captured America’s heart and started a long and tired tradition of Hollywood comic book movie adaptations. America fell even deeper in love with him when, after a horse riding accident, Reeve was confined to a wheelchair and breathing apparatus. The accident didn’t slow him down; up until his death in 2004, Reeve was a disability advocate and fought for the legalization of stem-cell research to benefit spinal cord injuries like his own.

Does the Theorist Outshine the Celebrity?

In a lot of ways, Christopher Reeve was Hollywood’s answer to Pierre Bourdieu. He traveled through multiple fields of influence, parlaying his social capital first as a handsome and charismatic actor and then as a social activist to pretend to fly against a green screen of stock footage and advocate for medical research, respectively. In fact, if we ignore the whole “flying backwards really fast to reverse time” thing, their professional careers are remarkably similar.

Still, one has to wonder whether Super-Pierre wouldn’t have been better suited to solve the world’s problems. Combining his passion for the study of structural power relations with the ability to punch through an armored tank could go a long way in that whole “truth, justice, and the American way” thing that Superman has going on.

6. Jane Addams The Theorist: Jane Addams was a prominent figure in early American feminism and is considered today to be the mother of modern American social work. A women’s suffrage activist, she was a driving force in the Progressive Era of political reform. Addams also founded Chicago’s Hull House with college friend Ellen Gates Starr, a settlement home for immigrants and the poor that offered social services, education, and housing for those in need. Hull House was also the basis for a rich and prestigious tradition of social science research at the University of Chicago, a tradition that today’s UChicago graduates will never let you forget.

The Celebrity: Salma Hayek is a Mexican-American film, television, and music star. Aside from being considered one of the most beautiful women in Hollywood, she is also an active humanitarian. She has been a vocal advocate for combatting violence against women, earning her a number of awards and accolades. She was also briefly the UN spokeswoman for promoting mothers nursing their babies and eliminating the stigma of public breastfeeding, earning her a lot of uncomfortable and bewildered looks from people all over the world who don’t really know what “stigma” is. But she’s also married to a billionaire philanthropist, so she probably doesn’t care all that much.

Does the Theorist Outshine the Celebrity?

In Frida, Salma Hayek portrayed a woman who eschewed social norms of how a woman should act and look in favor of painting the world as she saw it. In Desperado, she played a bookstore proprietor who was inexplicably talented at wielding automatic weapons disguised as guitars. In Dogma she played, like, an elf or something. We think it’s pretty obvious that the glory of seeing Addams in those roles far outweighs the good work that Hayek did. Imagine Addams pontificating on the importance of feeding and caring for the poor between gunfights, all while wearing a dozen petticoats, and then tell us we’re wrong.

7. Frantz Fanon The Theorist: Although his training was in the field of psychology, Franz Fanon has had a measurable influence on the sociological study of race and colonialism. His book Black Skin, White Masks is still cited sixty years after publication as the definitive text on the devastating structural effects of internalized racism. And he did it all while being named Frantz, no small feat for the brief, pre-hipster era of Western culture.

The Celebrity: Jennifer Lopez hit the public spotlight on 90’s sketch comedy show In Living Color before launching a lucrative career in music, film, and bespangled bodysuit-wearing. She also spawned America’s love of the portmanteau when she and one-time romantic partner Ben Affleck were branded in the popular media as Bennifer. Our nation has never been the same since.

Does the Theorist Outshine the Celebrity?

As if this question even needs answering.

Could anyone deny that Maid in Manhattan wouldn’t have benefitted from a little critical analysis of the imperialist motives behind a Puerto Rican hotel maid pretending to be a high-class guest instead of an employee in order to impress her white, aggressively preppy love interest, with the help of all of the other hilarious stereotypes with whom she works in the underbelly of the hotel? Would Gigli have been even a little more salvageable if someone had been there to explain why a lesbian would suddenly find herself enamored with a greasy muscle for hire?

On the other hand, primary source data indicate that Fanon was notoriously tonedeaf, and could not possibly have brought us such gems as Jenny From the Block and If You Had My Love. We can all agree that we don’t want to live in an America where those songs were never introduced into the cultural lexicon.

Conclusions The results are conclusive: sociologists and social thinkers make everything better. Whether they’re standing in for supernatural demigods, space pirates, or oddly-matched romantic leads, these theorists have demonstrated that they could’ve, at the very least, been much more entertaining than their celebrity doppelgangers.

sociology news . volume 8 . issue 1 . Fall 2013 department of sociology . university of maryland