Sociology PhDs on the Market
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Dissertation Title: Gullet Politics. How Markets, Movements, and the State Organize Public Morality: Contentious Foie Gras Politics in France and the United States.
Areas of Interest: Sociology of Culture; Organizations; Economic Sociology, Consumption; Food; Social Movements; Institutions and Globalization, Social Problems, Qualitative Methodologies
Recent Publications:
Michaela DeSoucey and Isabelle Téchoueyres. ‘Virtue and Valorization: “Local Food” in the United States and France.’ In The Globalization of Food. Edited by David Inglis and Debra Gimlin. Oxford & New York: Berg Publishers. Forthcoming March 2009.
Klaus Weber, Kathryn Heinze, and Michaela DeSoucey. ‘Forage for Thought: Mobilizing Codes in the Movement for Grass-fed Meat and Dairy Products.’ Administrative Science Quarterly, accepted December 2007, forthcoming Fall 2008.
Michaela DeSoucey, Jo-Ellen Pozner, Corey Fields, Kerry Dobransky, and Gary Alan Fine. 2008. ‘Memory and Sacrifice: An Embodied Theory of Martyrdom.’ Cultural Sociology 2:1 (p.99- 121).
Paul Hirsch and Michaela DeSoucey. 2006. ‘Organizational Restructuring: Rhetorical and Structural Implications.’ Annual Review of Sociology. Vol. 32.
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Dissertation Title: Help Me Help You: On Empowerment in Healthcare and Human Services
Dissertation Summary: Addressing the increasing focus throughout healthcare and human services on patient/client rights, self-determination, and empowerment, my dissertation examines the ideals and practice of empowerment in a particularly challenging setting—care for people with severe, persistent mental illness. My data come from fifteen months of ethnographic research in two multi-service mental health services organizations. In addition to field observations, data include 91 in-depth interviews with both clients and workers, as well as organizational and policy documents, including 39 complete client files. There are many different conceptions of empowerment raised by workers, clients, policy, professional ethics, and organizational missions and procedures. My findings reveal how, in the conflicts and miscommunications that result from multiple interpretations of empowerment, informal organizational processes and non-clinical client characteristics determine much of the type and degree of empowerment that is carried out, and for whom. Contributing to work both in the cultural dynamics of organizations and in the social organization of health care and human services, my research demonstrates both the problems and possibilities involved in the organizational enactment of polysemic ideologies of patient/client care.
Areas of Interest: Medical Sociology, Sociology of Mental Health, Cultural Sociology, Organizations (Formal/Complex), Health/Social Policy, Qualitative and Historical Methods.
Recent Publications:
Under Review. Dobransky, Kerry. "The Good, the Bad, and the Severely Ill: Label Inconsistency and Informal Organizational Labeling in Community Mental Health." Under Review at Social Science and Medicine.
2008. DeSoucey, Michaela, JoEllen Pozner, Corey Fields, Kerry Dobransky, and Gary Alan Fine. "Memory and Sacrifice: An Embodied Theory of Martyrdom." Cultural Sociology 2:99-121.
2007. Dobransky, Kerry. "City Folk: Survival Strategies of Tradition-Bearing Organizations." Poetics: Journal of Empirical Research on Culture, the Media and the Arts 35: 239-261.
2006. Dobransky, Kerry and Gary Alan Fine. "The Native in the Garden: Floral Politics and Cultural Entrepreneurs." Sociological Forum 21:559-584.
2006. Dobransky, Kerry and Eszter Hargittai. "The Disability Divide in Internet Access and Use." Information, Communication and Society 9:313-334.
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Dissertation Title: "AIDS Streetscapes: A Social Iconography of HIV/AIDS Campaigns in Chicago and Accra."
Dissertation Summary : This dissertation explains how some visual strategies used by AIDS media campaigns in Ghana and the US resonate more than others. To do so I create a social iconography of AIDS campaigns: a study of the social practices, interactions, and contexts around representations of AIDS. The data include participant observation of AIDS campaign design, interviews within public health organizations and with local civic and religious leaders, group interviews within the local community, GIS analysis of Demographic Health Survey data and campaign density, photographic documentation and ethnographic observation of campaigns amidst the urban streetscape. By attending to the links between visual culture and the prevention of AIDS, I find that knowledge sources (i.e. public health models, international "best practices," local assumptions, religious interests, etc.) leave campaigns hamstrung as they attempt to mobilize frames and images to change behaviors associated with HIV transmission. With a focus on meaning-making and cultural power, I articulate new approaches for the evaluation of public health communication and offer a new theoretical framework that elaborates the relationship between culture, media, and health behavior.
