On the Job Market
Angela Barian
My dissertation investigates the impact of cultural concerns on the framing of a social problem. The main question is why and how it is that three different claimsmaking communities – medical, media, and policy – define childhood obesity as a problem fraught with cultural anxieties. My analysis focuses on the claimsmaking communities’ use of language to make sense of the issue. To answer the question, I examine concerns over the causes, fallout, and solutions to childhood obesity in American medical research, news media, and policy documents between 2002 and 2009. Through this, I show how raced, classed, and gendered concerns are expressed through accounts of the “childhood obesity epidemic.” I find that the childhood obesity epidemic is also an issue of values and the democratic determination of how we should intervene - or not - for “the common good." This process raises questions about the appropriate size and scope of the state and other authorities, the desired degree of public intervention in private affairs and for whom, the distribution of power and material goods, and dilemmas of morality and values. This theoretical and methodological approach is indicative of my larger orientation towards sociology: to take a social problem that "everyone already knows," and to make larger social relations of gender, race, class, and power available and understandable on a wider scale.
abarian@ssc.wisc.edu | homepage | Curriculum Vitae
Wendy Christensen
My research centers on how ideas about gender shape cultural and political issues. In my dissertation I bring together theories of gender, discourse, and political mobilization to address the question of how gender shapes the intersection of personal concerns and political issues surrounding war. I examine how mothers of U.S. service members are targeted by the Department of Defense in recruitment material, and how mothers come together in online forums to provide their children and one another with support through their children's training and deployment. To do this, I conducted an online ethnography of military mothers’ online support forums, interviewed mothers of service members, and analyzed Department of Defense recruitment and deployment support material. I show that while some mothers are publicly vocal against the war, many mothers self-censor their views and are marginalized from public political discourse. I argue that mothers' dissent is managed by constructing their opinions as motherly, thus personal and not relevant to war-making, a public issue. This study contributes to understanding the complex relationship of the homefront and the warfront, by showing how homefront support relies on gender. It also contributes to understanding the intersections of gender and politics, by showing how motherhood can be both an empowering social status for military mothers, while leading them to devalue their autonomy as citizens in the political sphere.
wchriste@ssc.wisc.edu | homepage | Curriculum Vitae
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