Graduate Students
Nadia Assad
nassad@ssc.wisc.edu
Angela Barian
Angela's research interests include the sociology of gender, race and class; sexuality and the body, culture, and health. She has received teaching awards from the Sociology department, the University, The Panhellenic Association, and the University Housing system. Her dissertation is an analysis of how raced, classed, and gendered concerns are expressed through accounts of the “childhood obesity epidemic.” She is currently writing an essay on the sexualized fat body on television. She is also working on a theoretical project with Shamus Khan of Columbia University on how to mobilize the concept of embodiment in empirical research. Her Swedish meatballs have won awards.
abarian@ssc.wisc.edu | homepage | Curriculum Vitae
Shlomit Bornstein
Shlomit is interested in the relationship between cultural beliefs, social structure and life opportunities. Cultural beliefs I am particularly interested in are those concerning gender, sexuality, race and power.
sbornste@ssc.wisc.edu
Shelley Boulianne
sboulian@ssc.wisc.edu
Nicole Breazeale
nbreazea@ssc.wisc.edu
Jessica Brown
jbrown@ssc.wisc.edu
Hae Yeon Choo
Hae Yeon's research interests include migration, and citizenship, race-class-gender, sociology of culture, and ethnography. Her master's thesis, published in Gender & Society, was an ethnography of North Korean settlers in South Korea, looking at gendered citizenship construction. She is currently conducting her dissertation fieldwork in South Korea, examining citizenship in practice in the experiences of Filipina migrant women. She is also working on a paper on South Korean discourse on teenage homosexuality and a theoretical paper on how to bring a race and gender integrative approach to empirical studies of inequality.
hychoo@ssc.wisc.edu | homepage | Curriculum Vitae
Wendy Christensen
Wendy's interests include Sociology of gender, sociology of culture, social theory, war and the military, discourse analysis, news media, and internet technology and communications. She is currently working on her dissertation which is a study of how the mothers of deployed U.S. service members mobilize around gendered ideas of politics, support, and motherhood.
wchriste@ssc.wisc.edu | homepage | Curriculum Vitae
Nikki Graf
Nikki’s interests include gender, stratification, education, and political sociology. Her master’s thesis examined intergenerational effects on the labor force participation and socioeconomic attainment of men and women, with a particular focus on how mother’s employment and attitudes toward work relate to children’s employment and status outcomes in adulthood.
ngraf@ssc.wisc.edu
Michelle Hasday
Michelle's research interests include gender, sexuality, mass media, and social psychology. For her Master's thesis, she is studying the relationship between pornography use and romantic relationship satisfaction among heterosexual men. Her other working research projects include a study on the relationship between pornography use and romantic relationship behaviors among heterosexual men, and the relationship between female self-objectification and power dynamics in heterosexual dating couples.
mhasday@ssc.wisc.edu
Erin Hatton
Erin’s dissertation examines the history of the temp industry as a largely ignored site for understanding how workers and business leaders worked within and reconfigured constructions of gender in order to achieve their goals. Each aimed to change the very meaning of work—and “womanhood”—in overlapping and contradicting ways. For example, early temp industry leaders constructed the prototype of the temp worker as a white middle-class woman—and thus not a “real” worker—in order to be accepted as a new, legitimate segment of the labor market and to obtain legal exemptions from burdensome regulations. White middle-class women,meanwhile, used temp work to create a “respectable” space for them in the labor market in the 1950s and ‘60s. And, finally, business owners took advantage of this new labor force to establish a sector of white middle-class work that did not have to abide by the expensive worker protections, such as health benefits and unemployment insurance, which had been hard won in the major unionized industries. Ultimately, all of the key players in this new “triangular employment relationship” both responded to and transformed concepts of gender and work in pursuing their sometimes complementary, sometimes competing agendas.
