Joseph C. Ewoodzie | email | website
Joseph’s research and teaching interests include cultural sociology, urban sociology, race and ethnicity, theory, and ethnography. His master’s thesis, since turned into a book manuscript titled Break Beats in the Bronx: Symbolic Boundaries and the Making of Hip Hop, combines never-before-used archival material with sociological theorizing about symbolic boundaries to provide a new historical account of the making of hip hop, focusing on a crucial span of time surprisingly under-examined in previous studies: 1975-79. His dissertation takes on questions about how people acquire, prepare, and consume what they eat. To answer these questions, I moved to Jackson, Mississippi to conduct an ethnographic study of African Americans. For nearly a year in 2012, he followed more than a dozen Black Jacksonians, from people who are homeless and families who live well below the poverty line, to middle income and wealthy families, to observe and experience how they make decisions about food.
Daanika Gordon | email
Daanika Gordon is a graduate student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin- Madison. Her interest areas include race and ethnicity, urban sociology, law, and social control. Her research aims to 1) examine the processes by which criminal justice system agencies construct the meaning of criminality and race, and 2) explore the consequences of contemporary forms of social control in the context of everyday life.
Nicole M. Butkovich Kraus | email | curriculum vitae
Nicole M. Butkovich Kraus is sociology PhD Candidate. She was awarded the 2012-13 Social Science Research Council-Eurasia Dissertation Fellowship as well as the Mellon-Wisconsin fellowship for her dissertation, “Constructing Xenophobia: Geography, Gender, and Generation of Nation.” She has published “National Identity and Xenophobia in Russia: Opportunities for Regional Analysis” in Russia’s Regions and Comparative Subnational Politics, with Yoshiko Herrera (2013), and they currently have an article under review entitled “Pride versus Prejudice: Xenophobia and National Identity in Russia”. Nikki has a forthcoming chapter “Admitting Diversity: Migrant Laborers and the Effects of Diversity Capital” in Buckley, Cynthia, Ed. People, Power, Conflict: The Emergence of the Eurasian Migration System, NYU Press, and recently authored the Op-Ed “Focus on Russia’s children to defeat antigay law” in the San Francisco Chronicle (Sept 10, 2013). Nikki’s research interests include social stratification/inequality, race and ethnicity, migration, quantitative methods, and the Russian Federation.
Aliza Luft is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology and currently a Visiting Research Scholar at CUNY Graduate Center in New York City. Her research focuses on state violence, political violence, and persecution, and she is especially interested in how civilians react to state authorities’ manipulations of racial categories in high-risk contexts. Drawing on theoretical insights from political sociology, organizational sociology, and the sociology of race and ethnicity, Aliza’s research employs mixed methods to explain how and why people with no pre-existing history of violence choose to support or resist violent state regimes.
Minhtuyen (Minh) Mai | email
Minhtuyen (Minh) Mai is a second year MA student in Educational Policy Studies. Her Master’s Thesis will look at food insecurity among low-income college students. She is also interested in Asian American representation in the media, and social media in higher education.
Alyn McCarty | email | website
Alyn McCarty is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology and an M.S. candidate in the Department of Population Health Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research examines key pathways by which poverty affects children’s life chances and evaluate the effectiveness of interventions to increase low-income families’ social resources. She explores how income and racial/ethnic inequality is reproduced along multiple dimensions of stratification, including mental health, physical health, education, and family social and economic resources. In particular, she shows how schools serve as social contexts in which children grow and develop, and identifies potential unintended consequences for inequality of well-intentioned institutional practices and policies.
Alfonso Morales | email | website
Alfonso Morales is Associate Professor of Urban and Regional Planning. Morales studies food systems, public marketplaces, and street vendors, and the role and function that they serve in economic development. Using an innovative blend of the disciplines of sociology and urban planning, Morales has created a body of books, articles, book chapters, and other writing that provides practical insight into the ways that urban agriculture, food distribution, street-level economies and social interactions contribute to and influence community and economic development. He is among a small number of researchers who employ ethnographic field research methods to help inform contemporary theoretical debates about community food systems, public markets, space use, and street vending businesses. His primary dissertation research on Chicago’s Maxwell Street Market established the foundation for what has become a wider range of studies of the social, cultural, and economic factors that involved in the interactions between public marketplaces and the areas where they are established. His new research on community and regional food systems expands his intellectual and policy agenda through the $5 million dollar USDA-AFRI grant of which he is Project Co-Principle Investigator.
