On the Job Market
Angela Barian
My research examines the discourses surrounding childhood obesity from a gendered, raced, and classed lens. For my dissertation, I analyzed hundreds of documents from the medical community, media, and policy worlds to investigate the impact of cultural concerns on the framing of a social problem. I find that these claimsmaking authorities frame not only fat children as unfortunates in need of saving, but their families (especially mothers), communities, and culture as well. These authorities use racial and ethnic “unfortunates” as marks by which to gauge American progress. As a result, I argue that attempts to slim down children are not simply health-related endeavors, but also a type of cultural colonialist project that allows cultural power over subordinated people’s everyday lives. The focus on health and wellness justifies the involvement in political and public sphere body projects over something that could otherwise be deemed “private.”
So 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 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
Hae Yeon Choo
My research centers on the intersections of gender, migration, and citizenship in order to understand the changing dynamics of inequality in the context of globalization. My background in the sociology of gender, the sociology of culture, and political sociology, as well as my commitment to advancing feminist and sociological theory inform my research.
My dissertation comparatively examines how the South Korean state and civil society produce and maintain distinct incorporation regimes for three overlapping groups of Filipina migrant women—factory workers, wives of South Korean men, and “entertainers” at clubs in American military camptowns. I approach citizenship, not as a simple legal category, defined in top-down fashion for an individual by a nation-state, but rather as an interactive accomplishment involving both the host society and the migrants as active agents constrained by the structures of law and policy. Based on 18 months of multi-sited ethnographic research, I examine how the boundaries of citizenship are negotiated and contested through everyday interactions among the immigration wing of the state, the migrant advocacy NGOs that represent the privatized state’s welfare wing, and migrants. By examining the ways in which gender and ethnicity are variously invoked, and analyzing how these discursive struggles relate to the management of legality and rights in practice, my dissertation illuminates the gendered governance that emerges at the margins of citizenship.
hychoo@ssc.wisc.edu | homepage |Curriculum Vitae
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