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Sociology Department News

Week of December 16, 2011

Hillary Potter has been reappointed by Denver Mayor Michael Hancock to serve another two-year term as a commissioner on the Denver Civil Service Commission. (She has been on the commission since Jan. 2009, originally appointed by the former mayor, John Hickenlooper.) The Commission comprises five civilian commissioners who oversee the Commission's executive director and staff. The Commission is responsible for administering the testing process for entry-level and promotional positions within the Denver Fire and Police Departments, policy administration, and hearing disciplinary appeals of classified members (officers and firefighters).

Christie Sennott's mixed-method evaluation of Boulder County's Housing First program to address homelessness has informed the recent debates about the program's future. She conducted the research for a SOCY graduate health seminar in 2007, and it is referenced here as a "2008 study" of the program.

Amy Wilkins has just been elected to the council of the Pacific Sociological Association. She will serve a three-year term starting in March 2012.

Joanne Belknap's previous publication has been republished as a book chapter: Belknap, Joanne and Kristi Holsinger. 2012. “The Gendered Nature of Risk Factors for Delinquency,” in Women and Crime, Stacy L. Mallicoat, Ed., Los Angeles: Sage, pp. 30-48.

Finally, we have our first good news of the season from the academic job market. Bethany Everett has accepted a tenure-track assistant professor position in the department of sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago beginning in Fall 2012. Bethany was recruited to UIC to contribute to the department's PhD program concentrations in quantitative methods and gender and sexuality. UIC is a Research I university located in downtown Chicago.

Congratulations to everyone!

Week of December 9, 2011

Congratulations to Amy Wilkins, who received a grant from the CARTSS Scholar Fund for her project, "Identities, College, and Mobility."

Joanne Belknap has been nominated and approved to appear on the 2012 election slate for the position of President of the American Society of Criminology. Only five women have been presidents of ASC since the society's inception in 1939. Elections will be held this summer.

Jo is on a roll! Joanne Belknap, along with Anne DePrince, Jennifer Labus, Susan Buckingham, and Angela Gover (Joanne is 4th author) have had an article accepted for publication. "The impact of community-based outreach on psychological distress and victim safety in women exposed to intimate partner abuse," in the Journal of Consulting & Clinical Psychology.
Abstract:
Objective. Using a longitudinal, randomized controlled trial, this study assessed the impact of a community-based outreach versus a more traditional criminal justice system-based referral program on women’s distress and safety following police-reported intimate partner abuse (IPA). Method. Women (N=236 women; AgeMean=33.4) with police-reported IPA were randomly assigned to one of two interdisciplinary community-coordinated response program conditions: Outreach (community-based victim advocate outreach) or Referral (criminal justice system-based victim advocate referrals tocommunity-based agencies). Participants were interviewed 3 times over a year period: within 26 (median) days of police-reported IPA, 6- and 12-months later. Primary outcome measures included posttraumatic stress disorder and depression symptom severity (Posttraumatic Stress Diagnostic Scale; Beck Depression Inventory-Second Edition); fear appraisals (Trauma Appraisal Questionnaire); IPA revictimization (Revised Conflict Tactics Scale); and readiness to leave the relationship with the abuser.Results. One year after the initial IPA incident, women in the Outreach condition reported decreased PTSD and depression symptom severity, and fear compared relative to the Referral condition. Although condition was unrelated to revictimization in the year following the initial IPA incident, women in the Outreach condition reported greater readiness to leave the abuser and rated services as more helpful than the Referral condition. Conclusions. This is one of the first studies to examine community-based outreach in the context of an interdisciplinary community coordinated response to police-reported IPA. The findings suggest that community-based outreach by victim advocates results in decreased distress levels, greater readiness to leave abusive relationships, and greater perceived helpfulness of services relative to system-based referrals.

Joanne has also been active in advocating for former CU Honors student, Molly Bowers, who is currently serving a 16-year prison sentence.
Daily Camera Articles:
http://www.dailycamera.com/boulder-county-news/ci_19172482?IADID=Search-www.dailycamera.com-www.dailycamera.com

http://www.dailycamera.com/ci_19367545?IADID=Search-www.dailycamera.com-www.dailycamera.com

http://www.dailycamera.com/ongoing-coverage/midyette-baby-death/ci_19392370?IADID=Search-www.dailycamera.com-www.dailycamera.com

Together with Beth Whalley, Jo organized a vigil for Molly Bowers, and there was strong graduate student turnout:
http://www.dailycamera.com/ongoing-coverage/midyette-baby-death/ci_19493260?IADID=Search-www.dailycamera.com-www.dailycamera.com#.TuFt3y-3kD4.mailto

Week of December 2, 2011

Hillary Potter was recently elected to serve a second two-year term as Chair of the Division on People of Color and Crime of the American Society of Criminology.

Isaac Reed gave two keynote addresses/forty-five minute papers at Kultursociologisk Konferens, November 18-19 at Linneaus University in Sweden.

Abstracts:
Causality beyond the mechanism: Notes on the interpretive sublation of critical realism
For much of the twentieth century, an opposition between “explanation” and “understanding” structured our understanding of the nature and purpose of different sorts of sociological knowledge. But this opposition relied for its coherence on certain axioms of logical positivism that proved unsustainable; one of these was a strict agnosticism about causality. Against this, the development of critical realism and analytic sociology have, from the 1970s to the present, presented a new epistemology for social science, and an insistence that social scientists can, and must, ask causal questions—and answer them by theorizing social mechanisms. However, these formats of knowledge have not fully interrogated the opposition between interpretative understanding and (causal) explanation. Doing so suggests that, while the theorization of mechanisms can be a part of explanation, that ultimately the causal explanation of social action requires the interpretive reconstruction of landscapes of meaning. Thus “explanation,” in sociology, is inherently “interpretive.” Some of the implications of this conclusion for how we understand the rationality of social science are explored.

Modernity Reconfigured: Empire, Critical Sociology and the End of 'Habermas contra Foucault'
The opposition between Habermas and Foucault has structured how we think about, teach, and reinterpret critical sociology for many years. For all of the differences, both real and imagined, between these thinkers, they share an important commonality: a sociohistorical analysis of modernity which locates its dynamics in the cultural, social and economic transformations of Western Europe, and to some degree the United States, via rationalization, discipline, and dialectical interplay of instrumental reason and practical reason. This narrative of modernity also informs other accounts--such as the "multiple modernities" paradigm of sociology. Yet, this theoretical analytic is incomplete at best and ideological at worst. It disavows the intertwining of modernity and imperialism; the opposition of Foucault and Habermas, as we read it now, ignores the way the unique social and political transformations we call "modernity" were products of a particular kind of imperial process and a particular interpretation of the modern colonial encounter via a semiotics of race and racism. Considering modernity and empire as intertwined in this way forces us to reconsider how we theorize power, how we understand the cultural dimension of modernity, and how we conceptualize the current moment of global crisis.

Laura Patterson successfully defended her dissertation, “Prime Age Adult Mortality Shocks and Household Socioeconomic Status: An Analysis of Vulnerability and Coping in Rural South Africa.” Congratulations to Dr. Patterson!

Amy Wilkins has had an article accepted in Gender & Society. Wilkins, Amy C. "Stigma and Status: Interracial Intimacy and Intersectional Identities among Black College Men." Abstract: In this article, I use in-depth interviews with Black college students at two predominantly white universities to investigate the co-construction of race, gender, and sexuality, and to examine intersectional identities as a dynamic process rather than bounded identity. I focus on Black college men’s talk about interracial relationships. Existing research documents black women’s angry reactions to interracial relationships, but for Black men, interracial relationships present both problems and opportunities. I examine how Black men use two distinct forms of interracial talk—‘player’ talk and ‘intimacy’ talk—to negotiate racialized gendered stereotypes of Black men’s heterosexuality. By moving between forms of talk, Black men negotiate the identity tensions they face as Black upwardly mobile men. Player talk and intimacy talk both respond to and use racialized stereotypes, reworking the relationship between gender, race, and sexuality. In this case, disrupted racial boundaries uphold gender inequalities between men and women.

Brandi Gilbert and Liesel Ritchie (Assistant Director of Research at the Natural Hazards Center) recently attended the American Evaluation Association (AEA) Conference in Anaheim, CA, where they presented a paper entitled “Assessing the Needs of Youth in the Aftermath of the Gulf Oil Spill.” Brandi also presented on a panel for recipients of the 2011 AEA Presidential Strand Student Travel Award, where she discussed her essay "Addressing Values and Valuing through a Culturally Responsive Evaluation Framework." This year Brandi will be serving as the Chair of AEA's Disaster and Emergency Management Evaluation Topical Interest Group.

Beth Whalley and Joanne Belknap presented their paper entitled "Parricide and Filicide Sentencing: Children Who Kill Their Parents and Parents Who Kill Their Children" at a panel entitled Sentencing Offenders Convicted of Homicide and Sex Offenses at the American Society of Criminology in Washington DC.

Our department was well represented at the ASC meetings. Also on the program were: Colleen Hackett, Shelby McKinzey, Kathryn Nowotny, Hillary Potter, Michael Roettger, Sara Steen, and Devon Thacker.

And last but certainly not least, in the December 2011 issue of Rooster, The Teacher of the Year Award (as voted by students) was given to Glenda Walden for her class, "Social Constructions of Sexuality." One of the four Runner Up Awards went to Patti Adler for her class, "Deviance in US Society." This is the second year running that Patti has received this distinction.

Week of November 18, 2011

Congratulations to Sanyu Mojola and Bethany Everett, who have had a paper accepted in Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health (the #3 Demography journal - based on impact factor).
"STD and HIV RISK FACTORS AMONG YOUNG U.S. ADULTS: BY GENDER, RACE/ETHNICITY, AND SEXUAL ORIENTATION." Sanyu A. Mojola and Bethany Everett.
Abstract:
Context: STD and HIV infections disproportionately affect individuals who have multiple minority identities. Understanding the distribution of STD/HIV risk factors across gender, race/ethnic and sexual minority groups is important for tailoring public health interventions.
Methods: Data from 11,045 young adults from Wave III (2001-2002) and IV (2007-2008) of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health were used to develop population based estimates of STD/HIV risk factors by gender, race/ethnicity (non-Hispanic white, non-Hispanic black, Hispanic) and sexual orientation (heterosexual, mixed oriented, gay). Regression analyses were also conducted to examine the significance of these risk factors.
Results: Mixed oriented women across all race/ethnic groups had significantly higher STD diagnoses compared to heterosexual white women. White and Black mixed oriented women reported an average of 17 male partners; women on average reported 9. Over 40% of white sexual minority women reported forced sex, almost twice that of all women (24%). Gay women of all race/ethnic groups reported between 5 and 9 male lifetime partners in addition to their female partnerships. Men reported an average of 16 lifetime female partners, however, gay men reported on average less than 2. Black men reported higher rates of forced sex (8%). STD diagnosis rates were highest among black men (34%), and mixed oriented black men in particular.
Conclusions: Young adults in the US with multiple minority identities face particular vulnerability for STDs and HIV. Taking account of race/ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation should be an important part of future research and intervention efforts for STD/ HIV prevention.

And kudos to Jason Boardman, Casey Blalock, and Fred Pampel, whose very interesting work on changes in genetic influences on smoking has been featured in a variety of news outlets this week. Here are some of the writeups:
http://artsandsciences.colorado.edu/magazine/2011/11/smoke-smoke-smoke-that-cigarette-genetic-factors-may-add-new-refrain-to-old-song-cu-led-study-finds/

http://www.dailycamera.com/cu-news/ci_19348148

http://www.latimes.com/health/boostershots/la-heb-smoking-genetic-20111117,0,4972821.story

http://www.denverpost.com/recommended/ci_19353324

Week of November 11, 2011

This past weekend Wade Smith presented a paper titled "Calling the Shots: Context and Contradiction in Decision-making among Sports Officials" at the annual conference of the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport in Minneapolis, MN.

Wee Kiat Lim has had a coauthored paper accepted at the Journal of Strategic Information Systems (JSIS), which has an impact factor of 2.90. Title: "Client Strategies in Vendor Transition: A Threat Balance Perspective."
Abstract: Many outsourcing contracts are expiring, and vendor transition is an increasing concern. This paper attempts to develop guidelines for vendor transition by applying balance of threat theory, which suggests a client organization should pursue either a “soft” or “hard” balancing strategy, depending on the outgoing vendor’s capability and aggressive intent to disrupt client operations. Balance of threat theory is explored across two contrasting case sites. In addition to demonstrating the relevance of balance of threat theory, the cases identify specific tactics associated with hard and soft balancing, as well as key areas of conflict in vendor transition.

Janet Jacobs and Stefanie Mollborn have had a paper accepted at Qualitative Sociology. Special thanks to the junior faculty reading group, which provided important feedback on the manuscript. Stefanie Mollborn and Janet Jacobs. "'We'll Figure a Way': Teenage Mothers' Experiences in Shifting Social and Economic Contexts." Abstract: The current economic and social context calls for a renewed assessment of the consequences of an early transition to parenthood. In interviews with 55 teenage mothers in Colorado, we find that they are experiencing severe economic and social strains. Financially, although most are receiving substantial help from family members and sometimes their children's fathers, basic needs often remain unmet. Macroeconomic and family structure trends have resulted in deprived material circumstances, while welfare reform and other changes have reduced the availability of aid. Socially, families' and communities' disapproval of early childbearing negatively influences the support young mothers receive, their social interactions, and their experiences with social institutions.

Last but certainly not least, Sanyu Mojola has a new article forthcoming in Signs. Title: PROVIDING WOMEN, KEPT MEN: Doing Masculinity in the wake of the African HIV/AIDS epidemic.
Abstract: This paper draws on ethnographic and interview based fieldwork to explore accounts of intimate relationships between widowed women and poor young men that emerged in the wake of economic crisis and a devastating HIV epidemic among the Luo ethnic group in Western Kenya. I show how the cooptation of widow inheritance practices in the wake of an overwhelming number of widows as well as economic crisis resulted in widows becoming providing women and poor young men becoming kept men. I illustrate how widows in this setting, by performing a set of practices central to what it meant to be a man in this society – pursuing and providing for their partners - were effectively doing masculinity. I will also show how young men, rather than being feminized by being kept, deployed other sets of practices to prove their masculinity and live in a manner congruent with cultural ideals. I argue that ultimately, women’s practice of masculinity in large part seemed to serve patriarchal ends. It not only facilitated the fulfillment of patriarchal expectations of femininity – to be inherited – but also served, in the end, to provide a material base for young men’s deployment of legitimizing and culturally valued sets of masculine practice.

Also, Sanyu presented her new research at a CU-Denver in the Health and Behavioral Sciences colloquium on "The HIV/AIDS Epidemic in Washington D.C." last Friday.

Week of November 4, 2011

Congratulations to Lori Hunter, who recently received word that one of her 2005 articles will be reprinted in a 2012 collection on Migration and Climate Change, Graeme Hugo (Ed.), in the series The International Library of Studies on Migration. Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd: Cheltenham UK. The reprinted article is Hunter, Lori M. 2005. “Migration and Environmental Hazards.” Population and Environment. Vol. 26, No. 4: 273-302.

Week of October 28 , 2011

Jenny Vermilya's second article (first solo-authored article!) has been accepted for publication inSociety & Animals. It will be coming out in April 2012. This is a special edition which will include work from past fellows of the Animals and Society Institute's Human-Animal Studies Fellowship (which she participated in during the summer of 2010). "Contesting Horses: The Equine Concentration as a Border Track in Veterinary Medical Education."
ABSTRACT:
Within veterinary medical education, tracking systems can exist that differentiate between “large” and “small” animal medicine. In a tracking system, students can break off and focus primarily on their choice of animal medicine once they have all completed the same core curriculum. This article argues that these socially created categories are ever shifting, therefore some species do not always “fit.” This generates new discourses surrounding emerging “border tracks”; these “tracks” focus on species whose social definitions change so that their placement in veterinary medical education’s tracking system is a site of contestation. Thus, animal medicine operates not solely on biology, but on social meaning as well. The analysis will use the equine concentration to display the ambiguity of borders, as well as their potential to serve as communicative sites for social change.

Christie Sennott and Sara Yeatman (CU Denver) have had their article, "The Stability of Fertility Preferences and the Predictors of Change Among Young Women in Malawi" accepted for publication in International Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health (March 2012). The abstract is below.
ABSTRACT
CONTEXT: Although studies have demonstrated change in fertility preferences over time, we still lack definitive knowledge about the level and direction of change at the individual level, especially among young and unmarried women. Furthermore, little is known about the factors predicting change in fertility preferences over time.
METHOD: Five waves of longitudinal data from the Tsogolo la Thanzi (TLT) project were analyzed to determine the extent of change in young Malawian women’s desired timing of their next birth. Multinomial logit regression models were used to examine the relationship between life events related to reproduction, relationships, health, and economics and directional shifts in fertility timing preferences.
RESULTS: Our findings demonstrate considerable change in fertility timing preferences over a period of 18 months. Over half of the respondents reported changes in the desired timing of their next birth over each four month period. Changes in timing desires in both directions (delays and accelerations) were common. A number of life events, including having a child, entering a serious relationship, and changes in household finances were found to influence the level and direction of fertility preference change.
CONCLUSION: A significant proportion of young women report changes in their fertility timing preferences over four month intervals. This high level of change over short time periods has important implications for research that relies on fertility preferences to measure and predict outcomes over longer reference periods.
Patti Adler's book, The Tender Cut, was featured on the Home page of FoxNews.com under the Health section
Leslie Irvine was an expert source in a Daily Camera article this week.

Hillary Potter and Joanne Belknap were chosen as "CU campus leaders" to introduce women basektball student-athletes at the One-on-One with CU Women's Basketball Evening on October 27th at the Coors Event Center.

Also, the Daily Camera reported on Joanne Belknap's activism in heading a grass roots group to support one of CU's alumna in a wrongful conviction case.

Finally, Christina Sue has some good news to share. Her book, Land of the Cosmic Race: Racism, Race Mixture, and Blackness in Mexico, is under contract with Oxford University Press.

Week of October 21, 2011

On October 17-19, Mike Radelet participated in a symposium funded by the Spanish government on "The Death Penalty in the Caribbean," in Madrid, Spain. On Friday, October 21, he served as Moderator for the "Overview and Recommendations" Session at the Fourth Annual Health Disparities Institute, University of the Virgin Islands, St. Thomas, USVI.

Patti Adler's new book, The Tender Cut, is receiving widespread publicity. Last Friday Patti's interview on Colorado Public Radio aired, and the podcast can be accessed here.
Last Monday an article with her about The Tender Cut appeared in the London newspaper, The Guardian. It can be accessed here.

Wade Smith and Bob Regoli have an article that was accepted for publication and will appear in the January, 2012 issue of The Social Science Journal: “Does Race Matter? Assessing Consumer Discrimination in the Secondary Basketball Card Market” Wade P. Smith, Eric Primm, Nicole Leeper Piquero, Alex R. Piquero, and Robert M. Regoli
ABSTRACT:
Sociologists continue to observe the ways race permeates America’s social institutions, the institution of sport being no exception. Although researchers have explored customer racial discrimination via examinations of the secondary sports card market, only three studies have explored the phenomenon in the context of basketball, a sporting context with a higher proportion of non-White players than the baseball and football leagues that have been the primary focus to date. We explore the unique way race matters on the hardwood by employing a methodological approach that previously has been used to study card collecting in other contexts. Data were obtained for 215 retired players and their rookie cards. Controlling for other factors, to include career performance, position, and card scarcity, the results reveal no direct effect of race on card values, but there is an interaction effect between race and Hall of Fame status that impacts card prices. The potential source and implications of this interaction are discussed as well as suggestions for future research.

Week of October 14, 2011

Leslie Irvine, Kristina Kahl, and Jesse Smith have had a paper accepted by The Sociological Quarterly: “Confrontations and Donations: Encounters between Homeless Pet Owners and the Public.”
ABSTRACT:
This study examines interactions between homeless pet owners and the domiciled public with a focus on how the activities of pet ownership help to construct positive personal identities. Homeless people are often criticized for having pets. They counter these attacks using open and contained responses to stigmatization. More often, they redefine pet ownership to incorporate how they provide for their animals, challenging definitions that require a physical home. Homeless pet owners thus create a positive moral identity by emphasizing that they feed their animals first and give them freedom that the pets of the domiciled lack. Through what we call “enabled resistance,” donations of pet food from the supportive public provide the resources to minimize the impact of stigmatization.

Congratulations to Leslie, Kristina, and Jesse!

Week of October 7, 2011

Patti and Peter Adler's new book, The Tender Cut, was profiled in articles on Tuesday, October 4th in The Daily Camera and the Longmont Daily Times-Call, "New Book Shows Self-Injury Spreading".
Patti also appeared on Channel 9News that night in a story about the book. Here's a link to the TV spot.

Stef Mollborn and former Sociology graduate student Jeff Dennis have a new publication: Mollborn and Dennis. In press. "Investigating the Life Situations and Development of Teenage Mothers' Children: Evidence from the ECLS-B." Population Research and Policy Review.
ABSTRACT:
The Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort of 2001 represents a unique opportunity to examine the life situations of teenage mothers and their young children in a nationally representative sample. Descriptive and multivariate regression analyses compare teenage mothers and their children to older mothers and their children, examine variation amongteenage mothers and their children, and estimate associations between household structures and mothers' work and school involvement at age 2 and children'shealth and development at age 4 1/2. Results show that compared to children of mothers who never gave birth as teens, teenage mothers' children experiencestrong socioeconomic disadvantages, and their home environments have some greater risks. Their mothers' parenting behaviors are not rated as favorably, and many measures of their health and development at age 2 are compromised.However, many of these parenting and developmental disparities are explained by teenage mothers' low levels of current socioeconomic status. At least in some domains, teenage mothers' involvement in school and paid work is associatedwith more favorable child outcomes at age 4 1/2, and living with a single mother and other adults predicts more negative outcomes. Many everyday experiences that are associated with disadvantaged outcomes are quite prevalent among teenage mothers' children, identifying useful targets for policy interventions. These findings suggest that effective social programs implemented in early life may have an opportunity to reduce the early developmental disadvantages of many children of teenage mothers.

Week of September 30, 2011

A huge congratulations to Joanne Belknap, who has been given the 2011-2012 Student Affairs Faculty Member of the Year Award! This is a great honor.

Rick Rogers presented his research, “Alcohol Consumption and Mortality,” to the Rice University Department of Sociology and Kinder Institute for Urban Research, and the University of Houston Center for Drug and Social Policy Research, September 21, 2011. While in Houston, Rick was able to visit with past CU graduates Justin Denney and Jarron Saint Onge, who are both doing quite well.

