Congratulations to Tad Skotnicki and Jeff Haydu, whose article, “Three Layers of History in Recurrent Social Movements: The Case of Food Reform” will be published in an upcoming issue of Social Movement Studies.
Tad was a recipient of one of the department’s Summer Research Grants a couple of summers ago. Thanks, Tad, for providing such a great demonstration of how that program works!
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Grad student Dan Davis was informed that he has received a highly competitive dissertation fellowship from the Kauffman Foundation in support of his research on student technology incubators on university campuses.
This follows the great news that Dan (and his co-author Professor Amy Binder) have had two papers accepted, one on “Career Funneling” at elite universities (to appear in Sociology of Education, Nick Bloom also a co-author) and one called “Selling Students” about corporate partnership programs on college campuses (to appear in a special issue about higher education in Research in the Sociology of Organizations). All of this work examines in various ways the increasing corporatization of higher education. Congrats Dan.
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Congrats to Tad Skotnicki (recent PhD) on his solo article accepted with the Journal of Historical Sociology. It is entitled “Consumer Senses and Commodity Fetishism: Turn-of-the-Twentieth-Century Consumer Activism in the United States and England.”
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Laura Rogers’ solo authored article, “Helping the Helpless Help Themselves”: How Volunteers and Employees Create a Moral Identity While Sustaining Symbolic Boundaries within a Homeless Shelter” is now out on the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography website’s “online first” list. Congratulations, Laura!
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Yao-tai Li’ paper, “‘Playing’ at the Ethnic Boundary: Strategic Boundary Making/unmaking among Ethnic Chinese Groups in Australia,” has been published by Ethnic and Racial Studies.
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01419870.2015.1080383
ABSTRACT
The sociological literature has constructed a systematic typology of ‘modes’ and ‘means’ of strategic ethnic boundary making/unmaking. Through exploring different strategies, scholars illustrate the processes and contexts of boundary expansion or contraction. Other scholars also distinguish ethnic elements and ‘moral’ values attached to certain ethnicities but not to others. This paper acknowledges dynamic boundary making/unmaking and moral aspects of ethnicity, while exploring the different degrees to which national and pan-national identity nest within each other among ethnic Chinese groups, as well as how ethnic boundary becomes a field where people ‘play’ in their everyday interactions. Based on participant observations and in-depth interviews from two pan-Chinese worksites in Australia, the paper argues that different interpretations of ethnic identity as well as how different identities (national and pan-national) are nested give people room to ‘play’ at the ethnic boundary and result in different outcomes. This paper also shows that people can cross the ethnic boundary (between Taiwanese/Hong Kongese and PRC-Chinese) without expanding/contracting the existing categories or ‘repositioning/transvaluing’ their ethnic statuses.
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Jane Lilly Lopez has some good news to share. Her dissertation project “Citizenship Obligations in an Age of Rights” has been recently awarded a NSF Dissertation Improvement Grant.
Congratulations Jane!
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Recent PhD,Tad Skotnicki and Professor Kwai Ng co-authored an article entitled, “‘That British Sound’: Talk of Nationalness in Global Capitalism” It has recently been accepted by the journal Signs and Society.
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The paper written by grad student Yao-tai Li entitled, “Constituting Co-Ethnic Exploitation: The Economic and Cultural Meanings of Cash-In-Hand Jobs for Ethnic Chinese Migrants in Australia” has been accepted by Critical Sociology. Congratulations!
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Many congratulations to Laura Pecenco, who has been appointed as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Social and Behavioral Sciences Program at San Diego Miramar College! As a grad student, Laura wished to do ethnographic dissertation research on artistic creation in prisons. Since CA had de-funded its prison arts programs, she convinced the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility in San Diego to allow her to found her own arts program, Project PAINT. This award-winning project has improved the lives of artists in prison and their families. E.g., the first project was a collaborative mural project of landscape scenes for family photograph backdrops in visiting rooms. Laura has overseen the artistic and practical sides of Project PAINT, won state funding, and curated exhibitions at the Museum of Photographic Arts in Balboa Park, the Oceanside Museum of Art, SDSU’s Love Library, the Kruglak Gallery, and other venues. Her work has garnered media attention.
Laura’s dissertation studies how the artistic process and products for prisoners are gendered, raced, and classed and analyzes how the safe space of an arts program combats organizational mandates for hypermasculinity. It also critically examines the unintended consequences of the layers of state and university IRB rules (ostensibly designed to protect individual rights of prisoners), which create Kafkaesque barriers to researchers wishing to conduct reasonable research that would support more humane prison policy. Her work has won an Honorable Mention from the ASS SPPS Section’s Robert Dentler Award for Outstanding Student Achievement. It is also the launching pad for her recent award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Laura is also an award-winning teacher and mentor. Her new position at Miramar College will allow her to continue as Executive Director of Project PAINT, lead her NEA research, and combine research and advocacy with her teaching vocation.
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Natalie Aviles has co-written a paper with Isaac Reed, “Ratio via machina: Three standards of mechanistic explanation in sociology,” that has been accepted by Sociological Methods and Research (see abstract below). Congratulations Natalie!
Natalie B. Aviles (first author) and Isaac Ariail Reed ABSTRACT: Recently, sociologists have expended much effort in attempts to define social mechanisms. We intervene in these debates by proposing that sociologists in fact have a choice to make between three standards of what constitutes a good mechanistic explanation: strict-substantial, formal, and metaphorical mechanistic explanation. All three standards are active in the field, and we suggest that a more complete theory of mechanistic explanation in sociology must parse these three approaches to draw out the implicit evaluative criteria appropriate to each. Doing so will reveal quite different preferences for explanatory scope and nuance hidden under the ubiquitous term ‘social mechanism.’ Finally, moving beyond extensive debates about realism and anti-realism, we argue prescriptively against ‘mechanistic fundamentalism’ for sociology, and advocate for a more pluralistic understanding of social causality.
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