Mytoan Nguyen-Akbar | email | website
Mytoan Nguyen-Akbar recently recently defended her dissertation, titled “Ambivalent Diasporics: High-Skilled ‘Return’ Migration and Social Change in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.”
Heather O’Connell | email | website
Heather studies racial inequality and poverty with a focus on how each is differentially distributed across places. In her work she aims to identify the social, economic, and political factors that explain why some places have higher levels of racial inequality or poverty than other places. In addition, she addresses how context, most notably the historical slavery context, continues to affect contemporary inequality and poverty generating processes.
Pamela Oliver | email | website
Pamela Oliver is a professor. She developed “critical mass” theories of collective action and social movements that stressed the role of organizers, and has written other pieces on social movements theory. She has studied news coverage of protests and other public events. She teaches an undergraduate course “Ethnic Movements in the US” that applies social movement theory to understanding racial/ethnic conflict and politics in the US. Her current research focuses on racial disparities in incarceration and on linking theories of repression with theories of crime control and on developing theory that puts ethnicity and minority/majority dynamics at the center of social movement theory. She has had extensive involvement doing public sociology in Wisconsin around racial disparity issues, including more than a hundred public presentations and involvement in a number of public organizations, boards and commissions over the past decade.
Jason is a PhD candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research focuses on the intersection between race and sexuality in queer populations. Jason’s current project is an ethnography of Chicago’s gay neighborhood Boystown, focused on how sexual assimilation of queer enclaves reinforces racial assimilation and gentrification. American LGBTQ communities are trading their unique sexual cultures for “normality.” IHeargue that sex—the act, not merely alternative identities—helps constitute communities. Alternative sexual cultures infuse spaces with a sexiness that fosters diversity, but, paradoxically, queer people protect these spaces in discriminatory ways. As Boystown adopts a more heterosexual sexual culture, Chicago’s LGBTQ communities perceive the area as whiter.
Johanna Quinn | email
Johanna Quinn is a doctoral student in the Department of Sociology at UW-Madison. Her research examines United State’s teachers as a gendered and racialized labor force and seeks to understand their experiences of teaching in a stratified labor market. Her work investigates how changing relations of accountability and authority in schools and policies like No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and Race to the Top (RTTP) impact teachers’ work and lives.
Katrina Quisumbing King | email
Katrina Quisumbing King is a doctoral student in Sociology and Community and Environmental Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her areas of interest include race and ethnicity, migration, and agro-food systems, especially in urban spaces. In one of her current research projects, katrina investigates urban agricultural activities as a site for understanding immigrant adaptation in three aspects: (1) the socio-cultural dimension of incorporation, which includes identity formation and processes of group-making; (2) the political participation of immigrants in community gardens, for example; and (3) economic integration as seen in the market or through self-provisioning.
Megan Noriko Shoji | email | curriculum vitae
Megan is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Sociology and an Advanced Fellow of the Interdisciplinary Training Program in Education Sciences. Megan’s research focuses on identifying mechanisms of educational stratification and areas of potential intervention. In particular she is interested in the role of social and cultural resources in the production of racial/ethnic inequality in U.S. schools. In her dissertation, “Nice to Meet You? Exploring the Development of Supportive Parent-School Relationships in Low-Income Latino Communities,” she uses mixed-methods to explore how inequalities in family-school connections are produced during early elementary school and how a family engagement program intervenes on this process.
Gina Spitz | email | curriculum vitae
Gina is a PhD Candidate in Sociology and Community and Environmental Sociology. Gina’s dissertation research uses a qualitive neighborhood study to explore the question, how does the racial diversity of a neighborhood relate to the cross-racial ties and cross-racial interactions present there? She proposes to distinguish between technical racial integration – racially diverse people living next to each other and social racial integration – people of different racial groups interacting with each other and forming relationships. In doing so, she challenges the sociological literature to understand neighborhood diversity in a more social way. She also questions how place matters to the formation and presence of cross-racial relationships.
Casey Stockstill | email
Casey Stockstill is a graduate student in the Department of Sociology at UW-Madison. Her interest areas include social psychology, race and ethnic studies, gender, and family. Casey has three current projects: (1) an experiment examining how multiracials’ presentations of their racial background affect their perceived status and competence; (2) a project with Katie Fallon about how single, heterosexual, professional women in New York City approach dating; and (3) an ethnography of the social lives of preschool children.