Stef Mollborn has a new publication: Stefanie Mollborn and Jeff A. Dennis. “Ready or Not: Predicting High and Low Levels of School Readiness Among Teenage Parents’ Children.” Child Indicators Research.
Abstract:
Past research has documented compromised development for teenage mothers’ children compared to others, but less is known about predictors of school readiness among these children or among teenage fathers’ children. Our multidimensional measures of high and low school readiness incorporated math, reading, and behavior scores and parent-reported health. Using parent interviews and direct assessments from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort, we predicted high and low school readiness shortly before kindergarten among children born to a teenage mother and/or father (N≈800). Factors from five structural and interpersonal domains based on the School Transition Model were measured at two time points, including change between those time points, tocapture the dynamic nature of early childhood. Four domains (socioeconomic resources, maternal characteristics, parenting, and exposure to adults) predicted high or low school readiness, but often not both. Promising factors associated with both high and low readiness among teen parents’ children came from four domains: maternal education and gains in education (socioeconomic), maternal age of at least 18 and fewer depressive symptoms (maternal characteristics), socioemotional parenting quality and home environment improvements (parenting), and living with fewer children and receiving nonparental child care in infancy (exposure to adults). The findings preliminarily suggest policies that might improve school readiness: encouraging maternal education while supplying child care, focusing teen pregnancy prevention efforts on school-age girls, basic socioeconomic supports, and investments in mental health and high-quality home environments and parenting.

Week of September 23, 2011

Congratulations to Patti Adler, whose new book on self-injury, "The Tender Cut," has been receiving lots of publicity. It was featured in the Arts and Sciences Magazine. Patti's book was also featured this week in a radio interview with New York NPR, the Brian Lehrer Show, on the Foxnews.com Health department, and in the national Brazilian magazine, Revista A*poca.

Kudos to two faculty members whose new achievements were highlighted in CU-Boulder's 2011 "Celebration of Faculty Achievement" brochure: Tim Wadsworth's promotion and tenure, and Amy Wilkins's Provost's Faculty Achievement Award.

Week of September 16, 2011

Congratulations to Lori Hunter and John Reid-Hresko on their new publication: Lori M. Hunter, John Reid-Hresko, and Thomas Dickinson. 2011. “Environmental Change, Risky Sexual Behavior, and the HIV/AIDS Pandemic: Linkages Through Livelihoods in Rural Haiti.” Population Research and Policy Review. Volume 30, Issue 5: 729-750.
Abstract:
Local natural resources are central to rural livelihoods across much of the developing world. Such ‘‘natural capital’’ represents one of several types of assets available to households as they craft livelihood strategies. In order to explore the potential for environmental scarcity and change to contribute to perpetuation of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, we examine the association between declining natural capital and engaging in risky sexual behaviors, as potentially another livelihood strategy. Such an association has been demonstrated in Kenya and Tanzania, through the fish-for-sex trade. To explore the possibility of this connection within rural Haitian livelihoods we use Demographic and Health Survey data, with a focus on rural women, combined with vegetation measures generated from satellite imagery. We find that lack of condom use in recent sexual encounters is associated with local environmental scarcity—controlling for respondent age, education, religion and knowledge of AIDS preventive measures. The results suggest that explicit consideration of the environmental dimensions of HIV/AIDS may be of relevance in scholarship examining factors shaping the pandemic.

Lori is tearing up the track! She also has another new publication: Wayne Twine and Lori M. Hunter, 2011, “Adult mortality an household food security in rural South Africa: Does AIDS represent a unique mortality shock?” Development Southern Africa. 28(11):431-444.
Abstract:
HIV/AIDS has been described as a household shock distinct from others faced by rural households. This study examines this characterisation by analysing the impact of an adult HIV/AIDS-related death on household food security, compared with households experiencing either no mortality or a sudden non-HIV/AIDS adult death. The research is based in the Agincourt Health and Demographic Surveillance Site in rural South Africa, and focuses on a sample of 290 households stratified by experience of a recent prime-age adult death. HIV/AIDS-related mortality was associated with reduced household food security. However, much of this negative association also characterized households experiencing a non-HIV/AIDS mortality. In addition, other household characteristics, especially socioeconomic status, were strong determinants of food security regardless of mortality experience. We therefore recommend that development policy and interventions aimed at enhancing food security target vulnerable households broadly, rather than solely targeting those directly affected by HIV/AIDS mortality.

Kudos to Kathleen Tierney, who did an interview on terrorism and disasters with the Denver Post, including a video. The interview was also reported in the CU President's newsletter.

Congratulations to Martha Gimenez, whose originally designed and created quilt was accepted for the Hoffman Challenge. It was exhibited for the first time in August, at the Rocky Mountain Quilt Fair in Loveland. The Hoffman Challenge exhibit will be traveling throughout the U.S. until October 2012. The quilt is called Fukushima; Martha was inspired to do it by the contrast between the lovely Japanese fabric chosen by Hoffman for the challenge and the horrors produced by the earthquake, tsunami, and damage to the Fukushima nuclear plant. Here is a photo of Martha's quilt.

We have good news from Ali Jordan, who recently started a position as Senior Consultant with Booz Allen Hamilton in the Washington DC metro area. While finishing her dissertation, Ali will be working at Booz Allen full time, consulting for the federal government on issues related to emergency management and homeland security. Additionally, the firm will be supporting the completion of her PhD through their Academic Assistance Program. Booz Allen was recently rated one of the top ten commercial and government consulting firms to work for in 2011 by Consulting Magazine and remains on Forbes list of “100 Best Companies to Work For” for the sixth consecutive year in a row. Ali and her husband, Chris, have enjoyed their transition so far, and are getting settled in their new home in Rockville, MD.

Finally, we had a great turnout for the Buffalo Bicycle Classic this year. In total we had 14 riders with six graduate student riders (4 of which are from the most recent cohort). The weather was absolutely perfect and the event was run very smoothly. Thanks again to the riders and their sponsors.
Tom Mayer
Rick Rogers
Josh LePree (sponsored by Lori Hunter)
Amanda Tyler (sponsored by Jill Harrison)
Mike Radelet
Shelli Walker (sponsored by Rick Rogers)
Alex Thompson (sponsored by Jane Menken)
Laurent Cilia (sponsored by Sara Steen)
Stef Mollborn, her dad, and her 2 little guys Benjamin and Simon (riding tandem)
Philip Pendergast (sponsored by Jane Menken)
Joyce and Larry Nielsen
Jason Boardman

Week of September 2, 2011

Congratulations to Mike Radelet, who is the recipient of the 2010-2011 William Chambliss Award, "for Outstanding Life Achievement in Law and Society," Society for the Study of Social Problems. The Award was formally presented at the SSSP meetings in Las Vegas in August.

Kudos to Brandi Gilbert, who was awarded the Presidential Strand Student Travel Award ($1000) from the American Evaluation Association (AEA) to attend this year's AEA conference to be held in Anaheim, California November 2-5.

Two new books in two weeks is a pretty impressive record for our department! We congratulate Isaac Reed on the publication of his book, "Interpretation and Social Knowledge: On the Use of Theory in the Human Sciences." Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2011. SUMMARY: For the past fifty years anxiety over naturalism has driven debates in social theory. One side sees social science as another kind of natural science, while the other rejects the possibility of objective and explanatory knowledge. Interpretation and Social Knowledge suggests a different route, offering a way forward for an antinaturalist sociology that overcomes the opposition between interpretation and explanation and uses theory to build concrete, historically specific causal explanations of social phenomena. Click here for more information.

And finally, congratulations to Jennifer Bair, who has just published a new chapter in an edited volume: Bair, Jennifer. 2011. “Constructing Scarcity, Creating Value: Marketing the Mundo Maya.” Pp. 177-196 in The Cultural Wealth of Nations, Nina Bandelj and Fred Wherry, eds. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.

Week of August 26, 2011

The American Sociological Association's annual meeting was held in Las Vegas earlier this week. Participants from our department included:
Patti Adler, Jennifer Bair, Casey Blalock, Jason Boardman, Nnenia Campbell, Liam Downey, Colter Ellis, Bethany Everett, Barbara Grossman-Thompson, Colleen Hacket, Kristofer Hoyt, Lori Hunter, Leslie Irvine, Kristina Kahl, Benjamin Lamb-Books, Joshua LePree, Sanyu Mojola, Stefanie Mollborn, Naghme Naseri, Raphael Nawrotski, Kathryn Nowotny, Patrick O'Brien, Hillary Potter, Isaac Reed, John Reid-Hresko, Mary Robertson, Christie Sennott, Marshall Smith, Christina Sue, Devon Thacker, Kathleen Tierney, Michelle Walker, Amy Wilkins, and Tamara Williams. Let me know if I missed you.

At ASA, Lori Hunter chaired two award committees for the Environment and Technology section and presented the awards for the Allan Schnaiberg Distinguished Contribution and the Marvin E. Olson student paper competitions.

Also at ASA, Stefanie Mollborn and coauthor Monica Kirkpatrick Johnson received the 2011 Outstanding Publication Award from the American Sociological Association's section on Aging and the Life Course. The award, for which any book or article published in the past 3 years was eligible, was given for their 2009 Social Psychology Quarterly article, "Growing Up Faster, Feeling Older: Hardship in Childhood and Adolescence."

The Society for the Study of Social Problems also had its annual meeting in Las Vegas, with Kathryn Nowotny and Patrick O'Brien participating.

Lori Hunter also has a new publication with a recent graduate of our Ph.D. program: Lori M. Hunter and Emmanuel David. 2011. “Displacement, climate change and gender.” Migration & Climate Change, (Eds) Étienne Piguet, Antoine Pécou, Paul de Guchteneire, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge UK.
Abstract:
Migration, as a social phenomenon, is inherently gendered. Climate change will, therefore, yield different migratory experiences and impacts for the world’s women and men. This manuscript explores these potential gender dimensions through use of a Sustainable Livelihoods framework to discuss two pathways through which climate change’s gendered migration impacts may manifest: 1) shifts in proximate natural resources and agricultural potential, as well as 2) increases in extreme weather events. Within both pathways, broader cultural norms shape differential response by gender. Labor migration, for example, as related to gradual decline of local natural resources, is undertaken more often by women in some locals (e.g. from the rural Philippines), although in other cases more often by men (e.g. portions of west Africa). As related to extreme weather events, gendered differences in vulnerability can be broadly captured through the lens of poverty – and the global feminization of poverty has resulted in women and girls comprising upwards three fifths of the world’s one billion poorest people (UNFPA 2008). Hazard risk perception, mitigation, and the potential for hazard-related residential mobility also vary for men and women, and as such, increase climate-related disasters will yield gendered impacts in these arenas. Still, substantial gaps remain in both research and policy arenas as related to gender, migration and climate change as a specific ecological force. We close with a discussion of such gaps and related needs. As the world community anticipates climate negotiations in Copenhagen, December 2009, women’s groups work tirelessly in their call for the inclusion of gender into the climate concerns, often forming alliances with governmental organizations and UN agencies. We argue that policy consideration of gendered impacts may be much informed by integration of past research along the lines of that reviewed here.

Migration and Climate Change provides the first authoritative overview of the relationship between climate change and migration. It brings together both case studies and syntheses from different parts of the world and critically discusses empirical evidence, methodological challenges, conceptual gaps, policy responses, and normative issues. The book constitutes a unique and thorough introduction to one of the most discussed but least understood consequences of climate change and brings together experts from a wide range of disciplines, including anthropology, climatology, demography, geography, law, political science and sociology.

Our new professor Jill Harrison knows how to make an impressive entrance onto the Friday kudos list! MIT Press has just published her book, "Pesticide Drift and the Pursuit of Environmental Justice." In the book, Jill uses the case of political conflict over agricultural pesticide drift in California, as well as a theoretical framework from political philosophy, to critically evaluate the competing notions of justice at work in environmental politics today. Notably, she argues that environmental inequalities stem not only from industry malfeasance and regulatory failure but also from the particularly problematic notions of justice that shape the work of the environmental regulatory state and non-EJ social movement actors. Kudos to Jill!

And finally, the CU Connections newsletter just published a full list of CU faculty who received tenure and promotion to associate professor this summer. Tim Wadsworth was on the list, having completed the final level of the tenure process a couple of months ago. Congratulations, Tim!

Week of August 19, 2011

Beth Whalley and Joanne Belknap have a newly accepted publication: "Family and Friend Reactions to Sexual Assault Survivors.”Encyclopedia of Sexual Violence and Abuse, Judith L. Postmus (Ed.). Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO.

Amy Wilkins has had a new article accepted in the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography. Wilkins, Amy C. "‘Not Out to Start a Revolution’: Race, Gender, and Emotional Restraint among Black University Men."
ABSTRACT:
In this article, I use in-depth interviews with black university men to investigate race, gender, and emotions. Participation in dominant institutions requires African American men to exhibit extraordinary emotional restraint. Because anger is culturally associated with men, however, black men’s suppression of anger violates masculine expectations. Thus, racial subordination not only creates difficult emotional expectations, but may also create emotional dilemmas in which expected emotional displays undermine other identity expectations. In this paper, I examine both how a group of black university men achieve emotional restraint, and how they use their emotions to craft and manage their identities as black middle class men. I argue that black men distance themselves from the controlling image of the angry black man by developing a shared identity I call moderate blackness. Moderate blackness entails emotional restraint, a moderate approach to campus racial politics, and the ability to get along with white people. These strategies work together to produce positive, restrained emotions and to manage anger and agitation, but they require black university men to “not see” racism. Black men use defensive othering to push the stereotype of the angry black onto black women. In doing so, they shore up their masculinity, but leave women responsible for combating racial inequality.

Tamara Williams and Adelle Monteblanco recently participated in the CU "Peak to Peak Workshop" - with a goal to integrate sustainability into CU courses across the curriculum. Feel free to contact them with questions regarding sustainability. They both look forward to formally presenting their new knowledge to the department but for now they encourage faculty, staff and graduate students to visit the "Peak to Peak" website to review presentations and suggested activities.

Patti and Peter Adler's new book, The Tender Cut, was featured in an article posted 8/18 on Salon.com, entitled "How we became a nation of cutters." It's a fascinating read.

Week of August 12, 2011

Congratulations to Patti Adler, whose book with Peter Adler, The Tender Cut has just been published with NYU Press.

Patti and Peter have also been invited by PsychologyToday.com to be regular bloggers on their site. View their blog, “The Deviance Society.”

Stef Mollborn has a new article accepted for publication: Stefanie Mollborn and Jeff A. Dennis. Forthcoming in Sociological Forum. "Explaining the Early Development and Health of Teenage Mothers' Children."
Abstract:
The transmission of social disadvantage from teenage mothers to their children is well established, but when and why do these disparities emerge in the early life course? Using nationally representative data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort, this study investigated the relationship between teen childbearing and children’s cognition, behavior, and health from infancy through preschool. Developmental disparities between teenage mothers’ children and others were largely nonexistent at 9 months but accumulated with age. Having a teenage mother predicted compromised development across several domains by age 41Ž2. Our conceptual model expected preexisting disadvantage, ongoing resource disadvantage, and compromised parenting quality to explain the association between teen childbearing and child outcomes. Preexisting social disadvantage accounted for much of this relationship. Financial, social, and material resources in the child’s household partially or fully explained each of the remaining significant relationships between teenage childbearing and child outcomes. Parenting quality explained a smaller proportion of these relationships than did resources, and these factors’ influences were largely independent. Because children of teenage mothers with a modest set of resources were not predicted to have compromised development, resources provided in early childhood may have the potential to reduce developmental disparities for teenage mothers’ children.

Week of August 5, 2011

Congratulations to Liam Downey, who has accepted an invitation to be a Consulting Editor for the American Journal of Sociology, for a two-year term from September 1, 2011 to August 31, 2013.

Kudos to Kathleen Tierney, who has been appointed to the National Academy of Sciences Committee to Advise the US Global Change Research Program. The USGCRP consists of 13 federal agencies that sponsor research on global change and its impacts, including climate change and environmental impacts of globalization. Among the tasks of the committee are to provide ongoing advice to the USGCRP on program-wide issues; to provide a forum for interaction between the USGCRP and relevant scientific communities; and to identify issues of importance to the global change research community.

Finally, congratulations to Jules Wanderer, who has a new publication in print this month: Jules J. Wanderer. 2011. "Scaling Professional Critics: Men and Women Rate Films." Empirical Studies of the Arts 29(2):209-223.
Abstract:
Film critic research typically attends to the impact of critics' ratings and reviews on box office receipts. With few exceptions, critics are treated as a homogeneous group. Taking a different approach, this article explores similarities and differences among critics. First, in a test of potential differential influences of the objectification of women harbored in the "Male Gaze," no significant difference between male and female critics' median ratings was found. Second, differences and similarities among critics did appear in their rankings along a "kindness" dimension. Specifically, produced by a Correspondence Analysis which used the complete rating "profiles" of 25 professional film critics who contributed 6389 ratings to Film Comment, it was possible to rank critics from most to least kind. Third, differences in kindness ratings between two subsets (male and female critics) set the stage for another examination of the continuing influence of the Male Gaze: while males were distributed across the entire kindness scale, female critics clustered around the central (or average) kindness profile. The observed similarities and differences among critics are discussed in terms of the divergent influences of professional canons and ideological issues, such as the Male Gaze.

Week of July 29, 2011

On July 5, Colter Ellis successfully defended his dissertation entitled “Breeding Inequality: Human-Animal Relationships in Beef Production.” Congratulations, Dr. Ellis!

Leslie Irvine’s 2004 book, If You Tame Me: Understanding our Connection with Animals, has been translated into Turkish.

Leslie has also signed a contract with Lynne Reinner Publishers for her next book. The working title is My Dog Always Eats First: Homeless People and their Companion Animals.

Kudos to Amy Wilkins, who has won the Provost Junior Faculty Achievement Award for her book. This award, which includes research funds, is "granted in recognition of a particular piece of research, scholarship, and/or creative work that has made a contribution to its field and that indicates the promise of the recipient."

Amy has also been elected as secretary/treasurer of the American Sociological Association's Sociology of Emotions section.

Finally, Isaac Reed has accepted an invitation to be a Consulting Editor for the American Journal of Sociology, for a two-year term from September 1, 2011 to August 31, 2013.

Week of July 1, 2011

Kudos to Naghme Naseri, who was selected to receive a 2011 Fichter Research Grant from the Association for the Sociology of Religion in the amount of $2700.

Congratulations to Nitika Sharma, who received an award of $7,500 from the Global Grant Program of the Open Society Institute for her dissertation work on menstruation rites and practices among Nepalese women.

Eric Bonds successfully defended his dissertation, “Hegemony and the Humanitarian Challenge,” this week. He and his family are moving to Virginia at the end of July, where Eric will join the department of sociology and anthropology at Mary Washington University in Fredericksburg.

Kelly Knight successfully defended her dissertation, "Assortative Mating and Partner Influence: Problem Behavior Across the Life Course," on Wednesday. In August she will start a tenure-track assistant professor position at Sam Houston State University in Texas.

Week of June 17, 2011

Congratulations to Wee Kiat Lim, who has a couple of pieces of great news. First, he has a new journal article accepted for publication: Chua, Cecil Eng Huang, Wee-Kiat Lim, Christina Soh, and Siew Kien Sia. 2011. "Enacting clan control in complex IT projects: A social capital perspective." Management Information Systems Quarterly. Forthcoming. MISQ is the top journal in the information systems field. Ranked 37th in the 2009 Social Science JCR, the journal's impact factor is 4.485.
Abstract:
The IT project control literature has documented that clan control is often essential in complex multi-stakeholder projects for project success. However, instituting clan control in such conditions is challenging as people come to a project with diverse skills and backgrounds. There is often insufficient time for clan control to develop naturally. This paper investigates the question, “How can clan control be enacted in complex IT projects?” Recognizing social capital as a resource, we conceptualize a clan as a group with strong social capital, i.e., where its members have developed their structural, cognitive, and relational ties to the point that they share common values and beliefs and are committed to a set of peer norms. We theorize that the enactment of clan control is a dual process of (1) building the clan - by developing its social capital dimensions (structural, cognitive, and relational ties) or re-appropriating social capital from elsewhere; and (2) leveraging the clan – by reinforcing project-facilitating shared values, beliefs, and norms, and inhibiting those that impede the achievement of project goals. We explore how clan control was enacted in a large IT project at a major logistics organization in which clan control was quickly instituted to avoid an impending project failure. Our research contributes to theory in three ways: we (1) reconcile the two differing views of clan control into a single framework, (2) explain the role of controllers in enacting clan control, and (3) clarify how formal controls can be employed to develop clan control.

Second, Wee Kiat has been accepted to participate in the 2011 Summer Institute for Advanced Study of Disaster and Risk (SIASDR) at Beijing Normal University. It will be from August 1 to 12, 2011, in Beijing. More about the summer workshop: The primary goal is to attract and train young scholars who have both background and strong interest in the field of hazard and risk study, and through which, to improve and strengthen education, research, as well as international communication and cooperation capacity in China in the field of disaster and risk sciences. Prominent international risk scholars will helm the lectures, such as Drs. Roger Kaspersons, Carlo Jaeger, and Otwin Renn. Details are available here.

And finally, some interesting food for thought. This link is to an article that analyzed gains in college students' analytical/critical thinking and writing. Out of all majors, sociology came out on top! We must be doing something right.

Week of June 10, 2011

Joanne Belknap gave a presentation, "Judges' Experiences with and Opinions of Restorative Justice in First Nation Communities' Intimate Partner Abuse Cases in Canada," at the National Association of Women Judges at their mid-year meeting conference aboard an Alaskan cruise last week, in a panel on "Ethics: Hot Topics on the Horizon."

Last month, Jenn Bair was invited to give a talk at Colorado State University‘s Center for Fair and Alternative Trade (CFAT). A description of her talk, “From Varieties of Capitalism to Varieties of Activism: The Anti-Sweatshop Movement in Comparative Perspective,” can be found here. Jenn was also invited to join CFAT’s team of research associates.

This Tuesday, Jenn was in Montreal where she was one of three plenary speakers at an international conference organized by CRIMT (the Interuniversity Consortium for Research on Globalization and Work). The theme of the conference was “Multinationals, Global Value Chains and Social Regulation,” and the title of Jenn’s plenary address was “Global Value Chains: Concepts, Measures, Consequences.”