Areas of Interest: Cultural Sociology, Media Studies, Gender and Sexuality, Urban Studies, Social Movements, Health/HIV and AIDS, Qualitative Methods
Recent Publications:
McDonnell, Terence E. "Cultural Objects as Objects: Materiality, Urban Space, and the Interpretation of AIDS Media in Accra, Ghana." Revised and resubmitted to the American Journal of Sociology.
McDonnell, Terence E. "The (re)Presentation of an Epidemic in Everyday Life." Invited cover essay for Social Psychology Quarterly.
McDonnell, Terence E. and J. Lynn Gazley. "Measurement AIDS: Bridging the Culture Gap that Divides Public Health and Anthropology." Submitted to Social Theory & Health special issue on "HIV/AIDS in its Third Decade."
Fine, Gary Alan, and Terence McDonnell. 2007. "Erasing the Brown Scare: Referential Afterlife and the Power of Memory Templates." Social Problems. 54: 170-187.
Griswold, Wendy, Erin Metz McDonnell, and Terence E. McDonnell. 2007. "Glamour and Honor: Going Online and Reading in West African Culture." Information Technology and International Development. 3: 37-52.
Griswold, Wendy, Terry McDonnell, and Nathan Wright. 2005. "Readers and Reading in the Twenty-First Century." Annual Review of Sociology. 31: 127-41.
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Dissertation Title: Consciousness in the Environmental Movement
Dissertation Summary: Using interviews with environmental activists, I examine how activists understand social change. In particular, I identify schemas of social change that activists employ to make sense of cultural objects relevant to their activism, such as environmentalism and law. The interviews reveal variations of consciousness in which different schemas are used or blended together to place objects such as environmentalism and law into coherent frameworks. These frameworks form the basis for their strategies for social change.
Areas of Interest: Sociology of Law, Environmental Sociology, Sociology of Religion, Multi-method Research, Social Psychology of Collective Behavior/Social Movements (Consciousness Studies).
Recent Publications:
Joanna Reed
j-reed2@northwestern.edu
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Dissertation Title: A Closer Look at Unmarried Parenthood: Relationships, Meanings, Trajectories and Gender
Dissertation Summary: My dissertation is a qualitative study of unmarried parents. I use four years of interview data from 48 couples to explore their relationship trajectories and stability, what marriage, cohabitation and parenthood mean to them, and how gender shapes their practices and relationships. While new national studies have revealed much about unmarried parenthood, there are still many knowledge gaps. I fill some of these by showing how how unmarried parents’ relationships fare and change over time, what keeps them together and pushes them apart and what their relationships mean to them. I discuss the implications of unmarried parenthood for society and the adults and children who experience their family this way. Several factors have combined to make unmarried parenthood in the U.S. a complicated and politically charged topic. Although about one third of all U.S. births now occur to unmarried couples, this change has affected Americans unequally. Those advantaged by income, education and race tend to still be married when they give birth, while having children outside of marriage is strongly related to lower educational attainment. This, along with consistent research findings that marriage confers advantages on children, has led many researchers and policy makers to view unmarried parenthood as a social problem. I try to cast a wider net by engaging with the ambivalence and flux in the data and situating unmarried families in their historical and institutional contexts. I also incorporate theory from gender, culture, and modernity in my analyses.
Areas of Interest: Families, Inequality, Gender, Culture, Qualitative Methods, Immigration,Theory
Recent Publications:
Reed, J. 2007. “Anatomy of the Break-Up: How and Why do Unmarried Parents Break-up?” Unmarried Couples with Children, edited by Paula
England and Kathryn Edin. Russell Sage Foundation, New York. (forthcoming)
Edin, K., England, P, Schafer, E & Reed, J. 2007.“Planned, Accidental or Somewhere
in Between: Pregnancy Intentionality among Unmarried Couples.” Unmarried Couples with Children, edited by Paula England and Kathryn Edin. Russell Sage Foundation, New York. (forthcoming)
Reed, J. 2006. “Not Crossing the Extra Line: How Cohabitors with Children View their
Unions.” Journal of Marriage and Family, 68(5) 1117-1131
Reed, J., Pashup, J., and Snell, E. 2005. “Voucher Use, Labor Force
Participation and Life Priorities: Findings from the Gautreaux Two Housing
Mobility Study”. Cityscape, Vol. 8, no. 2, pp.219-239
Edin, K., & Reed, J. 2005. “Why Don’t They Just Get Married? Barriers
to Marriage Among the Disadvantaged.” The Future of Children, Vol. 15, no.2, pp. 117-137
Edin, K., Kefalas, M., & Reed, J. 2004. “A Peek Inside the Black Box:
What Marriage Means for Poor Unmarried Parents.” Journal of Marriage and Family, 67: 1007-14