ehatton@ssc.wisc.edu | Curriculum Vitae
Victoria Healey-Etten
Victoria is
interested in gender, social stratification, inequality, education, expectation states theory, and social psychology. For her master's thesis, she is conducting in-depth interviews with students who have left graduate school to see what factors influenced their decision. Eventually she will also interview a sample of comparable individuals who have completed
graduate school. The main areas of interest in this preliminary research will be the student's class, gender, and race. At this point, she is particularly interested in the experiences of white working class students in graduate school. vhealey@ssc.wisc.edu
Elizabeth Holzer
Elizabeth is currently studying political practices among Liberian refugees in Ghana. The research compares the experiences of Liberians living in a large refugee camp to those living without refugee aid to explore how refugee aid fosters or impedes post-conflict democratization. The study links research interests in democracy, refugee studies, law, gender and ethics. Previous research explored social and judicial activism in the military integration case, Kreil v Germany. Papers from this project described the case's implications for movement-elite relations and the development of European citizenship.
eholzer@ssc.wisc.edu | Curriculum Vitae
Jennifer Holland
Jennifer Holland is a doctoral student in Sociology and an affiliate of the Center for Demography and Ecology and the Institute for Research on Poverty. Her areas of interest are demography, family sociology, and social welfare policy in the United States and Europe. Current research include an investigation of differences in the "economic bar" for marriage across socioeconomic status in the United States and Sweden and a project exploring family formation behaviors as a measure of immigrant incorporation within the European Union.
jholland@ssc.wisc.edu | Curriculum Vitae
Lillian Hsiao-Ling Su
Lillian is interested in feminism, political economy, material and culture in Taiwan and China. She is currently working on the role of the state, female labor force, and IPR issue by comparing two markets in the People's Republic of China. One market is featured for luxurious pirated goods despite the government policing, while the other a platform where local brands strive to establish themselves with the state endorsement. She asks 1) how the state negotiates and positions itself when facing pressures from international regime, and the needs for economic growth; and 2) does the Marxist critique that women are at the bottom layer of capitalist exploitation still hold in China: a state that emphasized gender equlity since the 60s, and where labor is relatively protected? Lillian is in the Dept of Anthropology.
hsu8@wisc.edu
Annabel Ipsen
Annabel Ipsen is a doctoral student in Development Studies with a regional focus on Latin America. Her research interests are: gender, labor, agriculture, migration, social responsibility and sustainable development. Her current research includes an investigation on temporary workers in the citrus industry in Argentina and Uruguay and a project on supply chain development with local farmers in the fruit export industry in northern Chile, looking particularly at labor practices and working conditions.
aipsen@hotmail.com
Julie Keller
Julie is a Rural Sociology student. She is working with Michael Bell on a project about women principal farm operators in Wisconsin and intend to turn it into a master’s thesis. Her interests include feminist theory, gender, and rural sociology.
jkeller@ssc.wisc.edu
Kristy Kelly
Kristy's research examines transnational spaces, places and processes that inform how national and local-level policy-actors engage with global development projects, in ways that often contradict their framers' intents. In this presentation, Kristy examines the role that education and training plays in how a key development policy called gender mainstreaming, is understood and implemented in a variety of local contexts in one country - Vietnam - where the state claims a long history of promoting women's equality vis-a-vis men. Through a contextualization of how gender mainstreaming is accepted, resisted, ignored and/or transformed through the process of training, Kristy presents a new framework for theorizing the transnational as an important site of struggle and engagement between global and local understandings of "equality," "rights" and "development."
kekelly@wisc.edu
Chaitanya Lakkimsetti
clakkims@ssc.wisc.edu
Hallie Lieberman
Hallie
studies the marketing of sex and sex toys throughout history. She is in the department of mass communication.
hhlieberman@wisc.edu
Jason Orne
Jason's interests focus around the intersections of race, gender and sexuality. He is particularly interested in sexual identities management strategies and how they might change between different communities. Currently, he is working on his master's thesis which examines the mechanisms of the coming out process and the differences across gender and sexual identity label.
jorne@ssc.wisc.edu | Curriculum Vitae
Susan Pastor
pastor@ssc.wisc.edu
Moira Reilly
mreilly@ssc.wisc.edu
Landy Sanchez
lsanchez@ssc.wisc.edu
Rebecca Schewe
rschewe@ssc.wisc.edu
Sarah Warren
Sarah has conducted research with an indigenous group in Argentina, the Mapuche people. Her master's research looked at how women influence the direction of a Mapuche organization in its attempts to gain rights and recognition from the state. For her dissertation research she plans to continue studying Mapuche women's participation in indigenous social movements.
swarren@ssc.wisc.edu
Jeannie Yoo
jyoo@ssc.wisc.edu |