Jenn’s most recent publication appeared this week as well. The article, “The place of disarticulations: Global commodity production in La Laguna” (co-authored with Marion Werner), appears in the most recent issue of the journal Environment and Planning A. The abstract of the article, which can be found here, is provided below.
Abstract:
Studies of the shifting social organization and geography of global garment production have been critical to the development of the commodity chains framework as an important field of study for scholars of political economy in various disciplines. Our paper intervenes in this literature by proposing what we call a ‘disarticulations’ perspective, an approach attentive to historical and spatial processes of accumulation, disinvestment and dispossession that produce the uneven geographies generative of transnational production networks. We make the case for disarticulations as an approach to commodity chains via a case study of a region in north-central Mexico called La Laguna—a celebrated center of export dynamism in the 1990s, following the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and of rapid decline in the 2000s. Rather than offer a conventional commodity chain analysis of the boom to bust cycle in La Laguna, which would look to the dynamics of the contemporary apparel chain to explain the causes and consequences of La Laguna’s NAFTA-era trajectory, we instead follow La Laguna’s ‘travels’ through the cotton, textile, and garment industries over 150 years. We show how the recent NAFTA-era boom was premised on this layered history of engagements with the cotton – textile – apparel commodity chain. The disarticulations approach to commodity chains that we develop here foregrounds the processes of dispossession, accumulation and disinvestment through which not only commodity chains, but the uneven geographies that are their conditions of possibility, are reproduced.

Jason Boardman was in Stanford this week as a faculty member in the 3rd annual Biodemography Workshop. The workshop is offered by the Stanford Centers for the Demography and Economics of Health & Aging, and Population Research. The workshop covered methods and theory from demography, evolutionary ecology, quantitative genetics, and genetics. Click on this link to see a flyer for the workshop.

Isaac Reed presented a paper: "Theorizing the Power-Causality Link" at the Philosophy and Social Sciences conference in Prague, Czech Republic, May 11-15.

Week of May 27, 2011

Congratulations to Christie Sennott, who has been awarded a 2011-2013 Hewlett Foundation/IIE Dissertation Fellowship in Population, Reproductive Health and Economic Development. This fellowship will provide her with two years of funding for her dissertation work on fertility and motherhood in South Africa.

Week of May 20, 2011

Brandi Gilbert and Liesel Ritchie (Assistant Director of the Natural Hazards Center) presented a paper entitled “Filling a Critical Gap: Recognizing the Role of Non-Governmental Organizations in U.S. Disaster Preparedness and Response” at the Veterans Health Administration Comprehensive Emergency Management Program Evaluation and Research Conference in Washington,DC.

Stefanie Mollborn was part of a Contexts journal podcast on motherhood in American society.

Christie Sennott and Stefanie Mollborn had an article accepted at Advances in Life Course Research. Christie Sennott and Stefanie Mollborn, "College-Bound Teens' Decisions about the Transition to Sex: Negotiating Competing Norms."
Abstract:
The normative influence of parents, close friends, and other peers on teens’ sexual behavior has been well documented. Yet, we still know little about the processes through which these oftentimes competing norms impact teens’ own sexual norms and behaviors. Drawing on qualitative data from 47 interviews conducted with college-bound teens, we investigate the processes through which perceived parental, close friend, and other peer norms about sex influenced teens’ decisions about whether and when to have sex. Although virtually all teens perceived that most of their peers were having sex and that parents were almost universally against teen sex, some teens had sex and others did not. Our findings demonstrate that teens who remained virgins and those who were sexually active during high school often negotiated different sets of competing norms. Differences in understandings of age norms, in close friends’ sexual norms and behaviors, and in communication about sex with parents, close friends and other peers were related to different levels of sexual behavior for teens who otherwise shared many similarities in social location (e.g.. class, race, and educational status). While virgins reported an individualized process of deciding whether they were ready for sex, we find that their behavior fits within a traditional understanding of an age norm because of the emphasis on avoiding negative sanctions. Sexually experienced teens, on the other hand, explicitly reported abiding by a group age norm that prescribed sex as normal during high school. Finally, parents’ normative objections to teen sex – either moral or practical – and the ways they communicated with their teen about sex had important influence on teens’ own sexual norms and behaviors during high school.

Mike Radelet was featured in Arts and Sciences Magazine for his Alumni Award from Purdue University.

On Friday, May 13, Patti Adler delivered the Keynote Address to the International Conference on Qualitative Analysis, Wilfrid Laurier University, Brantford, Ontario, Canada. The title of her talk title was: “Contemporary Stances on Ethnographic Epistemology: Ethics, Engagement, and Analysis.”

Bob Regoli's new book, Delinquency and Society, was featured here.

Week of May 6, 2011

First of all, congratulations to our graduates! And kudos to all of us for making it through a busy academic year. Despite everything that's going on, several department members made important achievements this week.

Congratulations to Naghme Naseri, who passed her specialty comp a couple of weeks ago.

This week Naghme also passed her prospectus defense. Her dissertation is titled, "The Sociology of Mass Trauma: The Baha’ís, Religious Persecution and the Cross Generational Transmission of Traumatic Memory."

Kudos to Brandi Gilbert, who received an honorable mention for the highly competitive American Sociological Association Minority Fellowship.

Leslie Irvine gave a talk at a benefit for the University of Denver Graduate School of Social Work’s Institute for Human-Animal Connection Tuesday night. The evening’s theme was “The Role of Shelter Dogs in Human Health: The Colorado Connection.”

Patti Adler just returned from the University of Kassel in Kassel, Germany, where, as a Visiting Scholar and Presenter sponsored by the department's Concentration on Micro-sociology, she taught an intensive 20-hour workshop on Advanced Topics in Ethnography, and Goffman’s Theoretical Perspective. And even after such a big trip, Patti took on the gargantuan task of organizing our department's graduation ceremony. Thanks, Patti!

And finally, congratulations to the departmental award winners, who were announced a week ago at our end-of-year party. I'm going from memory here, so please let me know if I forgot anyone.
Betsy Moen "Walk the Talk" Award: Mary Richardson
Outstanding paper award: Naghme Naseri
GPTI of the year award: Zek Valkyrie
Dissertation expense award: Jesse Smith
Faculty mentor of the year award: Jennifer Bair

Week of April 29, 2011

Lori Hunter is currently at Stanford University as an invited participant in a workshop on “Adaptation and Migration” sponsored by NIH and organized by the Stanford Institute for Research in the Social Sciences. Lori is presenting on the topic of “Migration and Health.”

Just accepted: Lori M. Hunter, John Reid-Hresko, and Thomas W. Dickinson. Forthcoming. “Environmental Change, Risky Sexual Behavior, and the HIV/AIDS Pandemic: Linkages Through Livelihoods in Rural Haiti.” Population Research and Policy Review.
Abstract:
Local natural resources are central to rural livelihoods across much of the developing world. Such “natural capital” represents one of several types of assets available to households as they craft livelihood strategies. In order to explore the potential for environmental scarcity and change to contribute to perpetuation of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, we examine the association between declining natural capital and engaging in risky sexual behaviors, as potentially another livelihood strategy. Such association has been demonstrated in Kenya and Tanzania, through the fish-for-sex trade. To explore the possibility of this connection within rural Haitian livelihoods we use Demographic and Health Survey data, with a focus on rural women, combined with vegetation measures generated from satellite imagery. We find that lack of condom use in recent sexual encounters is associated with local environmental scarcity – controlling for respondent age, education, religion and knowledge of AIDS preventive measures. The results suggest that explicit consideration of the environmental dimensions of HIV/AIDS may be of relevance in scholarship examining factors shaping the pandemic.

Barbara Grossman-Thompson was awarded a Foreign Language Area Studies (FLAS) grant from CU Boulder's Department of Asian Studies. The grant is for $7,500 towards tuition for summer language study and also includes a living stipend. Babs will use this money towards a 6 week course in Nepali at Cornell University this summer.

Adelle Monteblanco and Joyce Nielsen have been awarded a CU Teaching-as-Research Project Grant from the Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching and Learning (CIRTL) for their project, “The Effects of Experiential Education in an Environmental Sociology Course.”

Kudos to Brandi Gilbert, who successfully defended her dissertation proposal, entitled "Post-Disaster Recovery Experiences of Youth in the Aftermath of the BP Oil Spill."

Shannon Coffey successfully defended her master's thesis, "Caught Between Conflicting Worlds?: The Experiences of Students Who Are Underrepresented in Academia." Congratulations, Shannon!

Congratulations to Dr. Katherine Martinez, who successfully defended her dissertation, "Bound in Theory and Practice: A Mixed-Methods Exploration of Consensual Sadomasochism."

Week of April 22, 2011

Mike Radelet is the recipient of the 2010-2011 William Chambliss Award, "for Outstanding Life Achievement in Law and Society," Society for the Study of Social Problems. The Award will be formally presented at the SSSP meetings in Las Vegas in August.

Marshall Smith successfully defended and completed his dissertation, "Adolescents Learning About Sex - Broadband Internet Access, Sexual Education, Moral Panics and Youth Citizenship." This dissertation examines the experiences of fifty-one young people who were adolescents as high-speed Internet access became widely available in the United States. The data are drawn from semi-structured, open-ended interviews with thirty-nine women and twelve men that covered topics related to sexual socialization. While participants describe a wide and predictable variety of sources of sexual information including movies, television, books, magazines, family, friends, and personal experience, the majority reported the Internet served a central role in how they learned about sexuality. I place the findings within the cultural context of moral panics regarding teen sexuality and technology as well as emergent theories and debates about citizenship in order to fully understand the key social and theoretical implications of the experiences of these young people.

Lori Hunter is at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill, where she was invited to present her research on AIDS and livelihoods in rural South Africa. She presented to a diverse, interdisciplinary audience of both faculty and graduate students – and reports that the azaleas are blooming wildly.

Dr. Michael Haffey was selected to receive a Marinus Smith Award from the CU Parents Association. The purpose of the award is to identify and recognize CU Boulder faculty, staff, coaches , and administrators who have made a significant impact on the lives of CU undergraduate students. Dr. Haffey was one of four recipients of this year's award and honored in a ceremony April 16, 2011 at the CU Parents Association board of directors meeting.

Babs Grossman-Thompson was awarded $5,000 by Cornell University's Department of Asian Studies Nepali Language Program to participate in a 6 week 'Intensive Nepali Language Course' this Summer. The program will help in her language acquisition, which she hopes to use in her future dissertation fieldwork (in Nepal of course!).

This week's Faculty and Staff Newsletter includes an interview with Jane Menken. Mike Radelet's recent alumni award from Purdue University was highlighted in the same issue.

Joanne Belknap was a keynote speaker at the 75th Anniversary celebration of the School of Criminal Justice at Michigan State University. Her talk was "Herstory in the Making: Feminist Contributions to Criminology and Criminal Justice."

Joanne Belknap received a student-nominated faculty recognition award from CU-LEAD (Leadership,Excellence, Achievement, Diversity) at the Equity and Excellence Banquet this week.

Last month Jennifer Bair was invited back to her undergraduate alma mater, Johns Hopkins University, to give a talk in the sociology department’s spring colloquium series. Her talk, which was entitled, "Commodity Chains in Context: The Limits of Development through Upgrading" and reported fieldwork she conducted in Mexico and Nicaragua, examined the developmental implications for local firms and workers of participating in global production networks, especially in the context of preferential trade regimes.

The following week, Jenn was in Washington D.C. as an invited panelist for a multi-stakeholder symposium organized by the Fair Labor Association. The topic of the symposium was “Enhancing Social Protection in the Apparel and Footwear Industry in Central America” and included participants from the Inter-American Development Bank and the U.S. Department of Labor. Visit the Blog of the Fair Labor Association. .

Week of April 15, 2011

First, thanks to Sara Steen for putting together the nomination packet for Angela Stauffer's award (announced last week).

Naghme Naseri has been awarded a 2011 Dorothy Martin Doctoral Student honorable mention award. The committee was very impressed with Naghme's consistent and exceptional contributions to the women of the University of Colorado and beyond. They wrote, "You are a creative force in your field and have made a deep impression on behalf of the causes with which you identify."

Christie Sennott presented a paper entitled, "From Expectations to Reality: Qualitative Evidence on Changes in the Timing and Circumstance of First Birth in Agincourt" at the annual Wits-Brown-Colorado-APHRC (WBCA) colloquium in Providence, RI.

Together with two other students in the department, Christie was awarded a $1,000 CARTSS Graduate Student Fellow Grant for her collaborative project with Nicole Angotti (CU Post-doctoral Fellow) entitled, "Observational Field Journals." The award will help fund Sennott's travel to South Africa this summer to train field assistants for the project.

Devon Thacker has also been awarded a CARTSS Graduate Fellowship proposal for her dissertation research, "Mandatory Arrest Laws: The Scale or The Sword of Justice?" In their letter, the committee said her proposal was highly ranked. Devon received $1000.00 in Graduate Fellow funds for transcription of interviews.

Brandi Gilbert also received a CARTSS Graduate Fellowship of $1000 for her project, entitled "Post-Disaster Recovery Experiences of Youth in the Aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill."

Finally, John Tribbia was just notified that he has been selected to receive a 2011-2012 Graduate School Dissertation Completion Fellowship. This fellowship will be for one semester of full support during the 2011-12 academic year, and will consist of a stipend equal to a 50% GPTI appointment, up to five dissertation hours of tuition, mandatory fees, and coverage under the student gold health plan.

Week of April 8, 2011

Congratulations to Angela Stauffer, who won the Outstanding Grad Student Coordinator award for the year for the campus!

Naghme Naseri presented her paper, "Religious Persecution and Collective Memory: Iranian Baha’is’ Experiences of Internal and External Exile," at the Midwest Sociological Society meetings in St. Louis.

Kathleen McKinney (Illinois State) and Naghme Naseri have a new co-authored publication coming out in Teaching Sociology (Vol 39, Issue 2) this week. The title is: A Longitudinal, Descriptive Study of Sociology Majors: The Development of Engagement, the Sociological Imagination, Identity, and Autonomy.

We have several pieces of good news from Mike Radelet. Mike was the keynote speaker at the Alpha Kappa Delta induction ceremony, Colorado State University, on Saturday, April 2. On Thursday, April 7, he presented a paper on the death penalty in Florida at the College of Law, Michigan State University, East Lansing. The paper will be published this summer in Michigan State Law Review. And on Friday evening, April 9, Mike will receive a Distinguished Alumni Award, College of Arts and Sciences, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana.

Marc Eaton has successfully defended his dissertation: "From the Seats to the Streets: MoveOn.org and the Mobilization of Progressive Activists." Marc examines how the progressive organization MoveOn.org uses the internet to organize citizens for both online and offline activism. The data are drawn from four years of online and offline participant observation in MoveOn, sixty interviews with members and staff, sixteen informal interviews with congressional office workers, five interviews with leaders of other online activist organizations, and hundreds of documents. This study connects MoveOn’s national-level strategic decision-making to the everyday realities of participation by MoveOn members, and contextualizes this within the media-driven contemporary American culture. Marc will be moving to Ripon, Wisconsin for an Assistant Professorship at Ripon College.

Several sociology faculty members have been involved in the successful effort to obtain expanded funding for the CU Population Center. Jane Menken is mentioned in this writeup about the center.

Kathleen Tierney was featured in this week's CU faculty and staff newsletter.

Congratulations to Dr. Zek Valkyrie for successfully defending his dissertation (no revisions!), titled "Fantastic Realities: Solid and Virtual Resonance in MMORPGS April 8th."

Week of April 1, 2011

Eric Bonds and Liam Downey have an article that was accepted for publication by the Journal for World-Systems Research. It is entitled: "Green" Technology and Ecologically Unequal Exchange: The Environmental and Social Consequences of Ecological Modernization in the World-System. ABSTRACT: This article contributes to understandings of ecologically unequal exchange within the world-systems perspective by offering a series of case studies of ecological modernization in the automobile industry. The case studies demonstrate that “green” technologies developed and instituted in core nations often require specific raw materials that are extracted from the periphery and semi-periphery. Extraction of such natural resources causes significant environmental degradation and often displaces entire communities from their land. Moreover, because states often use violence and repression to facilitate raw material extraction, the widespread commercialization of “green” technologies can result in serious human rights violations. These findings challenge ecological modernization theory, which rests on the assumption that the development and commercialization of more ecologically-efficient technologies is universally beneficial.

Tim Wadsworth's research on immigration and crime rates was one of just a handful of research highlights from the social sciences featured in the most recent issue of Colorado Magazine.

Sanyu Mojola has a new publication: Sanyu Mojola. "Multiple Transitions and HIV Risk among Orphaned Kenyan Schoolgirls." Studies in Family Planning 42(1):29-40. Link
ABSTRACT:
Why are orphaned girls at particular risk of acquiring HIV infection? Using a transition-to-adulthood framework, this study employs qualitative data from Nyanza Province, Kenya, to explore pathways to HIV risk among orphaned and nonorphaned high-school girls. It shows how simultaneous processes such as leaving their parental home, negotiating financial access, and relationship transitions interact to produce disproportionate risk for orphaned girls. The role of financial provision and parental love in modifying girls' trajectories to risk are also explored. A testable theoretical model is proposed based on the qualitative findings, and policy implications are suggested.

Kat Martinez also has a new publication. Martinez, Katherine. 2011. "Gendered Consumptions: Cannibalism as a Form of Patriarchal Control." The Rutgers Journal of Sociology: Emerging Areas in Sociological Inquiry. This journal is a special edition entitled, Mind, Body, and Society, volume no. 1.
ABSTRACT:
This paper discusses cannibalism as a gendered phenomenon in which men claim the bodies of women and feminized men for the control and literal consumption of these bodies. Analyzing the social patterns of tribal societies, Medieval European saints, and modern cannibalistic killers reveals that cannibalism is a pathological expression of a patriarchal structure that allows men to control “others” bodies through metaphorical and literal consumption.

Colter Ellis gave an invited presentation at Duke University last week. Duke's Women’s Studies Program held a colloquium called “New Voices in Animal Studies." The theme of the colloquium was the intersection of Animal Studies and Feminist Studies. Colter's was one of five invited presentations.

Stef Mollborn received funding from the National Science Foundation's Sociology Program for a two-year grant titled “School Readiness among Children of Teen Parents.” Principal Investigator: Stefanie Mollborn, Co-Investigator: Paula Fomby, CU-Denver.

Finally, department members had an outstanding showing at this year’s 2011 Population Association Annual Meeting in Washington, DC, which is going on this weekend. Included on the program were: Jason Boardman, Lori Hunter, Jane Menken, Sanyu Mojola, Stef Mollborn, Fred Pampel, Rick Rogers, Mike Roettger, Jill Williams, Kari Alexander, Bethany Everett, Rob Kemp, and Christie Sennott.

Week of March 25, 2011

Kudos to Nitika Sharma and Amanda Shigihara, who presented their research at the Southwest Social Science Association meeting in Las Vegas over the weekend.

Congratulations to Lori Hunter, whose article has been accepted for publication in Development Southern Africa. Wayne Twine and Lori M. Hunter. “Adult mortality and household food security in rural South Africa: Does AIDS represent a unique mortality shock?”
ABSTRACT:
HIV/AIDS has been described as a household shock distinct from others faced by rural households. This study examines this characterization by analyzing the impact of an adult HIV/AIDS-related death on household food security, relative to households experiencing either no mortality or a sudden non-HIV/AIDS adult death. The research is based in the Agincourt Health and Demographic Surveillance Site in rural South Africa, and focuses on a sample of 290 households stratified by experience of a recent prime-age adult death. HIV/AIDS-related mortality was associated with reduced household food security. However, much of this negative association also characterized households experiencing a non-HIV/AIDS mortality. Additionally, socio-economic status was a strong determinant of food security regardless of mortality experience. We therefore recommend that development policy and interventions aimed at enhancing food security target vulnerable households broadly, rather than solely targeting those directly impacted by HIV/AIDS mortality.

Week of March 18, 2011

In an addendum to last week's announcement of a Sociology major receiving the prestigious Van Ek Award, our department is actually honored to have 2 awardees out of the total of 12 given out across all departments this year! Great work. Kenly Brown, whose honors thesis adviser is Joanne Belknap, received the Van Ek Award and accompanying cash prize.

And congratulations to Erica Kuligowski! On Friday, March 11th, Erica successfully defended her dissertation entitled "Terror Defeated: Occupant Sensemaking, Decision-making and Protective Action in the 2001 World Trade Center Disaster"(Kathleen Tierney, Chair).
Abstract (shortened):
This dissertation is a qualitative study of occupant behavior in response to the 2001 World Trade Center (WTC) disaster. Through analyses of transcripts from 245 face-to-face interviews with survivors from both WTC towers, collected by Project HEED, I investigate the pre-evacuation period in what became the largest full-scale building evacuation in history. The objectives of this study are to understand the types of actions performed before occupants began evacuation via stairs and elevators and why those actions were taken to improve techniques used and to address inadequacies in evacuation modeling tools. Drawing on social psychological theories of human action in normal times, collective behavior and sensemaking during normative crises, and emergency decision-making and protective action in response to hazards and disasters, and research on decision-making under uncertainty, I examine how interviewees made sense of environmental cues, interpreted the situation and danger to themselves and others, and decided upon pre-evacuation actions, either to seek confirmation or achieve protection. Subsequently, I developed a predictive conceptual model of pre-evacuation actions by identifying the linkages between occupant- and situationally-based factors and the actions performed. I argue that occupant pre-evacuation behavior in the WTC disaster can be conceptually modeled by understanding both the disaster environment and the meanings individuals assigned to that environment.

Christie Sennott was awarded an UGGS travel grant ($300) to help with travel costs for attending the 1st International HIV Social Science and Humanities Conference in Durban, South Africa from 11-13 June 2011.

Wee-Kiat Lim presented his research last week at the Pacific Sociological Association. He was also just notified that his sole-authored paper has been accepted for the Academy of Management (AOM) Meeting 2011 - the ASA-equivalent for management and organizational researchers. AOM has double-blind review and a stringent acceptance rate for presentations.
Abstract:
Few studies have turned their gaze on the everyday technological convenience afforded by IT support work. Instead, research has been preoccupied with senior executives, discrete implementation projects, and high-level strategic IT management. Through a case study of a system administrator team in a campus IT agency, this paper therefore makes visible the neglected enterprise of IT support work. Just as important, it surfaces a different conception of knowledge as a perishable product with limited shelf life, and elaborates its attendant knowledge management strategies. As this team operates as an internal vendor to other campus departments, this study further provides insights on outsourcing relationships, specifically from the vendor perspective.

Week of March 11, 2011

Sociology Department members turned out in force for the Pacific Sociological Association's annual meeting in Seattle this past weekend. On the program were faculty Lori Hunter, Isaac Reed, and Stefanie Mollborn; grad students Colleen Hackett, Zek Valkyrie, Tracy Deyell, Shannon Coffey, Amanda Shigihara, Bab Grossman-Thompson, Naghme Naseri, Nitika Sharma, Christie Sennott, Katherine Martinez, Wade Smith, Adelle Monteblanco, Liz Morningstar, and Rob Kemp; and undergraduates Ryan Saunders, Zachary Kennelly, and Melissa Kanack.

Amanda Shigihara and Colleen Hackett are featured in a photo on the cover of "Contexts" magazine. It is a 2008 photo, in which they participated in gathering surveys at the DNC. The cover can be found here.

Jules Wanderer's article, "Scaling professional critics: Men and women rate films" has been accepted at Empirical Studies of the Arts.
ABSTRACT:
Film critic research typically attends to the impact of critics’ ratings and reviews on box office receipts. With few exceptions, critics are treated as a homogeneous group. Taking a different approach, this paper explores similarities and differences among critics. First, in a test of potential differential influences of the objectification of women harbored in the “Male Gaze,” no significant difference between male and female critics’ median ratings was found. Second, differences and similarities among critics did appear in their rankings along a “kindness” dimension. Specifically, produced by a Correspondence Analysis and using the complete rating “profiles” of 25 professional film critics who contributed 6389 ratings to Film Comment, it was possible to rank critics from most to least kind. Third, differences in kindness ratings between two subsets (male and female critics) set the stage for another examination of the continuing influence of the Male Gaze: While males were distributed across the entire kindness scale, female critics clustered around the central (or average) kindness profile. The observed similarities and differences among critics are discussed in terms of the divergent influences of professional canons and ideological issues, such as the Male Gaze.

Mike Radelet is making one of his biannual visits to the Virgin Islands this week, where he serves as a consultant on a grant on "Health Disparities in the Virgin Islands," funded by the National Center on Minority Health and Health Disparities.

Isaac Reed has a new publication: Isaac Ariail Reed and Julia Adams, "Culture in the Transitions to Modernity: Seven Pillars of a New Research Agenda" Theory and Society. 2011. View it here.
ABSTRACT:
How did cultural dynamics help bring about the societies we now recognize as modern? This article constructs seven distinct models for how structures of signification and social meaning participated in the transitions to modernity in the West and, in some of the models, across the globe. Our models address: (1) the spread, via imitation, of modern institutions around the world (memetic replication); (2) the construal, by socio-cultural forces and by state organizations, of the modern citizen-subject (social subjectification); (3) the continual search for new meanings to replace traditional religious meaning-systems (compensatory reenchantment); (4) repeated attempts, in modern revolutions, to remake society completely, according to a utopian vision (ideological totalization); (5) the cultural origins and social consequences of scientific and humanistic worldviews (epistemic rift); (6) the gendered politics of state formation (patriarchal supercession); (7) the invention and production of race in the colonial encounter (racial recognition). We explicate the models in reverse chronological order, because in our synthesis, we argue that the original modern break results from a dynamic combination of racial recognition, patriarchal supercession, and epistemic rift; these changes set the stage for the four other processes we theorize. In addition to our synthesis, we also consider, from a more neutral perspective, the kinds of causal arguments upon which these models tend to rely, and thus explicate the analytical undergirding for the application of any of these models to empirical research on transitions to modernity. Throughout the article, we consider how these models might, and might not, mesh with other families of explanation, such as the politico-economic.

Undergraduate SOCY major Melissa Kanack (honors thesis writer with adviser Stef Mollborn) has been selected to receive one of the Jacob Van Ek Scholar Awards for 2011. The College of Arts and Sciences is honoring twelve outstanding students with these awards to recognize superior academic achievement combined with distinguished service to the university or the community at large. This award is made possible by Jacob Van Ek, the Dean of the College from 1929 to 1959. This is a prestigious award given to select undergraduates in the College of Arts and Sciences.

Laura Patterson is featured in this summer’s Continuing Education catalog - view quote and picture.

Sarah Lake has won a Beverley Sears Graduate Student Grant award for $1000 towards a research project. She will use the funds to conduct field work this summer that examines how supply networks between Wal-Mart stores and local, sustainable farms in Minnesota affect production practices and environmental outcomes.

Rick Rogers has published a new book: "International Handbook of Adult Mortality." Book Series: International Handbooks of Population, Vol. 2. Editors: Rogers, Richard G.; Crimmins, Eileen M. Springer Press.

Sanyu Mojola has a new publication: Mojola, Sanyu A. 2011. "Fishing in dangerous waters: Ecology, gender and economy in HIV risk." Social Science & Medicine, 72: 149-156.
ABSTRACT:
This paper focuses on a neglected factor in literature on the HIV epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa: the role of the eco-social environment in shaping HIV risk. I argue that the changing ecological environment of Lake Victoria, Africa’s largest freshwater lake, mapping onto a gendered economy, shaped fisherfolk’s sexual relationships and sexual mixing patterns in ways that were consequential for their HIV risk. Specifically, I show how disrupted lake and fish ecology had an impact on fishermen’s sexual, domestic and economic partnerships, as well as how it contributed to the “sex for fish” economy in Nyanza Province, Kenya. I also show the consequences of fishermen’s relative wealth on transactional relationships with school girls and women in lakeside communities. The paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork over a seven month period among the Luo ethnic group, which has the highest HIV rates in Kenya. The study included 74 individual and focus group interviews in communities around Lake Victoria, as well as 20 key informant interviews. Additionally, literature reviews on fishing and sexual economies as well as on ecological research in Lake Victoria are employed. Exploring linkages between these literatures and fieldwork findings forms the basis of this paper. I argue that solely focusing on individual level HIV prevention strategies is limited without taking into account the eco-social context of individual sexual decision making.

Week of March 4, 2011

Lori Hunter spent Tuesday in DC on a panel reviewing proposals submitted to NIH on the topic of “climate change and health.” She encourages anyone interested in the topic to craft a submission for the next round since the competition was, in a word, sparse.

Tom Mayer's panel on the political situation in Egypt was featured in the Faculty and Staff Newsletter (though they misspelled his name).

Finally, congratulations to all of us for a well-organized and well-attended open house for prospective graduate students!

Week of February 25, 2011

Jason Boardman was one of eight invited speakers to the NICHD Vision Workshop on Behavior entitled "Growing Up Healthy: Developmental Theory to Models to Interventions." The vision workshops were developed by Alan Guttmacher (the new director of NICHD) to initiate discussions about the next decade of research at NIH. Over 60 researchers participated in the 2 day workshop that was structured around the 8 initial talks. See the attached for more information.

On Saturday, February 26, Mike Radelet will present the keynote address at the meetings of the Michigan chapters of Amnesty International, in Detroit.

On Monday morning, Eric Bonds’ wife gave birth to a beautiful baby girl named Sage Marie. They are all doing very well.

Week of February 18, 2011

Congratulations to Mike Radelet, who is a featured speaker at a conference this weekend of some 800 death penalty attorneys, sponsored by the California Public Defenders Association, in Monterey, California. His presentation is entitled “Using Empirical Data on Class and Race in Death Penalty Cases.”

Kudos to Jules Wanderer, who has a new publication: "When Film Critics Agree: Does Film Genre Matter?" Vol. 29:1 in Empirical Studies of the Arts, an APA journal.
ABSTRACT:
This article reports the results of an analysis of patterns of "agreements" and "disagreements" among 45 professional critics' ratings of over 1300 films. These ratings—awarded along a scale from 0 to 5 stars—were examined, first, to determine whether increases in the sheer number of critics rating a film was associated with its average rating; second, to determine whether the number of ratings was more or less related to levels of agreement among critics' ratings; and third, to determine whether certain types of films (genres) were more likely to produce ratings agreement than others. Chi-square tests supported the contention that film genres were not distributed proportionally in subsets of films with very high and very low levels of ratings agreement, ranging, for example, from most agreement for horror films, to least, for dramas.

Finally, Stefanie Mollborn has published an article on teen parenthood in the latest issue of the ASA journal "Contexts." Mollborn, Stefanie. "'Children' Having Children." (latest issue not yet available through CU Libraries).

Week of February 11, 2011

On Friday, February 11, Mike Radelet presented a public lecture at Vermont Law School in South Royalton, Vermont. The title of his address (which will be published later this year in Vermont Law Review) was "Overriding Jury Sentence Recommendations in Florida Capital Cases: An Update and Possible Half-Requiem."

Liam Downey, Eric Bonds, and Katie Clark (ENVS) just had an article published in Organization & Environment. The title of the article is "Natural Resource Extraction, Armed Violence, and Environmental Degradation."
ABSTRACT:
The article demonstrates that environmental sociologists cannot fully explain the relationship between humans and the natural world without theorizing a link between natural resource extraction, armed violence, and environmental degradation. We begin by arguing that armed violence is one of several overlapping mechanisms that provide powerful actors with the means to (a) prevail over others in conflicts over natural resources and (b) ensure that natural resources critical to industrial production and state power continue to be extracted and sold in sufficient quantities to promote capital accumulation, state power, and ecological unequal exchange. We then identify 10 minerals that are critical to the functioning of the U.S. economy and/or military and demonstrate that the extraction of these minerals often involves the use of armed violence. We further demonstrate that armed violence is associated with the activities of the world's three largest mining companies, with African mines that receive World Bank funding, and with petroleum and rainforest timber extraction. We conclude that the natural resource base upon which industrial societies stand is constructed in large part through the use and threatened use of armed violence. As a result, armed violence plays a critical role in fostering environmental degradation and ecological unequal exchange.

Joanne Belknap has a new publication: Belknap, Joanne, Emily Gaarder, Kristi Holsinger, Cathy McDaniels Wilson, Bonnie Cady. 2011. “Using Girls’ Voices and Words to Study Their Problems,” in Margaret Kerr, Håkan Stattin, Anna-Karin Andershed, & Geertjan Overbeek (Eds.) Understanding Girls’ Problem Behavior: How Girls' Delinquency Develops in the Context of Maturity and Health, Co-Occurring Problems, and Relationships. West Sussex, England: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 97-116.

Week of January 28, 2011

Leslie Irvine's new book, The Self in Society, has been written up in the Arts and Sciences Magazine. LINK.

Congratulations to Mike Radelet on his new publication: Pierce, Glenn L. and Michael L. Radelet. "Death Sentencing in East Baton Rouge Parish, 1990-2008." Louisiana Law Review 71:647-73 (January 2011).

And kudos to Joanne Belknap for a new publication as well: Belknap, Joanne. 2010. “‘Offending Women’: A Double Entendre.” Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology, 100(3):1060-1098.
ABSTRACT:
Two of the most significant contributions of feminist criminology since the 1970s are the documentation of (1) the significant amount of violence against women and girls perpetrated by men and boys; and (2) how girls’ and women’s victimizations and trauma, often at the hands of abusive men, are risk factors for their subsequent offending or labeling as “offenders.” On this one-hundredth anniversary of The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology (Journal), I examined the nineteen articles written about women offenders in the first one hundred years, and in this Article, I summarize and critique the articles and place their findings in the context of current-day scholarship on feminist criminology. Overwhelmingly, these nineteen Journal “historical articles” were written primarily by women in the first three decades of the Journal (1910-1939), and they describe the characteristics of offending women and (speculations about) their offending, the reformatories and prisons in which these women were housed, and the laws regarding and leading to the implementation of women’s reformatories. Unlike much of today’s work on incarcerated women, these articles rarely consider race or the prisoners’ lifetime traumas. When race is considered, it is frequently done so in a racist manner. The women’s victimizations, if acknowledged, are typically indicated in a veiled manner. Still, these articles describe women who are highly marginalized by class and the conditions associated with economic marginalization: extremely poor health and very limited education and employment opportunities. At the same time, their survival behaviors, including prostitution, are criminalized alongside other offenses for which men are never incarcerated (such as having sex outside of marriage).

Week of January 14, 2011

Last Monday, Lori Hunter was an invited panelist at the National Academies of Science in DC, for a meeting on environmental migration convened by the NAS Committee on Climate, Energy, and National Security. Her talk was entitled "Migration, Environmental Change, and Natural Capital: Linkages through Livelihoods." Although the "intelligence community" comprised much of the audience, Lori reports that the meeting was not at all scary.

Kudos to Joanne Belknap on her new publication. Belknap, Joanne. “Rape: Too Hard to Report and Too Easy to Discredit Victims.” Violence Against Women, 16(12):1335-1344.
ABSTRACT:
Although false charges of rape are reprehensible, they are extremely rare, with statistics indicating that of all rapes, regardless of whether they are reported to the police, 0.005% are false reports. Conservatively, at least 90% of rapes are never reported to the police, yet falsely charged rapes seem to supersede unreported rapes as prioritized social and legal problems. Moreover, when examining high -profile cases portrayed as “false rape charges” by the courts and/or media, it is vital to examine them in the context of historical legacies and the roles and intersections of gender, race, and class. This article addresses why “real” rape victims may recant, particularly given the often hostile media, legal, and social responses to victims more marginalized by race, gender, and/or class who identify rapists who are more entitled by race, gender, and/or class. LINK

And a special congratulations to the authors of two new books! First, Leslie Irvine's new book has been released: The Self in Society, edited by Leslie Irvine (San Diego: Cognella). From the back cover: Few ideas are as taken for granted in modern society as the notion that people have selves. The Self in Society provides students with a thought-provoking set of readings to ignite their curiosity about this assumption. Most sociology courses aim to examine the relationship between the individual and society, but give scant attention to the individual side of the equation. Beginning with the established classic statements on the self, the readings trace the social origins of the idea that people have unique destinies they must understand and fulfill. They consider how to approach the self as a topic of study. They investigate how culture and individual experiences shape the personal self. The readings relate to sociological subfields such as race and ethnicity, sex and gender, religion, and inequality. They examine the possibility of selfhood among animals, and introduce recent research from neuroscience. Discussion questions and further readings after each chapter promote additional study. Whether used alone or as a supplement to a traditional text, The Self in Society can be a key to enhancing the sociological imagination. LINK

Second, Janet Jacobs has released a new book. Jacobs, Janet. "Memorializing the Holocaust: Gender, Genocide, and Collective Memory." The book is having both European and U.S. releases.
SYNOPSIS:
How do collective memories of histories of violence and trauma in war and genocide come to be created? Janet Jacobs offers new understandings of this crucial issue in her examination of the representation of gender in the memorial culture of Holocaust monuments and museums, from synagogue memorials and other historical places of Jewish life, to the geographies of Auschwitz, Majdanek and Ravensbruck. Jacobs travelled to Holocaust sites across Europe to explore representations of women. She reveals how these memorial cultures construct masculinity and femininity, as well as the Holocaust's effect on stereotyping on grounds of race or gender. She also uncovers the wider ways in which images of violence against women have become universal symbols of mass trauma and genocide. This feminist analysis of Holocaust memorialization brings together gender and collective memory with the geographies of genocide to fill a significant gap in our understanding of genocide and national remembrance. LINK.
And here's a writeup in the Arts and Sciences Magazine.

And last but certainly not least, two of our Ph.D. students have landed terrific jobs--and they've even beaten the odds by getting hired at the same university. Colter Ellis will be a Research Associate and Adjunct Professor in the Sociology Department at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas. Kelly Knight will be a tenure-track Assistant Professor in Sam Houston's School of Criminal Justice. Sam Houston has strong programs that match both of their research interests. Congratulations to Kelly and Colter!

Week of January 7, 2011

Tim Wadsworth was quoted in an article reporting on a Gallup poll that found Boulder to be the happiest and healthiest city in the U.S. LINK.

Hillary Potter's review of Sarah Hautzinger's book, Violence in the City of Women, was published in the December 2010 issue of Gender & Society. LINK.

The qualitative paper that Wee-Kiat Lim co-authored with Nanyang Business School faculty has been accepted by the Journal of Association for Information Systems (JAIS). JAIS is widely accepted to be an A or A- journal in Management Information Systems (MIS) and Information Technology (IT). CITATION: Lim, W.K., Sia, S. K., & Yeow, A. (2011). Managing risks in a failing IT project: A social constructionist view. Journal of the Association for Information Systems, forthcoming.
ABSTRACT:
"Why do IT projects continue to stumble, despite the proliferation of risk management methodologies and a growing body of knowledge on project risk assessment and mitigation? In this paper, we propose an alternative theoretical perspective that views project risk as a social construction process shaped by the risk accounts of social groups and actors within an implementation context. Risk management is embedded in the social processes where risks are negotiated and contested, with some risk accounts amplified and some attenuated. Through the analysis of a large IT implementation in an Asian logistics firm and its trajectory of successive crises, we examine the process of the social construction of risk. Our findings highlight the inherent fragmentation and the challenge of building collectiveness in risk construction, and the need for risk managers to consider the influence of broader social structures and the reshaping dynamism of sudden focusing events in managing complex IT projects." Congratulations, Wee-Kiat!

Week of December 17, 2010

Congratulations to Kris Hoyt, who successfully defended his dissertation proposal entitled “Changing the Climate While Reproducing Power?: Investigating the Social Construction of “Renewable” Frames in the Mass Print News Media.”

Kudos to Leslie Irvine, who has accepted an invitation to serve on the Emergency Services Advisory Committee of the American Humane Association. American Humane began doing animal relief in August, 1916, when invited by the War Department to help animals used by the U.S. Army during WWI. Today, through a Letter of Understanding with the American Red Cross, American Humane is the primary contact in the U.S. for animal-related disaster relief.

Leslie was also quoted in an article on the psychological benefits of pets in the fall issue of Esperanza, a magazine for people with depression and anxiety.

Stef Mollborn has had an article on teenage parenthood accepted for publication in the Winter 2011 issue of Contexts.

Week of December 10, 2010

Kudos to Rick Rogers, who was quoted in an article on the drop in Americans' life expectancy on MSNBC.

Congratulations to Christina Sue, whose response to Eduardo Bonilla-Silva's Latin Americanization thesis was number 10 of the top 10 downloaded articles for Ethnic and Racial Studies, the top journal in the subfield. Find it here.

Kudos to Hillary Potter, who was invited to give research talks at three different universities this semester! (sent in by J Belknap):

"'You Want to Fight? We Gonna Fight!": Black Women"s Retaliatory Responses to Intimate Partner Abuse." When She Hits Him: Why Gender and Context Matter, Batterer Intervention Services Coalition of Michigan.

"Crossing the Line: The Importance of Considering Gender, Race, and Class to Understand Intimate Partner Abuse." Department of Sociology, University of Nebraska, Lincoln.

"Violence in Hidden Spaces and Urban Places: Using Intersectionality and Qualitative Methods to Investigate Intimate Partner Abuse." Elijah Anderson"s Workshop in Urban Ethnography, Department of Sociology, Yale University.

Congratulations to Shannon Coffey, who was invited to participate in "Bringing Fieldwork Back In: An Ethnographic Retreat," at Yale University, November 4-6.

Shannon Coffey also published the essay, "'Bringing Fieldwork Back In': The Yale Urban Ethnography Project," in the November edition of Griot: The Newsletter of the Association of Black Sociologists.

Week of December 3, 2010

Extra-special congratulations to Mike Radelet, who has been selected to receive the 2011 Distinguished Alumni Award, College of Liberal Arts, Purdue University. Radelet will receive the Award on April 8 in West Lafayette.

We also have the first academic job market-related news of the year: Kudos to Marc Eaton, who has accepted a full-time, tenure track position at Ripon College (pronounced "rippin"). Ripon is a very good liberal arts private college in central Wisconsin, located in a town of 40,000 not far from Green Bay and Milwaukee. He will be placed at the kind of school has always wanted: engaged students, small classes, good colleagues, teaching oriented, and nice environment. Great job, Marc!

Jane Menken attended her final meeting of the African Population and Health Research Center Board of Directors in Nairobi, Kenya November 14-17, 2010. She has been a Board Member since 2001 and Chair for the past three years. One of the Center projects has been one to provide clean water in slum schools and promote handwashing to reduce disease transmission. Jane attached a wonderful photo that I couldn't send to the list, but it shows a play performed by children in one of the schools. They are in front of a rainwater collection tank installed by the project that now provides uncontaminated water. Over 700 children attend this particular school, with classes of over 70 crowded into tiny rooms and taught primarily by volunteer teachers. More on APHRC and its work can be found here. Congratulations, Jane!

Kudos to Jesse Smith, who successfully defended the proposal for his dissertation, entitled "Atheism in America: Investigating Contemporary Atheists."

Liesel Ritchie, Kathleen Tierney, and Brandi Gilbert recently published a chapter entitled "Disaster Preparedness among Community-Based Organizations in the City and County of San Francisco: Serving the Most Vulnerable" in the edited volume "Community Disaster Recovery and Resiliency: Exploring Global Opportunities and Challenges."

Brandi Gilbert received the the American Evaluation Association (AEA) Student Travel Award ($500) to attend the 2010 AEA conference in San Antonio, Texas. At the conference Brandi presented a poster entitled "Warning Decisions in Extreme Weather Events."

Lori Hunter is in Seattle giving an invited research presentation at the University of Washington’s Center for Demography and Ecology. She is presenting thoughts on population-environment research generally, as well as specifics related to her collaborative research at the Agincourt field site on HIV/AIDS and the local environment. Lori’s particularly excited about this presentation since she’s a “Husky” at heart with a UW Bachelor’s degree in Sociology and Communications!

Last but not least, Bethany Everett and Rick Rogers have had an article accepted for publication in the journal Ethnic and Racial Studies. Everett, Bethany G., Richard G. Rogers, Robert A. Hummer, and Patrick M. Krueger. "Trends in Educational Attainment by Race/Ethnicity, Nativity, and Sex in the United States, 1989-2005."
Abstract: Despite the importance of education for shaping individuals’ life chances, little research has examined trends and differences in educational attainment for detailed demographic subpopulations in the United States. We use labor market segmentation and cohort replacement theories, linear regression methods, and data from the National Health Interview Survey to understand educational attainment by race/ethnicity, nativity, cohort, and sex between 1989 and 2005 in the United States. There have been significant changes in educational attainment over time. In support of the cohort replacement theory, we find that across cohorts, females have enjoyed greater gains in education than men, and for some race/ethnic groups, recent cohorts of women average more education than comparable men. And in support of labor market segmentation theories, foreign-born Mexican Americans continue to possess relatively low levels of educational attainment. Our results can aid policymakers in identifying vulnerable populations, and form the base from which to better understand changing disparities in education.

Week of November 18, 2010

This week Christina Sue is in Veracruz, Mexico all next week revisiting her research site. She was invited to give a talk on "Racial Ideologies and Racial Identity in the Port of Veracruz" as part of an international coloquium titled "Veracruz, Then and Now."

Congratulations to Eleanor Hubbard, who will be teaching for Semester at Sea in spring 2011.

Shelby McKinzey will be recognized as an honorary coach for the CU Women's Basketball team on Wednesday, December 1, 2010 @ 7pm. Nominated by several students in her Crime & Society class for her excellence in teaching, Shelby will be acknowledged by the team during half time.

Kudos to Kristina Kahl, who successfully defended her dissertation proposal this week. It is titled, "The Crisis of Social Change for Simple Livers: How a Faith-Based Organization and its Members Affect the Voluntary Simplicity Movement."

Angel Hoekstra has written an article on clicker use in sociology that has been published in the ASA Teaching and Learning Section's most recent newsletter.

Sanyu Mojola has had an article accepted in Social Science and Medicine. Mojola, Sanyu. Forthcoming. "Fishing in Dangerous Waters: Ecology, Gender and Economy in HIV Risk."

Abstract:
This paper focuses on a neglected factor in literature on the HIV epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa: the role of the eco-social environment in shaping HIV risk. I argue that the changing ecological environment of Lake Victoria, Africa’s largest freshwater lake, mapping onto a gendered economy, shaped fisherfolk’s sexual relationships and sexual mixing patterns in ways that were consequential for their HIV risk. Specifically, I show how disrupted lake and fish ecology had an impact on fishermen’s sexual, domestic and economic partnerships, as well as how it contributed to the “sex for fish” economy in Nyanza Province, Kenya. I also show the consequences of fishermen’s relative wealth on transactional relationships with school girls and women in lakeside communities. The paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork over a seven month period among the Luo ethnic group, which has the highest HIV rates in Kenya. The study included 94 individual, focus group and key informant interviews in communities around Lake Victoria. Additionally, literature reviews on fishing and sexual economies as well as on ecological research in Lake Victoria are employed. Exploring linkages between these literatures and fieldwork findings forms the basis of this paper. I argue that solely focusing on individual level HIV prevention strategies is limited without taking into account the eco-social context of individual sexual decision making.

Stefanie Mollborn has a new publication Stefanie Mollborn, Paula Fomby and Jeff A. Dennis. "Who Matters for Children’s Early Development? Race/Ethnicity and Extended Household Structures in the United States." Child Indicators Research.
Abstract:
Taking advantage of recent data that permit an assessment of the importance of extended household members in operationalizing the relationship between family structure and children’s early development, this study incorporated coresident grandparents, other kin, and nonkin to investigate the associations between extended household structure and U.S. children’s cognitive and behavioral outcomes at age 2. Analyses assessed whether these relationships differed for Latino, African American, and White children and tested four potential explanations for such differences. Nationally representative data came from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort of 2001 (N ≈ 8,450). Extended household structures were much more prevalent in households of young African American and Latino children than among Whites. Nuclear households were beneficial for White children, but living with a grandparent was associated with the highest cognitive scores for African American children. Nuclear, vertically extended, and laterally extended households had similar associations with Latino children’s cognitive and behavior scores. Results suggest that expanded indicators of household structure that include grandparents, other kin, and nonkin are useful for understanding children’s early development.

Congratulations to the first year cohort (George Williams, Beth Whalley, Josh LePree, Cristen Dalessandro, and Althea Godfrey)! They each received a $600 support fellowship from the College, intended for first year graduate students as a signing bonus/recruitment incentive for their first semester of graduate study at CU-Boulder.

Week of November 12, 2010

This past weekend Wade Smith attended the annual conference of the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport in San Diego, CA, where he presented a paper titled "Institutionalized Gender-Role Management in the Wake of Title IX" and moderated a session titled "Producing Critical Sport Scholarship."

Joanne Belknap has been keeping busy. She recently gave a talk at the International Society for Trauma Stress Studies annual conference in Montreal (co-authored with Jani Little and Kristi Holsinger), entitled: "Sexual Minority Status, Abuse, and Mental Health Problems Among Incarcerated Delinquent Girls."

On October 20 Joanne conducted a training for Denver criminal legal system personnel entitled "The Gendered Nature of Intimate Partner Abuse."

On November 3rd, Joanne gave a keynote address entitled "Privilege and Activism" for the CU Diversity and Inclusion Summit.

On November 8th, Joanne gave a presentation sponsored by the CU Women's Resource Center called "Everyday Acts of Rebellion."

Fastest thesis in the West! On November 1, Johnathon Intollube-Chmil successfully defended his honors thesis entitled “The Effect of Race on the Colorado Parole Revocation Process.” John got interested in honors after Isaac Reed’s visit to a small class John was taking with Sara Steen, and he asked whether he could still write a thesis even though he was graduating in December, 2010. Isaac gave the okay, and John went from A to Z in the thesis process starting in August, and ending November 1. He wrote and defended an excellent piece of work, and we wish him the best as he works his way forward into law school.

Last week, Jennifer Bair and Isaac Reed both gave talks at UC-Riverside. Jenn's talk was part of the Global Studies colloquium series, and was titled "Revisiting Local Clusters and Global Chains: From Boom to Bust in Mexico's Blue Jeans Capital."
Issac's talk was part of the Sociology Department colloquium series and was titled "Power and Causality in Social Theory and Social Research"

Congratulations to Kelly Knight, who successfully defended her dissertation proposal. It is titled, "Assortative Mating and Partner Influence: Antisocial Behavior across the Life Course."

Week of November 5, 2010

Leslie Irvine gave two talks this week. On Monday, November 1, she presented on her book, "Filling the Ark: Animal Welfare in Disasters," at the annual convention of the International Association of Emergency Mangers in San Antonio. On Tuesday, she was part of a panel discussion on “Why Animals and Speciesism Matter to Social Justice” in CU’s Diversity Summit.

Sanyu Mojola's article, "Multiple Transitions and HIV Risk Among African School Girls," is forthcoming in Studies in Family Planning in the March 2011 issue.
Abstract:
Why are orphaned girls at particular risk of contracting HIV? Using a transition to adulthood framework, this paper uses qualitative data from Nyanza province, Kenya to explore pathways to HIV risk among orphaned and non-orphaned high school girls. I show how co-occurring processes such as residential transition out of the parental home, negotiating financial access and relationship transitions interact to produce disproportionate risk for orphan girls. I also explore the role of financial provision and parental love in modifying girls’ trajectories to risk. I propose a testable theoretical model based on the qualitative findings and suggest policy implications.

Jesse Smith just had a sole authored paper, "Becoming an Atheist in America: Constructing Identity and Meaning from the Rejection of Theism," accepted for publication with the Sociology of Religion: A Quarterly Review.
Abstract:
This study explores the identity formation process of self-avowed atheists in the context of American culture. Drawing on data collected from participant observation and forty individual in-depth interviews with atheists in Colorado, four stages of atheist identity development are presented: the starting point/the ubiquity of theism, questioning theism, rejecting theism, and “coming out” atheist. I argue that an atheist identity is an achieved identity, and one that is constructed in social interaction. Focusing on the interactional processes and narrative accounts of participants, I discuss the process of rejecting the culturally normative belief in God, and the adoption instead, of an identity for which the “theist culture” at large offers no validation. This research illustrates how identification with atheism in America becomes an important aspect of self for those who adopt this label. Further, it makes a qualitative contribution to our incipient understanding of the subjective experience and identities of actual atheists, as well as the dynamics of irreligion and unbelief in America – an area of inquiry within the sociology of religion that is in need of further development.

Jesse Smith also presented this paper at the annual conference of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion in Baltimore Maryland this past weekend.

Lori Hunter, with collaborator Wayne Twine, recently had a book chapter published in the collection AIDS and Rural Livelihoods Dynamics and Diversity in sub-Saharan Africa, Edited By Anke Niehof, Gabriel Rugalema and Stuart Gillespie. Hunter and Twine’s chapter, “Adult Mortality, Food Security and the Use of Wild Natural Resources in a Rural District of South Africa: Exploring the Environmental Dimensions of AIDS,” reports on their work at the Agincourt demographic surveillance site which documents negative impacts of adult mortality on household food security, although importantly, their work suggests that mortality from HIV is not a unique shock distinct from other mortality impacts. In addition, the analyses document the importance of wild foods in achieving dietary diversity, particularly among poverty-impacted households regardless of mortality shock.

Week of October 29, 2010

Amy Wilkins was quoted in the Daily Camera and the Denver Post in articles about Boulder's low proportion of married residents.

Mike Radelet was an invited speaker at the Third Annual Health Disparities Institute, "State of Mental Health & Substance Abuse: An Issue for All Ethnic/Minority and Caribbean Populations," Oct. 21-23, in St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands. The project is funded by the National Center on Minority Health and Health Disparities, and Radelet has been a consultant on the grant since 2005.

Michael Roettger, currently working as a post-doctoral researcher with Jason Boardman, was recently cited in a Reuters news report regarding the physical and mental health of children of men who have spent time in jails or prisons.

Jennifer Bair just had a paper accepted for publication. “The Place of Disarticulations: Global Commodity Production in La Laguna, Mexico” has just been accepted for publication at Environment and Planning A. Her co-author on this paper is Marion Werner, a geographer at York University in Toronto.

Week of October 8, 2010

Congratulations to Patti Adler, Peter Adler, and Patrick O'Brien, who have signed a contract with Wiley-Blackwell to produce a new edited anthology in the sociology of drugs entitled Drugs and the American Dream. This work departs from the traditional way readers in this area have been organized, according to the category of the substance (opiates, hallucinogens, club drugs, alcohol, etc.), to present the material more sociologically, featuring sections on Race/Ethnicity, Youth and Aging, Social Class, Gender, Managing Drug Lifestyles, in addition to the traditional sections on History and Theory, Drug Scares and Moral Panics, Crime and Violence, Education, Treatment, and Policy.

Kudos to Lori Hunter, who was invited to attend and present at the meeting, Oct 13-15, entitled “POPULATION DYNAMICS AND CLIMATE CHANGE II: Building for Adaptation” hosted by UNFPA, International Institute for Environment and Development and El Colegio de México, in Mexico City. She’ll be presenting her collaborative research on the environmental dimensionsn of HIV/AIDS within a session on “Health issues linked to population dynamics, including reproductive health.”

And congratulations to Bethany Everett, who recently received a $144,809 grant from NICHD (with PI Stef Mollborn). Among other things, the grant will provide support for Bethany to complete her dissertation research. The project is titled “Health Disparities among a Vulnerable Population: A Longitudinal Analysis.”
ABSTRACT:
The proposed research project will investigate sexual minority health disparities during the transition from adolescence to young adulthood. The existing research on sexual minorities has several limitations: 1) it is largely based on clinical and community samples; 2) it relies on cross sectional data sets; 3) it is often limited to one dichotomous indicator of sexual orientation; 4) it often ignores environmental influences, and 5) it has examined only a small number of health related outcomes. Given these limitations, this research is poised to make important contributions to the existing literature as well as public policy but improving upon the existing data, methods, and frameworks utilized. Specifically, this research will utilize nationally representative, longitudinal data and several indicators of same-sex orientation to investigate a wide variety of health outcomes including suicidal ideation, depressive symptoms, self-reported health, self-reported morbidities, and a series of biomarkers designed to measure anthropometric, cardiovascular, metabolic, and inflammation functioning. In addition to using these cutting-edge data, we will employ a series of innovative statistical techniques including generalized linear models, propensity score matching, multi-level models, and latent curve models. Critically, this work will employ an interdisciplinary, “ecosocial” framework that stresses the synergistic impact of individual, environmental, and biological level processes on health.

Week of October 1, 2010

Kudos to Jason Boardman, who was an invited speaker at the meeting entitled "Using genome-wide association studies (GWAS) to explore fundamental questions about aging and health in the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) sample." This meeting was held at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington DC on September 23rd and 24th.

Congratulations to Joanne Belknap, who along with Shannon Lynch, Dana DeHart, & Bonnie L. Green received a grant from the Department of Justice, entitled “Women’s Pathways to Jail: The Roles and Intersections of Serious Mental Illness and Trauma.” The entire multi-site study was funded for $496,022, with $105,000 for CU.

And finally, congratulations to Liz Morningstar, who today successfully defended her dissertation proposal, titled "Transitions and Turmoil?: Young Adult Children of Mentally Ill Parents and the Transition to Adulthood."

Week of September 24, 2010

Congratulations to Tim Wadsworth, who was featured in the most recent issue of Coloradan Magazine for his research on immigration and crime.

And kudos to Isaac Reed, who has a new forthcoming publication: Isaac Ariail Reed and Julia Adams, "Culture in the Transitions to Modernity: Seven Pillars of a New Research Agenda." The article will come out in Volume 40 of Theory and Society (sometime in 2011).

Week of September 17, 2010

Jennifer Bair's article, "On Difference and Capital: Gender and the Globalization of Production", just came out in the autumn issue of Signs (vol. 36, no. 1, pp. 203-226). It is part of a special issue on "Feminists Theorize the International Political Economy."

Last week, Jenn was in Newcastle, UK for a conference that she co-organized on "Social Labeling in the Global Fashion Industry" at the University of Northumbria. The three day event brought together academics and experts from NGOs, trade unions, and companies to discuss how best to promote ethical production in the global apparel industry. Jenn served as the discussant for the plenary panel which featured Scott Nova, the director of the Workers Rights Consortium. Her remarks aimed to put the current "anti-sweatshop" movement in historical perspective by focusing on the organization of domestic apparel production in New York's garment district from the 1910s through the 1980s.

Congratulations to Tamara Williams, who has received an internship award from the American Evaluation Association (AEA) Graduate Diversity Education Internship committee. Tamara will receive extensive off-site training and will be placed in an evaluation internship.

Sanyu Mojola was invited to give a public lecture at Eckerd College, Florida on Tuesday as part of their year long "Plight and Promise of Africa" initiative. See: http://africa.eckerd.edu/calendar/2010-09-14

Kudos to Amy Wilkins, who was invited to join the editorial board of the prestigious journal Social Psychology Quarterly.

Lori Hunter was invited by Chancellor Phil DiStefano to be one of several faculty participants in this year's CU Seminar. The seminar, running Thurs-Saturday, is for a select group of alumni and parents and aims to introduce the participants to some of CU's faculty and their research. Lori will be speaking on her collaborative research at the Agincourt study site on HIV/AIDS and the environment.

Last but definitely not least, Lori Hunter is participating in an online discussion through the Population Reference Bureau on Monday, Sept 20th, 1-2 pm EDT.
Details:
Population Reference Bureau's Discuss Online: "What Do We Know About the Relationship Between HIV/AIDS and the Natural Environment?"
When: Monday, Sept. 20, 2010, 1–2 p.m. (EDT) (GMT -4)
Who: Lori Hunter, Associate Professor of Sociology and Environmental Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder; Ben Piper, Director of Research and Programs for the University of Washington at KEMRI in Kenya; and Jason Bremner, Program Director of Population, Health, and Environment at the Population Reference Bureau.
Where: Go to http://discuss.prb.org. You may submit questions in advance and during the discussion. A full transcript of the questions and answers will be posted after the discussion.
Information: The relationship between HIV/AIDS and the natural environment is complex and operates at many levels in countless ways. HIV/AIDS morbidity and mortality may affect people's use of natural resources and the institutions that govern resources, while environmental change may affect people living with HIV/AIDS and increase susceptibility to illness and even HIV infection among certain groups, especially women and girls. Recognizing the associations between HIV/AIDS and the natural environment can contribute to the well-being of both humans and the environment, and the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals.

How does HIV/AIDS exacerbate vulnerability to food security and thus result in exploitation of natural resources? What is the impact of HIV/AIDS on conservation efforts and how does the epidemic affect land and resource ownership? How do scarce resources and conservation initiatives influence migration and vulnerability to HIV/AIDS? A growing number of research studies and health and conservation programs are examining these relationships, and their results may surprise you.

Week of September 10, 2010

A belated congratulations to Kristina Kahl, who received the department's Graduate Part-Time Instructor of the Year Award for AY 09-10!

Kudos to Pavla Harris, who successully defended her dissertation proposal. Title: "Worldwide patterns and determinants of national identity: The changing influence of education."

Congratulations to Tamara Williams, who was selected as a finalist for this year's Graduate Education Diversity Internship Program from the American Evaluation Association.

Finally, kudos to Isaac Reed, whose article, "Why Salem Made Sense: Culture, Gender, and the Puritan Persecution of Witchcraft," is being translated for inclusion in Claudio Benzecry, editor. Hacia una nueva sociología cultural. Buenos Aires: Editorial de la Universidad Nacional de Quilmes.

Week of September 3, 2010

Congratulations to Fred Pampel, who welcomed his second grand-baby into the world, Ms. Aurora "Rory" Joy Pascual!

Kudos to one of our Sociology Honors Students, Kenly Brown, who received a fellowship this past summer in the Summer Research Opportunities Program for undergraduate students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Not only was she one of 14 students nation-wide chosen for this honor, but she won the Outstanding Scholar of SROP and the Outstanding Poster Presentation at the CIC/SROP Ohio State Conference! Go, Kenly!

Angel Hoekstra's case study of using clickers in sociology is now available on the i-clicker website (click Sociology).

Liam Downey, Eric Bonds, and Katie Clark (ENVS) just had their article “Natural Resource Extraction, Armed Violence, and Environmental Degradation” accepted for publication in the journal Organization & Environment.
Abstract:
The goal of this article is to demonstrate that environmental sociologists cannot fully explain the relationship between humans and the natural world without theorizing a link between natural resource extraction, armed violence, and environmental degradation. We begin by arguing that armed violence is one of several overlapping mechanisms that provide powerful actors with the means to (a) prevail over others in conflicts over natural resources and (b) ensure that natural resources critical to industrial production and state power continue to be extracted and sold in sufficient quantities to promote capital accumulation, state power, and ecological unequal exchange. We then identify 10 minerals that are critical to the functioning of the U.S. economy and/or military and demonstrate that the extraction of these minerals often involves the use of armed violence. We further demonstrate that armed violence is associated with the activities of the world’s three largest mining companies, with African mines that receive World Bank funding, and with petroleum and rainforest timber extraction. We conclude that the natural resource base upon which industrial societies stand is constructed in large part through the use and threatened use of armed violence. As a result, armed violence plays a critical role in fostering environmental degradation and ecological unequal exchange.

Hillary Potter's book, Battle Cries, was given a glowing review in the latest issue of Social Forces.

Week of August 27, 2010

To celebrate the start of the semester, we once again have a lot of terrific news:

Earlier this month, Janet Jacobs was invited by the Association for the Sociology of Religion to give the prestigious Paul Hanly Furfey Lecture. Her lecture was titled "Sacred Space and Collective Memory: Memorializing Genocide at Sites of Terror." I was in the audience and was so impressed by Janet's combination of visual sociology (a slideshow of photographs from the Ravensbrueck concentration camp memorial) and scholarly analysis of memorials of the Holocaust and Rwanda genocides. Congratulations, Janet!

Kudos to Isaac Reed and Benjamin Lamb-Books, who have published "Hermeneutics and Sociology: Deepening the Interpretive Perspective," in Ieva Zake and Michael DeCesare, editors, New Voices in Sociological Theory. Jefferson, NC: MacFarland Publishers.

Jason Boardman was one of a handful of scholars invited to represent NICHD (one of the National Institutes of Health) in a welcome meeting with Dr. Alan Guttmacher, its new director.

Jenny Vermilya's and Leslie Irvine's research on gender and veterinary medicine was summarized in the most recent issue of Contexts (see contexts.org).

Joanne Belknap was recently interviewed for an article in Glamour magazine.

On Wednesday, Mike Radelet was a guest on the Ali Velshi Show on CNN. Read a transcript here .

Patti Adler's major award from SSSI (see last week's kudos) was featured in the Faculty and Staff Newsletter.

Congratulations to Liam Downey, who has had a very productive summer. In July, a book review he wrote on Rick Grannis' book "From the Ground Up" appeared in the American Journal of Sociology; in June, he had an article appear in Organization & Environment; and a couple of weeks ago, an article he co-authored was the lead article in The American Sociological Review. He also found out a few weeks ago that his NIH student loan repayment award has been extended for two years. This is a highly competitive award that pays for a significant chunk of his student loans. The abstracts for his articles and award proposal are listed below.
Downey, Liam and Susan Strife. 2010. "Inequality, Democracy, and the Environment." Organization & Environment: 23(2): 155-188.
ABSTRACT:
This article sets forth a new theoretical model that holds that local, regional, and global environmental crises are to a significant degree the product of organizational, institutional, and network-based inequality, which provide economic, political, military, and ideological elites with the means to create and control organizational and network-based mechanisms through which they (a) monopolize decision-making power; (b) shift environmental and non-environmental costs onto others; (c) shape individuals' knowledge, attitudes, values, beliefs, and behavior; and (d) frame what is and is not considered to be good for the environment. These undemocratic mechanisms produce severe environmental harm because they provide elites with the means to achieve goals that are often environmentally destructive and because they are sometimes environmentally destructive in and of themselves, as is the case with military power. After situating their study in the broader literature, the authors describe their theoretical model in detail and present three case studies that identify some of the most important mechanisms through which elites exert power and harm the environment.

Grant, Don, Mary Nell Trautner, Liam Downey, and Lisa Thiebaud. 2010, "Bringing the Polluters Back In: Environmental Inequality and the Organization of Chemical Production." The American Sociological Review: 75(4): 479-504.
ABSTRACT:
Environmental justice scholars have suggested that because chemical plants and other hazardous facilities emit more pollutants where they face the least resistance, disadvantaged communities face a special health risk. In trying to determine whether race or income has the bigger impact on a neighborhood's exposure to pollution, however, scholars tend to overlook the facilities themselves and the effect of their characteristics on emissions. In particular, how do the characteristics of facilities and their surrounding communities jointly shape pollution outcomes? We propose a new line of environmental justice research that focuses on facilities and how their features combine with communities' features to create dangerous emissions. Using novel fuzzy-set analysis techniques and the EPA's newly developed Risk-Screening Environmental Indicators, we test the influence of facility and community factors on chemical plants' health-threatening emissions. Contrary to the idea that community characteristics have singular, linear effects, findings show that facility and community factors combine in a variety of ways to produce risky emissions. We speculate that as chemical firms experiment with different ways of producing goods and externalizing pollution costs, new ''recipes of risk'' are likely to emerge. The question, then, will no longer be whether race or income matters most, but in which of these recipes do they matter and how.

Downey, Liam (PI). "Exploring Micro-level Sources of Environmental Inequality." NIH Health Disparities Research Loan Repayment Program.
SUMMARY:
This study seeks to address several significant gaps in the environmental inequality and racial health disparities literatures by merging individual-level socioeconomic, health, and residential mobility data from the nationally representative Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) with neighborhood-level demographic data from the U.S. Census and neighborhood-level environmental hazard data derived from the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) and Risk-Screening Environmental Indicators project (RSEI). The data cover the entire continental U.S. from 1987-2007, allowing us to examine race and class differences in mobility into and out of polluted neighborhoods, race and class differences in susceptibility to neighborhood industrial pollution, and the effect of long-term air pollutant exposure on health and racial disparities in health for a variety of air pollutants and health outcomes.

Week of August 20, 2010

Bob Regoli has been invited to prepare the 9th edition of his book, Delinquency in Society, and, the 2nd edition of his text, Criminal Justice: The Essentials.

Mike Radelet is featured in the September issue of Playboy Magazine. While Radelet had never heard of the publication, his wife assured him that it is widely circulated among people who like to read their excellent articles. Radelet's contribution is about the gas chamber.

Rick Rogers, Bethany Everett, Jarron Saint Onge, and Patrick Krueger published “Social, Behavioral, and Biological Factors, and Sex Differences in Mortality,” in Demography 47(3):555-578.
ABSTRACT:
Few studies have examined whether sex differences in mortality are associated with different distributions of risk factors or result from the unique relationships between risk factors and mortality for men and women. We extend previous research by systematically testing a variety of factors, including health behaviors, social ties, socioeconomic status, and biological indicators of health. We employ the National Health and Nutritional Examination Survey III Linked Mortality File and use Cox proportional hazards models to examine sex differences in adult mortality in the United States. Our findings document that social and behavioral characteristics are key factors related to the sex gap in mortality. Once we control for women’s lower levels of marriage, poverty, and exercise, the sex gap in mortality widens; and once we control for women’s greater propensity to visit with friends and relatives, attend religious services, and abstain from smoking, the sex gap in mortality narrows. Biological factors—including indicators of inflammation and cardiovascular risk—also inform sex differences in mortality. Nevertheless, persistent sex differences in mortality remain: compared with women, men have 30% to 83% higher risks of death over the follow-up period, depending on the covariates included in the model. Although the prevalence of risk factors differs by sex, the impact of those risk factors on mortality is similar for men and women.

Congratulations to Patrick O'Brien, who has been elected to the American Sociological Association Student Forum Advisory Board, created by the ASA Council in August of 1998. The goals of the Advisory Board are to enhance the level of attentiveness and engagement of students within the Association. The Student Forum Advisory Board (SFAB) is composed of 10 people elected by student members of the association. Patrick was voted in at ASA 2010 as the SFAB Treasurer and will serve a 3-year term on the board. Elected members of the ASA Student Forum Advisory Board are responsible for creating and presiding over ASA workshops, panels, and paper sessions, attending SFAB business meetings and board meetings, and selecting and awarding the SFAB student travel grants and the Graduate Paper Award.

Wee-Kiat Lim presented his paper, "Information Technology as Nascent Social Institution: Hints of a Weberian View," at the ASA meeting in Atlanta last week and presided over a roundtable.

Wade Smith presented "Naturalizing the Gender Integrated Force: Women, Narrative, and the United States Army" at the ASA meeting.

At the same conference, Nnenia Campbell presented "Coil Conscious: African American Women’s Development of Internet-Based Alternative Hair Communities."

Tracy Kirkland presented two papers at the ASA, "Toward Improved Understanding of Food Security: A Methodological Examination Based in Rural South Africa" (with Rob Kemp, Lori Hunter, and Wayne Twine) and "Symbolic Landscapes and Local Perception of Solar Energy Development in the San Luis Valley of Colorado" (with Lori Hunter, Kathleen Tierney, and Barbara Farhar).

Christie Sennott presented her coauthored study, “Mothers on the Market: Assessing the Impact of Motherhood on Partner Selection and Union Dissolution,” at the Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP) meeting in Atlanta and also attended ASA in her capacity as an officer of the Sociologists' AIDS Network.

Stefanie Mollborn presented her work coauthored with Paula Fomby and Jeff Dennis, "Who Matters for Children’s Early Development? Race/Ethnicity and Extended Household Structures,” at the ASA and presided over a social psychology regular session.

Zek Valkyrie presented "Gender Authenticity in MMORPGs: Heralding Solid-to-Virtual World Consistency" at the ASA meeting.

Other people listed as participants on the ASA program were: Patti Adler, Kari Alexander, Duke Austin, Jennifer Bair, Jason Boardman, Eric Bonds, Liam Downey, Marc Eaton, Bethany Everett, Lori Hunter, Leslie Irvine, Kristina Kahl, Rob Kemp, Kelly Knight, Sanyu Mojola, Fred Pampel, Isaac Reed, Christina Sue, Kathleen Tierney, Amy Wilkins, and Tamara Williams.

Other participants listed for SSSP were: Patrick O'Brien.

Finally, we have a set of updates on the terrific and wide-ranging work Kathleen Tierney has been doing lately:
Kathleen Tierney served as a faculty member at the Summer Institute for Advanced Study on Disaster and Risk, which was held at Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China, Aug., 2-13. Her lectures focused on risk and hazard analysis; new developments in research on disasters; and the causes and impacts of Hurricane Katrina.
Kathleen was a panelist at an “author meets critics” session on the book Catastrophe in the Making: The Engineering of Katrina and the Disasters of Tomorrow, jointly sponsored by the American Sociological Association and the Rural Sociological Society, at the American Sociological Association’s annual meeting in Atlanta, Aug. 14.
Kathleen moderated and served as a panelist for a special session entitled “Climate Change and the Interdisciplinary Sociologist: Working across Boundaries on the Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change” at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association in Atlanta, Aug. 16.
Kathleen has been appointed to the Steering Committee for the new American Sociological Association Task Force on Sociology and Global Climate Change, which held its first meeting at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association in Atlanta.
Kathleen was featured in a August 13 National Public Radio story entitled “China, Pakistan Floods: Preventable Disasters?”
Kathleen recently finished her work on the National Academy of Sciences “America’s Climate Choices” project, where she was a member of the panel on “Informing Effective Decisions and Actions Related to Climate Change.” The panel’s report, “Informing an Effective Response to Climate Change” is now available from the National Academies Press.

Week of August 6, 2010

Kudos to Mike Radelet, whose research was reported on the main CU News site: Study of Death Penalty in North Carolina Shows That 'Race Matters' A new study examining death sentences in North Carolina over a 28-year period ending in 2007 shows that among similar homicides, the odds of a death sentence for those who are suspected of killing whites are approximately three times higher than the odds of a death sentence for those suspected of killing blacks. The study, to be published in The North Carolina Law Review next year, was conducted by Michael Radelet, a sociology professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and Glenn Pierce, a research scientist in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Northeastern University in Boston. It is the most comprehensive study of the modern administration of the death penalty in North Carolina to date. You may read more here.

And congratulations to Christie Sennott, who was married last weekend!

Week of July 30, 2010

Lots of wedding bells are ringing in our department! Congratulations to Devon Thacker on her recent marriage, and to Ali Jordan on hers. And congratulations to Colter Ellis and Kelly Knight on their marriage.

We also have some good work-related news. Kudos to Amy Wilkins, who recently traveled to England to give the plenary talk (on race, class, gender, and the transition to adulthood) at the Center for Contemporary Religion's conference on Young People and the Cultural Performance of Belief at St Catherine's College, Oxford University.

Week of July 16, 2010

Tim Wadsworth's research on immigration and crime was mentioned in the latest ASA Footnotes, which can be found here.

Kudos to Adelle Monteblanco and Wee Kiat Lim for their recent presentation at the International Research Committee on Disasters Researchers Meeting in Broomfield. The presentation was titled, "Keeping Health Disparity in Check During Disaster: An Exploratory Study on Disaster Preparedness in Reproductive Health Clinics."

Congratulations to Jo Belknap and Courtney McDonald on their new publication: Joanne Belknap and Courtney McDonald. 2010. “Judges’ Attitudes about and Experiences with Sentencing Circles in Intimate-Partner Abuse Cases.” Canadian Journal of Criminology & Criminal Justice, 52(4):369-395.
ABSTRACT:
During the 1980s and 1990s, two important changes that occurred in criminal processing were seemingly at odds for intimate partner abuse cases. First was the move to treat gendered violence cases more seriously and punitively. Second was the design and implementation of restorative justice practices, which became mandated for consideration in First Nation cases in R. v. Gladue in 1999. There has also been an ongoing debate globally as to whether restorative justice is appropriate in gendered violence cases. Additionally, some First Nation scholars worry that restorative justice is simply another medium to control and punish Aboriginal people. This study draws on interviews with 27 judges in a large Western province, a year before the Gladue decision, regarding their attitudes about and experiences with sentencing circles in intimate partner abuse cases. The findings suggest cautious judicial support tempered by serious concerns. Patrick O’Brien has been selected as the 2010 graduate student paper competition winner of SSSP’s Drinking and Drugs Division for his article, “"Masculinized Femininity: College Women Drink Like Men, Act Like Ladies." In this paper Patrick examines the male-dominated college drinking culture and the gendered adaptations women make within this scene. He finds that in order to have a “successful” social life, and to interact and connect with men, women must traverse a subculture that values male drinking patterns, yet at the same time, they must contend with the omnipresent double standard. They therefore learn to negotiate ways to limit their drinking, displays of drunkenness, and the consequences of their drinking, or else they face socially patterned censure from both their male and female peers. Patrick’s award will be presented at the Drinking and Drugs reception in Atlanta. Great job, Patrick!

Kudos to Bob Regoli, whose paper with friends, "Racial Bias in Baseball Card Collecting Revisited," has been accepted for publication in The Social Science Journal. ABSTRACT: Although research examining the role of racial bias in the secondary sports card market has been an emerging area of inquiry, empirical knowledge on the question: “Does the race of the player on a sports card affect the value of the card?” remains inconclusive. This paper revisits one of the first studies on this topic. Data were derived for 66 Black, White, and Latino members of the National Baseball Hall of Fame who were elected by a vote of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America. Data for each player’s race, career performance statistics, rookie card price, and card availability were obtained from secondary sources. Findings indicate that card availability and, to a lesser extent, player performance is the most important factor affecting the value of a player’s card, while importantly, a player’s race is not a significant contributor to card value. Suggestions for future research are discussed.

Bob also has another paper with colleagues, "Investigating Customer Racial Discrimination in the Secondary Baseball Card Market," that has been accepted for publication in Sociological Inquiry.
ABSTRACT:
While a growing body of literature in a variety of disciplines has appeared over the last 20 years examining customer racial bias in the secondary sports card market, consensus on the matter has yet to emerge. In this paper, we explore the more subtle ways that a player’s race/ethnicity may affect the value of his sports card including a player’s skin tone (light- to dark-skinned). Data were obtained for 383 Black, Latino, and White baseball players who had received at least one vote for induction into Major League Baseball’s Hall of Fame including their career performance statistics, rookie card price, card availability, Hall of Fame status, and skin tone. Findings indicate that card availability is the primary determinant of card value while a player’s skin tone has no direct effect. Subsequent analysis demonstrates that a player’s race (White/non-White) rather than skin tone did have an effect as it interacts with Hall of Fame status to influence his rookie card price.

Bob Regoli is on a roll! His paper with colleagues, "The Role of Race in Football Card Prices," has been published in the Social Science Quarterly, 91: 129-142 (2010).
ABSTRACT:
While others have examined the impact of race and the value of baseball cards, few researchers have investigated the role of race on football card values. Data were derived from 1,279 black and white football players who were selected to participate in at least one Pro Bowl and who started their careers between 1946, the year professional football in the United States became racially integrated when Kenny Washington played in a game for the Los Angeles Rams, and 1988, the last year of Topps' monopoly in the football card market. Data for each player's race, value of their rookie card, card availability, card vintage, performance, Hall of Fame status, and position were obtained. When controlling for other factors, race has no effect on the value of players' rookie cards, whereas card vintage exerted the most influence on the value of players' cards. Football card values are largely driven by objective markers, supporting the conclusion that the market performs pretty much as expected for a collector market. Speculations on the absence of race effect, limitations related to the study, and suggestions for future research are offered.

Week of July 2, 2010

Joanne Belknap, along with co-authors, Anne P. DePrince, Jennifer S. Labus, Susan E. Buckingham, and Angela R. Gover had their paper, “The Impact of Victim-Focused Outreach on Criminal Legal System Outcomes following Police-Reported Intimate Partner Abuse,” accepted in the journal Violence Against Women.

Stefanie Mollborn's research was discussed and her interview quoted in the March 26 issue of CQ (Congressional Quarterly) Researcher, which focused on teen pregnancy. Link

And now for the icing on the cake: This week three Ph.D. students in our department successfully defended their dissertations. Congratulations to each of you!

Dawn Stanley successfully defended her dissertation on Tuesday, Jun 29. The title of her dissertation is “Becoming Psychic: Embodying Incorporeal Experience.”
Abstract:
Drawing on fieldwork, content analysis, and informal interviews, this dissertation analyzes classes at the Psychic Abilities Training and Healing Center, or PATHC. These classes led students to reframe their understandings of their own bodies, abilities, and environment. Building on the work of Merleau-Ponty, the author explains how classes taught a phenomenology of incorporeal experience that encouraged students to view themselves as having multiple bodies housed near/within the physical body and to perceive a multitude of (mostly) helpful spirit beings in their immediate environment. This phenomenology identified specific attributes to each of the bodies and spirits students were likely to encounter, providing students with “ground rules” and expectations for interactions with incorporeal beings. This view of the world as filled with spirits is a “re-enchantment” of the secular world that seeks to co-exist with, rather than replace, secular beliefs. PATHC provides an example of how an alternative discourse legitimizes itself and accommodates dominant secular materialism, even as it challenges basic assumptions of secular society.

Peter Lovegrove successfully defended his dissertation on June 30. Title: "Explaining Discontinuous Cross-Generational Patterns of Delinquency."
Abstract:
The main aims of this study were as follows:
1) Define intergenerational discontinuity and document the rate at which it occurs in the Rochester Intergenerational Study (RIGS);
2) Test for differences between instances of discontinuity and cases where cross-generational patterns of delinquency were more continuous; and
3) Test a multivariate path model explaining intergenerational discontinuity of delinquency. This study used data from the Rochester Intergenerational Study – a prospective, multigenerational study of delinquency. Latent growth curve models were used to divide parents into categories of ‗offenders‘ and ‗non-offenders,‘ as well as to identify which of the children were ‗non-delinquent‘ and ‗delinquent.‘ Parents‘ (G2) delinquency was measured at ages 14.5 through 18.5 using responses to a self-reported general delinquency index, while children‘s (G3) delinquency was measured using mothers‘ reports on child externalizing behaviors during ages 8-11. In this study, 32% of children born to delinquent parents were in the externalizing trajectory with the lowest level of problem behaviors. This group, according to definitions established at the outset of the study, was composed of children whose low levels of externalizing behaviors constituted instances of intergenerational discontinuity of delinquency. Next, t-tests for mean differences between the discontinuity and non-discontinuity group were used to identify whether variables associated with G2‘s adolescent prosocial bonds, G2‘s adult violent behavior and drug use, G2 parenting, and other caregivers‘ (OCG) antisocial behavior and parenting were significantly associated with G3‘s membership in the discontinuity group. G3s in the discontinuity group were significantly less likely to have been born when G2 was a teenager, and less likely to have been born to a G2 whose parents (G1) reported having a poverty-level income at the beginning of the Rochester Youth Development Study. The pattern of G2‘s offending during adolescence was not significantly related to G3‘s membership in the discontinuity group. No measures of G2 adolescent prosocial bonds, such as commitment to school and attachment to parents, were significantly associated with G3‘s membership in the discontinuity group. The non-association of these factors with G3‘s membership in the discontinuity group was robust across multiple G2 ages. Lower levels of parenting stress for G2s were significantly associated with G3‘s membership in the discontinuity group, as was G2‘s higher supervision of G3, higher levels of G2-G3 attachment, and more consistent discipline from G2. Further, G3s in the discontinuity groups had OCGs who provided significantly more supervision and consistent discipline, and had OCGs with significantly higher levels of attachment to G3. G3s were more likely to be in the discontinuity group when OCG had lower levels of parenting stress, as was the case for G2. Discontinuity was significantly associated with lower levels of OCG violent behavior, lower levels of OCG financial stress, and lower levels of OCG depression. Bivariate by-gender analyses demonstrated that, when G2 was female, more G2-related adult factors were associated with the measure of discontinuity used in the study. When G2 was male, more OCG-related factors than G2 adult-related factors were significant.
Lastly, the quality of fit of a multivariate path model to RIGS data was examined. The model tested included the following measures: G2‘s adolescent prosocial bonds, G2 early adult violence and drug use, OCG violence and drug use, G2 depression, OCG depression, G2‘s attachment to G3, OCG attachment to G3, and the posterior probability that G3 was a member of the discontinuity group. In the model with G2 males and females combined, analyses observed a pathway linking adolescent G2 factors with the likelihood of intergenerational discontinuity. G2‘s higher commitment to school in adolescence was significantly associated with lower depression, and lower levels of depression were significantly associated with stronger levels of attachment to G3. In turn, stronger levels of attachment were significantly associated with the likelihood of G3‘s membership in the discontinuity group. Another significant pathway was observed for OCG, such that higher levels of depression significantly reduced OCG‘s attachment to G3, which significantly reduced the likelihood of G3‘s membership in the discontinuity category. In addition to this indirect relationship, higher levels of depression in OCG significantly and directly reduced the likelihood of G3‘s membership in the discontinuity group. In addition, lower levels of OCG violence and drug use shared a significant direct association with the likelihood of G3‘s membership in the discontinuity group. The model observed that G2 and G3 attachment were significantly and positively correlated with one another. Results from the gender-specific SEM analyses showed that OCG-related factors were much stronger components of the process of discontinuity when G2 was male, while OCG factors did not make a substantial contribution to discontinuity when G2 was female. Most importantly, whereas G2 depression and attachment to G3 did not play especially important roles in determining discontinuity when G2 was male, G2 depression and attachment were indeed significant components of the process of discontinuity when G2 was female.

Elaine De Castro McFarland successfully defended her dissertation this morning. Title: "Sociodemographic and Cultural Characteristics of Acupuncture, Medical, and Nurse Practitioner Students."
Abstract:
The last half of the 20th century witnessed dramatic changes in the landscape of American healthcare, including the rise of complementary and alternative medicine and the creation of new careers in Western medicine. Americans' use of acupuncture in particular has grown steadily in the past three decades. Despite these facts, there has been no sociological investigation of acupuncture students, and little to no recent sociological work on students of Western medicine. This dissertation presents findings from a self-administered survey instrument which was offered to a sample of acupuncture (n=98), medical (n=167), and nurse practitioner (n=73) students in a metropolitan area of a Rocky Mountain state. Results from bivariate and multivariate analyses show significant differences in sociodemographics and cultural beliefs among the three groups. These results, along with testimonials from the students, show that the decision to embark on a particular type of healthcare career is dependent upon both social advantage and personal preferences which follow from cultural values. By providing new information on acupuncture students and updated information on medical and nurse practitioner students, this work integrates classic medical sociology, Inglehart's findings on postmaterialism, and Ray and Anderson's work on Cultural Creatives. This dissertation may be valuable not only to sociology, but also to professionals in healthcare and healthcare education.

Week of June 25, 2010

Congratulations to Zek Valkyrie, who successfully defended his dissertation proposal "Fantastic Realities: Solid and Virtual Resonance in MMORPGs." Zek is now A.B.D.

Tim Wadsworth is in Newsweek magazine for his research on how immigration decreases crime rates! See the article.

And finally, congratulations to Jeff Dennis, who successfully defended his dissertation, titled "Birth Weight in the United States: Disparities by Race/Ethnicity and Maternal Age."

Week of June 11, 2010

Angel Hoekstra has been invited to give a full day faculty workshop, "Effective Pedagogical Approaches to Clicker Use in Higher Education," at Midwestern University in Glendale, Arizona in August. At the workshop, Angel will present information on approaches to clicker use most beneficial to teaching and learning, as well as discuss the ways that clicker data can be used to support research in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.

Lori Hunter was recently elected to the Executive Council of the ASA’s Environment and Technology section as Policy and Research Chair.

Lori also has a new publication in print: Lori M. Hunter, Susie Strife, and Wayne Twine. 2010. “ Environmental Perceptions of Rural South African Residents: The Complex Nature of Environmental Concern.” Society and Natural Resources. 23(6): 525–541.
ABSTRACT:
The state of the local environment shapes the well-being of millions of rural residents in developing nations. Still, we know little of these individuals’ environmental perceptions. This study analyzes survey data collected in an impoverished, rural region in northeast South Africa, to understand the factors that shape concern with local environmental issues. We use the ‘‘post-materialist thesis’’ to explore the different explanations for environmental concern in less developed regions of the world, with results revealing the importance of both cultural and physical context. In particular, gendered interaction with natural resources shapes perceptions, as does the local setting. Both theoretical and policy implications are discussed.

Jason Boardman was the organizer for a recent conference held at CU. The conference, Integrating Genetics and the Social Sciences (http://www.colorado.edu/ibs/CUPC/conferences/IGSS_2010/), successfully brought together researchers from around the country to discuss this cutting-edge topic.

Kathleen Tierney's CNN editorial comparing the Hurricane Katrina and Haiti earthquake disasters was featured in the most recent issue of the ASA journal Contexts (www.contexts.org).

Stef Mollborn is speechlessly grateful to have completed the process of publishing her dissertation as a series of articles. Mollborn, Stefanie. 2010. "Exploring Variation in Teenage Mothers’ and Fathers’ Educational Attainment." Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, online ahead of print
. ABSTRACT:
A substantial body of research has compared educational outcomes of teenage parents with those of their childless peers, but less attention has gone to variations among teenage parents. Additionally, gender differences in teenage parents’ educational outcomes have rarely been studied. Characteristics associated with high school graduation by age 26 were assessed among 317 teenage mothers and fathers who participated in the 1988–2000 National Education Longitudinal Study. Logistic regression models included socioeconomic and educational characteristics, gender, parenting responsibilities and resources, and gender interactions. Married or cohabiting teenage parents living with no or one parent had 73% lower odds of graduation than single respondents living with two parents. Gender moderated the relationships between two parenting responsibilities and the likelihood of graduation: Fathers working at least half-time were less likely than nonworking fathers to graduate, and fathers who were primary caregivers had substantially elevated odds of graduating, but no similar relationships were seen among mothers. Sixty-one percent of fathers who worked but were not primary caregivers were predicted to graduate by age 26, compared with 97% of those who were nonworking primary caregivers. Traditional parenting norms, according to which mothers are primary caregivers and fathers are breadwinners, do not appear to be associated with improved odds of graduating. Policies and interventions aimed at helping teenage parents graduate may be most eff ective if they target both genders, but some are likely to be more beneficial for one gender than the other.

Week of May 28, 2010

Jill Williams has been invited to give a plenary talk, "Power and politics: the discourse on women's empowerment in 'developing countries'," at the Community of Sudanese American Women/Men (CSAW) Community Outreach Conference. The conference is this Friday and Saturday at the Broker Inn.

Marc Eaton has won the Blumer Award from the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction for his paper, "The Development and Enactment of Activist Identities among Moveon.org Members." The committee found it "an excellent exploration of how and why people became involved in MoveOn in different ways, linking this to their biographies and previous moral/political selves. As such, the committee noted that the paper has a strong potential for adding to our knowledge of social movements, interaction, identity, and political engagement more generally, and is an impressive contribution to the symbolic interactionist literature."

Lori Hunter's environmentally friendly remodel of her downtown Boulder home was featured in a Daily Camera article. You can read it at here.

Tim Wadsworth's research on immigration decreasing crime has been featured quite a bit in the media recently. This week he was on AM 760 (the David Sirota show) discussing his research.

Katherine Martinez's paper, "Consuming the Body: The Cultural Politics of Cannibalism," has been awarded the 2010 Virginia Currey Award for Best Student Paper of the Southwestern Women's and Gender Studies Association.

Jason Boardman and Jason Fletcher (Public Health, Yale) are hosting a 2 day conference here at CU entitled Integrating Genetics and the Social Sciences. The conference is bringing together economists, sociologists, demographers, political scientists, and public health researchers to discuss the state of the gene-environment interplay field and to present original findings from current studies.This current conference is being funded by the Population Association of America, and it will continue for at least the next two years because of additional funding from NIH/NICHD (R13, Boardman). For more information about the conference, please visit this link.

Fred Pampel's recent NSF grant, "Worldwide Patterns and Change in Gender Egalitarianism," was included in the most recent edition of the American Sociological Association's Footnotes.

Week of May 21, 2010

Kudos to Christine Bevc for her forthcoming article, entitled "Emotional Dimensions of Conducting Research in Disaster Settings: A Note on Social Psychological Considerations", that has been scheduled for the October 2010 issue of The Journal of Applied Social Science. This article discusses the emotional dimensions of conducting disaster research using classic and contemporary social psychological theories to explore how researchers deal with and/or negotiate the potential role conflict and the emotional dimensions of their fieldwork. This paper was originally developed for Leslie Irvine's social psychology seminar (SOCY 5531) and evolved into the final manuscript based on the additional feedback and comments from Kathleen Tierney, CU alum Lori Peek, and other disaster researchers who have attended the annual Hazards Research and Applications Workshop sponsored by the Natural Hazards Center.

Lori Hunter has a new review article in print: Robert A. McLeman and Lori M. Hunter. 2010. “Migration in the context of vulnerability and adaptation to climate change: insights from analogues.” Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change. Volume 1 Issue 2 (March/April).
ABSTRACT:
Migration is one of the variety of ways by which human populations adapt to environmental changes. The study of migration in the context of anthropogenic climate change is often approached using the concept of vulnerability and its key functional elements: exposure, system sensitivity, and adaptive capacity. This article explores the interaction of climate change and vulnerability through review of case studies of dry-season migration in the West African Sahel, hurricane-related population displacements in the Caribbean basin, winter migration of ‘snowbirds’ to the US Sun-belt, and 1930s drought migration on the North American Great Plains. These examples are then used as analogues for identifying general causal, temporal, and spatial dimensions of climate migration, along with potential considerations for policy-making and future research needs.

Congratulations to Ali Jordan, who has recently published her first sole-authored article in the Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management: Jordan, Alexandra E. (2010) "Collaborative Relationships Resulting from the Urban Area Security Initiative," Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management: Vol. 7 : Iss. 1, Article 38. This article uses in-depth qualitative interviews from five U.S. cities to examine the development of regional governance structures in response to the Urban Area Security Initiative (UASI)—a federal program providing “high-threat, high-density” urban areas with annual funding assistance to strengthen preparedness and respond capabilities for acts of terrorism and other disasters.

And congratulations to Colter Ellis, who has been invited to be a keynote speaker at the Duke Women’s Studies Program colloquium on “New Voices in Animal Studies” in March, 2011. The theme of the colloquium is the intersection between Animal Studies and Feminist Studies. Donna Haraway has been invited to respond to Colter’s presentation.

Week of April 30, 2010

Jason Boardman, Casey Blalock, and Fred Pampel have an article in the most recent issue of the Journal of Health & Social Behavior: Boardman, Jason D., Casey L. Blalock, and Fred C. Pampel. 2010. “Trends in the genetic influences on smoking.” Journal of Health & Social Behavior, 51(1):108-123. Link.
ABSTRACT: Using twin pairs from the National Survey of Midlife Development in the United States, we estimate that 35 percent of the variance in regular smoking is due to additive genetic influences. When we disaggregate the sample by birth cohort we witness strong genetic influences on smoking for those born in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1950s, but negligible influences for those born in the 1940s and 1960s. We show that the timing of the first Surgeon General’s Report coincides with an increase in the genetic influences on regular smoking, but subsequent legislation prohibiting smoking in public places has significantly reduced these influences. These results are in line with existing gene-environment interaction theory, and we argue that variation in genetic influences across cohorts makes it difficult and potentially misleading to estimate genetic effects on health behaviors from data obtained from a single point in time.

Stefanie Mollborn has a new publication in print: Mollborn, Stefanie. 2010. "Predictors and Consequences of Adolescents' Norms against Teenage Pregnancy." Sociological Quarterly 51:303-328. Link.
ABSTRACT:
African American and Latino teenagers and communities are frequently assumed to have weaker norms against teenage pregnancy than whites. Despite their importance, adolescents' norms about teenage pregnancy have not been measured or their correlates and consequences documented. This study examines individual-level and contextual variation in adolescents' embarrassment at the prospect of a teenage pregnancy and its relationship with subsequent teenage pregnancy. Descriptive analyses find that norms vary by gender and individual- and neighborhood-level race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status (SES). In multivariate analyses, neighborhood-level racial/ethnic associations with embarrassment are explained by neighborhood-level SES. Embarrassment is associated with a lower likelihood of subsequent teenage pregnancy but does not mediate racial, ethnic, or socioeconomic influences, underscoring the importance of both norms and structural factors for understanding teenage fertility.

Jenn Bair recently gave two talks in Vienna, Austria. She presented a lecture entitled “Revisiting Local Clusters in Global Chains” as part of the weekly colloquium series organized by the International Development Research Project at the University of Vienna. She also led an interdisciplinary workshop on conducting global value chain research with scholars and development practitioners. This event was jointly sponsored by the Mattersburg Circle for Development Policies at Austrian Universities and the Forschungs- und Beratungsstelle Arbeitswelt (Working Life Research Center) in Vienna.

After getting stuck in the European ash cloud for nearly a week, Jenn managed to make it back to the U.S. in time for the 34th annual Political Economy of the World-Systems Conference at Florida Atlantic University this past weekend. She presented a paper, co-authored with Phil Hough, entitled “The Political Economy of Dispossession: Land Struggle and Agrarian Reform in Mexico and Colombia.” Welcome back, Jenn!

Last week, Jenn also had a new publication appear. A French translation of the introductory chapter from her edited book, Frontiers of Global Commodity Chain Research, was published in the French management journal, Revue de Gestion Francaise (No. 201, pp. 103-120).

Congratulations to Leslie Irvine, who received a LEAP Associate Professor Growth grant for $3100 to support her research on homeless people who have pets.

Colter Ellis just had an article accepted for publication : Elizabeth Cherry, Colter Ellis, and Michaela DeSoucey. Forthcoming. “Food for Thought, Thought for Food: Consumption, Identity, and Ethnography.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography.
ABSTRACT:
Movements associated with lifestyle and consumption politics have gained increasing visibility in society and in sociological research, but our methodological insights for studying these issues have lagged behind. How might the lifestyles and consumption practices of researchers themselves impact data collection, and how might these movements affect researchers? We offer a collaborative, reflexive analysis of our experiences conducting fieldwork on three different consumption movements centered on food production. Building upon feminist and symbolic interactionist methodological literature, we show how our own “consumption identities” impacted our data collection, analyses, and written work. We also discuss how conducting research on consumption and lifestyle movements may also impact researchers’ own identities and practices. We conclude by discussing how our process of “collaborative reflexivity” brings new insight into feminist methodological concerns for reflexivity.

Week of April 16, 2010

Congratulations to Dr. Courtney McDonald, who successfully defended her dissertation, "A Qualitative Study of the Experiences of Woman-to-Woman Intimate Partner Abuse," earlier this week.

And kudos to soon-to-be Dr. Peter Lovegrove, who has accepted a postdoctoral fellow position at the University of Virginia. Peter will be working with Professor Patrick Tolan, Director of the Center for Positive Youth Development at the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. The Center is relatively new, established last summer using a $4 million grant from UVA. Peter will help design and evaluate school- and community-based programs that improve youth health, well-being, civic engagement and academic achievement. The Center’s main focus is on helping young people between the ages of 12 and 18 avoid risky behavior during adolescence. Additionally, Peter will work on projects associated with the Virginia Youth Violence Project and the Chicago Center for Youth Violence Prevention, and will continue to work with the Rochester Intergenerational Study.

Tim Wadsworth's Daily Camera writeup of his research on immigration and crime is currently the most read article on the newspaper's website. You can read here.

May 10, 2010

The department's commencement ceremony was lovely and very well organized--a huge thank-you to organizer Patti Adler and to our office staff Janie, Angela, and Rebekah for all their amazing efforts! Our staff do so much to keep the department running, so kudos to them for all their work throughout the year.

Congratulations to new Ph.D. Duke Austin, who has just accepted a Postdoctoral Associate position working with Elijah Anderson at Yale University. Duke met Prof. Anderson when Anderson came to speak at CU two weeks ago. That weekend, Prof. Anderson looked up Duke's CV online, then called Duke the following Monday to offer him the position. Prof. Anderson will serve as Duke's mentor in ethnographic methods and the study of race relations. In that capacity, Duke will help Prof. Anderson put the finishing touches on his forthcoming book and attend Prof. Anderson's classes. In addition, Duke will organize a distinguished speakers series for the Yale campus and work with a current graduate student to facilitate a conference for ethnographers. Prof. Anderson also hopes to work with Duke and an incoming graduate student to conduct new research on contemporary race relations in the U.S. South. Finally, Duke will be given ample opportunity to pursue his own research endeavors.

Congratulations to the winners of departmental awards, presented at the department party last Friday! Please let me know if I've forgotten anyone.
Ralph and Barbara Dakin Award: Devon Thacker
Betsy Moen Award: Leith Lombas
Graduate Student Paper Award: Patrick O'Brien
Dissertation Expense Award: Devon Thacker
Faculty Mentor of the Year Award: Joanne Belknap

Stef Mollborn and Peter Lovegrove have published a new article. Mollborn, Stefanie and Peter Lovegrove. 2010. “How Teenage Fathers Matter for Children: Evidence from the ECLS-B.” Journal of Family Issues. Published online, print edition forthcoming.
ABSTRACT: Much is known about how having a teenage mother influences children’s outcomes, but the relationship between teenage fatherhood and children’s health and development is less well documented. Using the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study–Birth Cohort, the authors investigated how teenage fathers matter for children. They expected teenage fathers’ influence on children to differ from adult fathers’ in three domains: the household context, the father–mother relationship, and the father–child relationship. Teenage fathers were less often married and more often cohabiting or nonresident, and their children experienced a variety of social disadvantages in their household contexts. The quality of the father–child relationship did not often differ between adolescent and adult fathers. Fathers’ marital status and children’s household contexts each fully explained the negative relationship between having a teen father and children’s cognitive and behavior scores at age 2. These findings suggest that policy interventions could possibly reduce these children’s developmental gaps in the critical preschool years.

Finally, Rebekah would like to compliment our new copy machine, which in the last 2 weeks alone has printed exams for Lori Hunter’s 500-student class, several hundred exams for other instructors, and printed our 750 graduation programs in record time with no major problems and no jams. There haven’t been any major issues at all for this semester’s end. A well-running copier saves us all a lot of stress!

Week of April 23, 2010

Lori Hunter participated in The Rocky Mountain Series on Social Science and Global Change, held at CSU on Monday, April 19. The workshop, entitled “Consilience Among the Social Sciences in the Face of Global Climate Change,” represented the launch of an effort to (re)unify social science knowledge about climate change through discussion among its primary stakeholders. The workshop was attended by leading scholars from across the nation, and Lori was invited to offer an overview of Sociological contributions to climate change understanding and she participated in discussion regarding pathways to social science integration on climate.

Kudos to Rick Rogers for his two new publications:
Rogers, Richard G., Patrick M. Krueger, and Robert A. Hummer. 2010. “Religious Attendance and Cause-Specific Mortality in the United States.” Pp. 292-320 in Religion, Families, and Health: Population-Based Research in the United States, edited by Christopher G. Ellison and Robert A. Hummer. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Hummer, Robert A., Maureen R. Benjamins, Christopher G. Ellison, and Richard G. Rogers. 2010. “Religious Involvement and Mortality Risk among Pre-Retirement Aged U.S. Adults.” Pp. 273-291 in Religion, Families, and Health: Population-Based Research in the United States, edited by Christopher G. Ellison and Robert A. Hummer. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Congratulations to Bethany Everett, who was accepted into the Fenway Institute's Center for Population Research in LGBT Health Mentoring Program. She has been paired with mentor Bryn Austin from the Department of Society, Human Development, and Health at Harvard University. From their website: "Our mission is to link promising young scholars with the resources they need to improve the reach, quality and methodological rigor of their research and to prepare them for careers in LGBT health and population science. We aim to foster the growth and development of the next generation of scholars in this exciting, interdisciplinary field by providing opportunities for additional coursework, assistance with independent research, and faculty interaction."

Liam Downey's research on race-based environmental inequality was just cited in USA Today in a special Earth Day article.

Joanne Belknap was invited to present "The Intersections of Sexual Minority Status, Gender, Race and Abuse Histories Among Incarcerated Delinquent Youth," at the University of Georgia, April 16.

Week of April 16, 2010

Patrick O’Brien has been selected by The United Government of Graduate Students as a Top TA or GPTI for the 2009-2010 academic year. Each year, UGGS solicits nominations from all departments for top Teaching Assistants and Graduate Part-Time instructors, and Patrick was the nominee from the Department of Sociology. In giving this award, they especially commended him for his commitment, passion, innovation and professionalism in the classroom, which made him stand out among his peers.

Patrick is having a very good week. He also received the Graduate Student Paper Award from our department for his ethnographic research on gender and alcohol use among undergraduates. Rick will present him with this award at our end of year party, together with the next award.

Congratulations to Devon Thacker, who won the department's Out-of-Pocket Dissertation Expense award to help fund her dissertation work on mandatory arrest policies for intimate partner disputes.

With coauthor Paula Fomby, Christie Sennott and Stefanie Mollborn have had an article published in the most recent issue of Journal of Marriage and Family: Paula Fomby, Stefanie Mollborn, and Christie Sennott. "Race/Ethnic Differences in Effects of Family Instability on Adolescents' Risk Behavior."
ABSTRACT:
We used data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (N = 7,686) to determine whether racial and ethnic differences in socioeconomic stress and social protection explained group differences in the association between family structure instability and three risk behaviors for White, Black, and Mexican American adolescents: delinquent behavior, age at first nonmarital sex, and age at first nonmarital birth. The positive association between mothers' union transitions and each outcome for White adolescents was attenuated by social protection. The association of instability with age at first sex and first nonmarital birth was weaker for Black adolescents but not for Mexican American adolescents. The weaker association was explained by Black adolescents' more frequent exposure to socioeconomic stress in the context of union instability. Link to the article.

Undergraduate Chair Lori Hunter would like to thank the undergraduate student award committee for working well together in choosing our great Fisher and Downton recipients! The team was Sara Steen, Sanyu Mojola and Laura Patterson.

A description of this semester's large enrollment SOCY1001 course taught by Lori Hunter was the Daily Camera's cover story in an article on campus class sizes – and there’s a photo of Sarah Lake lecturing in Chem 140 on page 3. See the article here.

A big congratulations to Isaac Reed, who just signed a contract on his new book. University of Chicago Press will publish "Interpretation and Social Knowledge: On the Use of Theory in the Human Sciences." Isaac expects to finish revisions by July or August, and the book will come out in simultaneous paperback and hardback just before ASA 2011.

Congratulations to Wade Smith and Bob Regoli, whose paper, "A Comment on Consumer Discrimination of Basketball Card Collectors," has been accepted for publication in The Social Science Journal, official publication of the Western Social Science Association. The paper examines racial consumer discrimination in sport card collecting by offering a critical commentary on this growing body of literature. Specifically, by focusing on methodological shortfalls of a paper published in a recent issue of The Social Science Journal, Smith and his colleagues open the door to dialogue on the persistence of racist ideologies in sport. By assessing the methods and findings of this recent contribution, Smith and his associates shed light on some of the challenges inherent in this line of inquiry. The paper concludes with suggestions for future research that hold the potential of revealing the interconnectivity of race and sport through studies of consumer discrimination.

Finally, our department has been well represented in presentations at regional and national conferences this month. My apologies if I missed any recent conferences or participants--please let me know so I can put you in later this week.

Association of American Geographers: Liam Downey

Midwest Sociological Society: Shelli Walker, Dustin Farivar, Jessa Kumar, Lindsey Sadler, Miranda Bender, Morgan Embleton, and Kori Sparks

Pacific Sociological Association: Glenda Walden, Wee Kiat Lim, Katherine Martinez, Amy Wilkins, Marshall Smith, Colleen Hackett, Christina Sue, Sanyu Mojola, Amanda Shigihara, and Shannon Coffey

Population Association of America: Jane Menken, Fred Pampel, Rick Rogers, Jill Williams, Tim Wadsworth, Bethany Everett, Sanyu Mojola, Jason Boardman, Christina Sue, Casey Blalock, Stefanie Mollborn, and Lori Hunter

Week of April 9, 2010

Jeff Dennis was awarded a 2010 Summer Fellowship from the CU-Boulder Graduate School, which will provide substantial summer funding for his dissertation work.

Brandi Gilbert gave a webinar entitled "Helping the Helpers Help Themselves" to 80 participants as a part of the HandsOn Non-Profit Network training series. The webinar focused on disaster preparedness for community-based organizations.

Christie Sennott was chosen as the recipient of the 2009 Sherri Aversa Memorial Foundation award for her dissertation research on HIV/AIDS. Sherri was a former graduate student of Mike Radelet's who was tragically killed in a car accident, and her family has set up an award in her honor.

Liam Downey is a co-author on an article that was just accepted at the American Sociological Review. The title of the article is “Bringing the Polluters Back In: Environmental Inequality and the Organization of Chemical Production.” The article combines Qualitative Comparative Analysis and standard regression techniques to demonstrate that the characteristics of communities and polluting facilities combine in a variety of ways to produce risky emissions. In doing this, the article makes several important contributions to the literature.
ABSTRACT:
Several environmental justice scholars have suggested that because chemical plants and other hazardous facilities emit more pollutants where they face the least resistance, disadvantaged communities are at a special health risk. However, in trying to determine whether neighborhood race or income has the bigger impact on exposure to pollution, scholars tend to overlook facilities themselves and the effect of their characteristics on emissions. In particular, they have yet to examine how the characteristics of facilities and those of their surrounding communities jointly shape pollution outcomes. To remedy this situation, we propose a new line of environmental justice research that focuses on facilities and how their features combine with communities’ to create dangerous emissions. Using novel fuzzy set analysis techniques and the EPA’s newly developed Risk-Screening Environmental Indicators, we also test the influence of facility and community factors on the health-threatening emissions of chemical plants. Contrary to the idea that community characteristics have singular, linear effects, findings show that facility and community factors combine in a variety of ways to produce risky emissions. We discuss the implications of these multiple “recipes of risk” for basic and applied research on environmental justice as well as related literatures on public health and “neighborhood effects.” We speculate that as chemical firms experiment with different ways of producing goods and externalizing pollution costs, new recipes of risk are likely to emerge. The question, then, will no longer be whether race or income matters most, but in which of these recipes do they matter and how.

Bethany Everett has received a travel stipend to attend the Add Health Users Conference at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD. She will present her research, titled "Non-HIV STI Risk Among Sexual Minorities: Examining the Intersection Between Identity and Behavior."

Finally, two of our outstanding graduating seniors have been selected for departmental awards, which will be given at graduation:
Zoey Tanner has been selected as the recipient of the Helen and Val Fischer Award for outstanding scholarship. Her nominator, Sara Steen, considers Zoey one of the very best students she has encountered in her almost twenty years of teaching. Zoey is exceptionally bright and has managed to earn an overall GPA of 3.756 while working 35 hours a week, interning at the public defender’s office, and commuting from her family home in Estes Park. Zoey’s analytical skills are outstanding, she engages actively in class discussions, and she has considerable experience in the criminal justice system. According to Sara, there are many days when Zoey is essentially coteaching her course on criminal justice reform.
Katie McCune has been selected to receive the Jim Downton Award For Outstanding Sociological Scholarship and Practice, recognizing a graduating senior who has demonstrated unusually high levels of both academic achievement and application of that sociological knowledge to social problems faced by our larger communities. Her nominator, Stefanie Mollborn, praised Katie's combination of unusual academic talent, strong engagement in sociological research, and sociologically informed community work in Colorado and internationally. During her time at CU, Katie has maintained a 3.99 GPA, worked on collaborative sociological research, been heavily involved in health-related local service projects, and co-founded the Health Outreach for Latin American Foundation. In this project, she has worked hard to engage Nicaraguan community members to build sustainable health care solutions for humans and animals in their village.

Week of April 2, 2010

We have more terrific job news this week. Christine Bevc has accepted a position as a post-doctoral researcher/research associate with the NC Preparedness and Emergency Response Research Center at the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill's Gillings School of Global Public Health. The Gillings School is ranked as the top publicly-funded school of public health in the nation by U.S. News & World Report and is tied with Harvard for second place among all public health schools in the country. Christine will be conducting research on public health preparedness systems and working with practice partners to ensure that the research findings are relevant to the practice community and are translated into practice. The NCPERRC is one of nine centers of excellence funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to help develop sustainable public health preparedness and response systems.

Congratulations to Sociology adviser Michael Lynn, who was put forward by CU-Boulder as the campus nominee for the Outstanding Advisor award from the National Academic Advising Association. This is a prestigious national award for which only one person per academic institution can be nominated. The Outstanding Advising Award annually recognizes individuals who have demonstrated qualities associated with outstanding academic advising of students or outstanding academic advising administration. Congratulations on the nomination, Michael!

Angel Hoekstra's research on clickers in the university classroom was the focus of a glowing blog post by Derek Bruff, a well-known name in educational research on clickers.

Naghme Naseri's M.A. thesis, "Leaving and Grieving: Women's Emotional Responses to the Loss of Their Abusive Relationships," has won the 2010 Midwest Sociologists for Women in Society Graduate Paper Competition. Naghme is flying to Chicago to receive her award today at the Annual Midwest Sociological Society meeting.

Naghme has also recently published a chapter with Kathleen McKinney (Illinois State University) in a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning book: McKinney, K. and Naghme Naseri. 2010. "A Descriptive, Longitudinal Study of Sociology Majors at One Institution." Gauisus: Selected Scholarship on Teaching and Learning at Illinois State University, 2004-2009. Cross Chair Illinois State University, Normal IL. This chapter was based on partial findings from longitudinal research about sociology majors' development of the sociological imagination, identity as a sociologist, and if/how they become more autonomous learners and more engaged in the discipline.

Stef Mollborn has been awarded a CU CARTSS Scholar Grant to conduct collaborative research with Christie Sennott and Laurie Hawkins this summer . The title of the project is "Young People's Perceptions of Teen Pregnancy Norms, Risk-Taking, and Sexual Behaviors."

Patti Adler reports that recent Sociology major Sarah Corcoran, graduating class of 2007, was just admitted to the ranks of the FBI after several years of grueling interviewing and screening. She will start her training at Quantico in April and will graduate after 20 weeks, becoming one of the youngest agents ever admitted to the Bureau.

Week of March 19, 2010

We have even more great job market news! Please congratulate Alison Hatch, who has accepted a tenure-track position as Assistant Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies at Armstrong Atlantic State University in Savannah, Georgia.

An invited comment titled “A Thousand Dogs Barking,” by Leslie Irvine, appeared in the March issue of the Natural Hazards Observer(.PDF).

Tamara Williams is featured front and center on the National Sexuality Resource Center's web page. Click through to view her terrific essay about their summer institute.

Congratulations to Jenny Vermilya, who has been awarded a position in the Human-Animal Studies Fellowship Program sponsored by the Animals and Society Institute. This year, the Fellowship Program will be a six-week summer residency at Clark University in Worcester, MA. Jenny will be working on her research on veterinary education with internationally ranked scholars in her area. Jenny is the second student from CU to receive this Fellowship, giving us a strong reputation in Human-Animal Studies.

Howard Higman, a former sociology faculty member and founder of the Conference on World Affairs, was featured in the most recent issue of the Coloradan in an article entitled "Dialing for Dignitaries."

Rob Kemp was awarded a 10-week summer fellowship from the Center for Population and the Environment. He will be working at NCAR with the Integrated Assessment Modeling Group to create global multi-region population projections.

Week of March 12, 2010

Our graduate students/recent Ph.D.s are really rocking the job market, even in such a tough year! Please congratulate Emmanuel David, who has accepted a position as Assistant Professor of Sociology at prestigious Villanova University in Philadelphia. His adviser is Janet Jacobs.

Emmanuel also received Honorable Mention in the 2009 Samuel H. Prince Dissertation Award competition, which is sponsored by the International Sociological Association’s Research Committee on Disasters.

Justin Denney was recently interviewed by a health reporter for AOL News on suicide and divorce.

Congratulations to Isaac Reed on his new publication: Isaac Ariail Reed, 2010, “Epistemology Contextualized: Social-scientific Knowledge in a Postpositivist Era,” Sociological Theory, 28 (1): 20-39.

The latest issue of the American Journal of Sociology was peppered with contributions from our department! Besides Liam Downey's new article announced last week, Isaac Reed reviewed the book "On Scandal: Moral Disturbances in Society, Politics, and Art". Also, Amy Wilkins's recent book, "Wannabes, Goths, and Christians: The Boundaries of Sex, Style, and Status," received a glowing review.

Lori Hunter reports that our stellar undergraduate, Lindsay Patterson (2009), will be attending Boston College next fall to pursue her Master's in Sociology.

Lori Hunter recently returned from Nairobi and Nakuru, Kenya. She visited reforestation and livelihood initiatives in the Maasai Mau Forest, implemented by the Green Belt Movement and funded by The Nature Conservancy. Lori and Tracy Kirkland have been assisting the organizations in development of a baseline socio-economic survey to document conditions prior to the integrated development-conservation interventions.

Week of March 5, 2010

First of all, a big congratulations to two of our excellent graduate students, who landed plum jobs in a tough economy:
From Jo Belknap: Congratulations to Courtney McDonald, who accepted a position as Assistant Professor in the Sociology Department at Georgia Southwestern State University!
From Patti Adler: Allison Hicks has accepted a tenure-track offer from Alfred University in upstate New York. Ranked by The Princeton Review and the Fiske Guide as a top 300 college/university in the US, and by US News and World Reports as the #3 ranked regional Master's comprehensive school in the North (just below Villanova), Alfred is a private liberal-arts school of 2000, filled with students who are curious, challenging, and rigorous. It has small classes and close student-prof relationships. There, Allison will be teaching a 3-3 load, and the school has ample money to support research and travel.

We also have a couple of new publications in the department:

A paper that Wee-Kiat Lim co-authored with colleagues from Nanyang Business School in Singapore is published in the latest (March) issue of MIS Quarterly Executive (MISQE). MIS stands for Management Information Systems. MISQE publishes practice-based research in the information systems field and disseminates "the results of that research in a manner that makes its relevance and utility readily apparent." Even though it's yet to be listed in the Social Science Journal Citation Report as it's only started fairly recently, it's considered a reputable journal, partly due to its association with MIS Quarterly, the top journal in the IS discipline. MISQE is often ranked as an A (tier 1), A- or B+ journal by several institutions in the U.S. and overseas (e.g., Australia). Many institutions also place it with other premier research-based and practice-oriented journals such as MIT Sloan Management Review and Harvard Business Review.
CITATION AND ABSTRACT:
Sia, Siew Kien, Wee-Kiat Lim, and Kanapaty Pelly Periasamy. 2010. "Managing outsourcing suppliers: The need to always be transition-ready." MIS Quarterly Executive 9. As IT outsourcing continues to gather momentum and mature, the decision to change suppliers at the end of a contract, or even earlier, has become an inevitable reality for many. This article sheds light on the management challenges associated with transitioning from one outsourcing supplier to another. Based on the “painful” experience of a large public-sector organization that chose not to renew its contract with a supplier that had operated its online portal and call center for five years, we provide insights into what makes a client organization “transition-ready.” We then describe the actions an organization can take before, during, and at the end of an outsourcing arrangement to prepare for vendor switching. These actions will help client organizations to reap more of the benefits from leveraging the outsourcing market in the long run.

Liam Downey's article, co-authored with Kyle Crowder, just came out in the American Journal of Sociology: “Interneighborhood Migration, Race, and Environmental Hazards: Modeling Microlevel Processes of Environmental Inequality.”
ABSTRACT:
This study combines data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics with neighborhood-level industrial hazard data from the Environmental Protection Agency to examine the extent and sources of environmental inequality at the individual level. Results indicate that profound racial and ethnic differences in proximity to industrial pollution persist when differences in individual education, household income, and other micro-level characteristics are controlled. Examination of underlying migration patterns further reveals that black and Latino householders move into neighborhoods with significantly higher hazard levels than do comparable whites, and that racial differences in proximity to neighborhood pollution are maintained more by these disparate mobility destinations than by differential effects of pollution on the decision to move.

And in other news:

Shelli Walker was awarded a $300 travel grant from UGGS to go to the Midwest meetings in Chicago at the beginning of April. She is attending the meeting to present a paper, "Beyond the Gender Divide in Mental Health: Relationships between Dimensions of Mental Health and Overall Self-Ratings."

Brandi Gilbert did a live radio interview with head Meteorologist of Univision Puerto Rico discussing the Haiti Earthquake. Specifically, the interview focused on measures that can be taken to make Haiti more disaster-resistant in the future. Brandi also gave a talk to sixty second grade students at Central Elementary School about her role as a disaster researcher at the Natural Hazards Center and how children can be involved in disaster preparedness and recovery.

Joanne Belknap was appointed to the Committee on Women in Prison of the National Association of Women Judges.

Joanne Belknap gave an invited talk at The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology's Centennial Symposium: A Century of Criminal Justice at Northwestern Law School, entitled: "The Victimizations and Offending of Women and Girls and the Invisible Link Between Them: An Historical Perspective."

Last but not least, Joanne Belknap is in a discussion on Rocky Mountain PBS for "Colorado State of Mind: I-News Investigation: Sexual Assault on College Campuses." It aired for the first time Friday Feb 26 at 7:30 p.m. You can go here to watch the program online, then click on "Watch 'Sexual Assaults on Campus'" in the upper right-hand corner.

Week of February 19, 2010

Last week Amy Wilkins gave an invited presentation at the ethnography workshop at Northwestern University, entitled, "You Couldn't Handle Me as a Black Woman': Sexual Stories in the Construction of Black College Women's Identities."

Congratulations to Dr. Duke Austin, who received an unconditional pass on my dissertation defense this week. Dissertation Title: "Surviving the Next Disaster: Assessing the Preparedness of Community-Based Organizations."
Abstract:
Community-based organizations (CBOs) play a critical role in providing services to the nation’s most marginalized populations. Mr. Austin’s dissertation helps explain variation in the levels of disaster preparedness among CBOs with the goal of helping all CBOs—and therefore their clients—become better prepared for disasters.
Mr. Austin gathered data while working on the BayPrep Initiative, a joint research project of the University of Colorado Natural Hazards Center and the Fritz Institute of San Francisco. He utilizes factor analysis to condense numerous measures of disaster preparedness into a manageable number of artificial dimensions known as factors. He then constructs multivariate models to examine the effects of organizational characteristics on the previously generated disaster preparedness factors. Finally, he enriches his quantitative results with the qualitative data he gathered while conducting in-depth interviews with the executives of the CBOs in the study.

Tim Wadsworth was quoted in a happiness article in the Daily Camera.

Joanne Belknap's research and experiences were featured in this week's Faculty/Staff Newsletter, and her photo was featured on the front page. Here’s the link to “Five Questions for Joanne Belknap.”

Liam Downey's and Brian Hawkins's recently published research on environmental inequality was the feature of a research brief in the Winter 2009 issue of Pathways magazine, published by the Stanford Center for the Study of Poverty and Inequality. You can read the article here.

Week of February 12, 2010

Kathleen Tierney is being featured on the CU website: "Haiti Earthquake a Reminder That Disasters are Preventable, CU-Boulder Expert Says."

Bryce Merrill's research is mentioned in this Denver Post music blog that came out last week.

Leslie Irvine did an interview for the Colorado Daily about Valentine's Day

Duke Austin was selected as a CU Boulder student leader by the Division of Student Affairs and the University of Colorado Student Union. He was singled out for his "genuine commitment to your position" and for being "a positive role model in the CU community." This week he will be recognized at halftime during the CU vs. Oklahoma men's basketball game.

Stef Mollborn and Angel Hoekstra have an article in print: "A Meeting of Minds": Using Clickers for Critical Thinking and Discussion in Large Sociology Classes. Teaching Sociology 2010;38 18-27. Fred Pampel has been invited to teach at two-week class (in English) this summer in Paris at the Laboratoire de Sociologie Quantitative, Centre de Recherche en Economie et Statistique. The topic will be "Socioeconomic Disparities in Health Behavior: Comparative Approaches."

Justin Denney, Rick Rogers, and Fred Pampel, and Bob Hummer from Texas recently had a manuscript accepted: “Education inequality in mortality: The age and gender specific mediating effects of cigarette smoking.” Forthcoming in Social Science Research.
ABSTRACT:
A debate within the mortality literature centers around the impact of health behaviors on the prospects of disadvantaged groups. Meanwhile, a growing body of work illustrates the social processes that shape changes in smoking levels by socioeconomic status (SES), especially educational attainment. These literatures are merged by examining the mediating effects of cigarette smoking on education gaps in U.S. adult mortality by age and gender. Findings reveal that cigarette smoking is an important mediator of the education-mortality gap for all males and for younger females. In particular, education-mortality gaps for young men narrow considerably when cigarette smoking is accounted for, while older women experienced no reduction in the education-mortality gap with controls for smoking. These results are consistent with diffusion arguments that describe SES differences in smoking adoption by age and gender and provide strong evidence that smoking is an important differentiator of mortality risks by education.

Lori Hunter gave an invited presentation at Global Greengrants Fund on the topic of "Gender, Natural Resources and Livelihoods." Global Greengrants offers small loans to environmental causes in less developed settings across the globe. They're interested in embedding research within some of their efforts and could offer entrée to fascinating study sites for graduate student Population/Environment Research Internships and/or dissertations on topics such as environmental activism, women's empowerment, integrated development initiatives, etc. Contact Lori for additional information. http://www.greengrants.org/

Week of January 29, 2010

An excellent essay on Haiti coauthored by Kathleen Tierney can be found on the CNN website.

An update from Kathleen:
We at the Hazards Center are setting the groundwork for our own field work in Haiti, which will focus on the provision of temporary housing to the victims of the earthquake. Our assistant director for research, Liesel Ritchie, plans to go into the field on Saturday. She will be traveling with a group from the Lower 9th Ward in New Orleans, which has foundation backing to begin the process of building temporary housing for earthquake victims. There will be many such efforts, and this is the process we would like to study. We have access to a limited amount of funds through our own quick response research program (funded by NSF), but we must keep most of those funds available for others to use. (We are already funding two research teams from other universities). I am trying to raise money to support our initial research efforts in Haiti--including asking the University for assistance.

Two department members have a new publication: Pampel, Fred C. and Justin T. Denney. "Cross-National Sources of Health Inequality: Education and Tobacco Use in the World Health Survey."
Abstract:
The spread of tobacco use from the West to other parts of the world, especially among disadvantaged socioeconomic groups, raises concerns not only about the indisputable harm to global health but also about worsening health inequality. Arguments relating to economic cost and diffusion posit that rising educational disparities in tobacco use—and associated disparities in health and premature mortality—are associated with higher national income and more advanced stages of cigarette diffusion, particularly among younger persons and males. To test these arguments, we use World Health Survey data for 99,661 men and 123,953 women from 50 low-income to upper-middle-income nations. Multilevel logistic regression models show that increases in national income and cigarette diffusion widen educational disparities in smoking among young persons and men, but have weaker influences among older persons and women. The results suggest that the social and economic patterns of cigarette adoption across low- and middle-income nations foretell continuing, perhaps widening disparities in mortality.

And another fruitful collaboration that appeared in print this week! Leslie Irvine and Jenny Vermilya, "Gender Work in a Feminized Profession: The Case of Veterinary Medicine." Gender & Society 2010;24 56-82
ABSTRACT:
Veterinary medicine has undergone dramatic, rapid feminization while in many ways remaining gendered masculine. With women constituting approximately half of its practitioners and nearly 80 percent of students, veterinary medicine is the most feminized of the comparable health professions. Nevertheless, the culture of veterinary medicine glorifies stereotypically masculine actions and attitudes. This article examines how women veterinarians understand the gender dynamics within the profession. Our analysis reveals that the discursive strategies available to women sustain and justify the status quo, and thus preserve hegemonic masculinity. Women use strategies previously used toward female tokens in nontraditional jobs, such as role encapsulation, and strategies previously used by male tokens in traditionally female jobs, such as distancing from the feminine. Through this discursive "gender work," women help to maintain the institutionalizedinequality and the masculine ethic of the profession. Veterinary medicine illustrates the importance of considering organizational context in studies of feminization.

And Justin has another publication that just appeared in print:
Denney, Justin T. 2010. "Family and Household Formations and Suicide in the United States." /Journal of Marriage and Family/ 72: 202-213.
Abstract:
Family support systems have been theoretically linked to suicide risk. But no research to date has investigated the effects of detailed living arrangements on individual risk of suicide. Using data on 825,462 adults from the National Health Interview Survey Linked Mortality File reveals that living in families with stronger sources of social support and integration decreases risk of suicide. These effects persist despite controls for important individual level characteristics. Risk of suicide decreases for persons in married as well as unmarried families when children are present and risk increases for persons living with unrelated adults. These results reveal the structural importance of family formation on the social integrative forces that contribute to an individual’s risk of suicide.

Last but definitely not least, last week Mike Radelet testified in favor of a bill abolishing the death penalty in front of the Kansas Senate Judiciary Committee in Topeka. This morning (29 January) that bill was approved by the Committee on a 7-4 vote. It now moves on to the full Senate.

Week of January 22, 2010

Hearty congratulations to Joanne Belknap, who is the winner of the 2009 Elizabeth D. Gee Memorial Lectureship Award. This award recognizes and honors an outstanding faculty member of the University of Colorado for efforts to advance women in academia, interdisciplinary scholarly contributions and distinguished teaching. The Gee Award is the only award in the CU system that specifically recognizes outstanding work on women's issues and a concerted effort to advance women in the academy. It carries with it a $1,000 prize, and the recipient will have an opportunity to present his/her scholarly work at a research symposium/award ceremony on February 26, 2010.

And kudos to Zek Valkyrie, who has a sole-authored publication on a cutting-edge topic: Valkyrie, Zek Cypress. "Cybersexuality in MMORPGs: Virtual Sexual Revolution Untapped." Men and Masculinities.
ABSTRACT:
This study explores the mechanics and perceptions of cybersex interactions in Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games and examines the potential for cybersex in gaming to revolutionize sexuality politics. Drawing on ethnographic and in-depth interview data with fifty MMORPG players, the author examines how cybersex interactions are performed, the context in which they are allowed, and the assessments players make about the utility of cybersex. He suggests that cybersex has yet to embrace a broader spectrum of sexuality even in strictly virtual interactions.

Week of January 15, 2010

Liam Downey and Susie Strife (Ph.D., ENVS) just had an article, "Inequality, Democracy, and the Environment," accepted for publication in Organization and Environment. Liam thinks it is one of the best and most important articles he has written. The article sets forth a new theoretical model that holds that local, regional and global environmental crises are to a significant degree the product of organizational, institutional, and network-based inequality, which provide economic, political, military, and ideological elites with the means to create and control organizational and network-based mechanisms through which they (a) monopolize decision making power, (b) shift environmental and non-environmental costs onto others, (c) shape individuals' knowledge, attitudes, values, beliefs, and behavior, and (d) frame what is and is not considered to be good for the environment. These undemocratic mechanisms produce severe environmental harm because they provide elites with the means to achieve goals that are often environmentally destructive and because these mechanisms are sometimes environmentally destructive in and of themselves, as is the case with military power. After situating the study in the broader literature, the authors describe their theoretical model in detail and present three case studies that identify some of the most important mechanisms through which elites exert power and harm the environment.
Liam has also received a College Scholar award from the College of Arts and Sciences. Theis award will allow him to pursue creative work or research full time. Congratulations, Liam!

Kathleen Tierney was quoted extensively by ABC news in an interesting article on disaster relief in Haiti.

Our recent Ph.D. Hannah Brenkert-Smith (now a post-doc at NCAR) just received an acceptance for work from her dissertation: Brenkert-Smith, Hannah. (forthcoming) Building bridges to fight fire: the role of informal social interactions in six Colorado wildland-urban interface communities. International Journal of Wildland Fire.
Abstract:
Property owners in fire-prone communities have been identified as key stakeholders in the wildfire dilemma. Although past research has examined stakeholder characteristics and their behaviors, less is known about how small-scale social processes among stakeholders might shape mitigation decision-making and related actions. This manuscript highlights the role informal social interactions play in building bridges among full-time and part-time residents that facilitate the spread of wildfire information and galvanize small-scale cooperative efforts to reduce wildfire risk. Data from in-depth interviews conducted with residents in six fire-prone Colorado communities indicate that these interactions create bridging capital that links those who are not likely to be the direct recipients of wildfire outreach efforts to those who are.

CU Sociology alumna Peggy Thoits, Virginia L. Roberts Professor of Sociology at Indiana University, has won the ASA Social Psychology section's Cooley-Mead Award. The Cooley-Mead Award is the section's highest honor and is given annually to an individual who has made lifetime contributions to distinguished scholarship in sociological social psychology. In addition to receiving the award, the recipient presents an address to the Social Psychology Section at the American Sociological Association Annual Meeting. Joyce Nielsen mentored Peggy when she was a CU student.

Week of January 08, 2010

Congratulations to Week Kiat Lim, who has received an Adopt-A-Graduate Student award, which will provide him with $1000 a year for the next five years. The Adopt-a-Graduate Student program was established in 2005. This particular award was made possible by a donation from Scott and Carol Winston. Both of the Winstons are CU Boulder Graduate School alumni who have served on the Graduate School Advisory Council at CU Boulder. Using the criteria suggested by the Council, the Graduate Committee opened the self-nomination process up for students currently in the second year in our program. The Committee evaluated the applications and selected Wee based on his outstanding accomplishments and ambitious goals. We are honored that the Winstons chose to designate their donation for our program, and we are equally honored to have Wee as the recipient.

Kudos to Raphael Nawrotzki, who has managed the enviable feat of publishing in an international journal in his first year of grad school! Kampa, Barbara J. and Raphael Nawrotzki. 2009. “Assisting and Protecting Refugee Women: A Policy Analysis.” International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences 4(8):39-50. ABSTRACT: The number of refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) has risen sharply over the last decade. This trend is the result of several causes such as the impact of climatic change, conflicts over diminishing resources, and religious and ethical disagreements. The largest and most vulnerable subgroup among refugees is women and their dependent children, and they are frequently subject to abuse and neglect. To address protection issues, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) released the Policy on Refugee Women in 1990. The authors provide a comprehensive policy analysis, building on an exploration of the historical background and a presentation of policy goals. This exploration sets the stage for a discussion of the influence and viewpoints of major interest groups, such as donors, governments, and non-governmental organizations. The authors draw upon casestudies and a variety of literary resources to explore diversity issues, social justice concerns, and ethical interests. Furthermore, the authors assess the policy’s implementation success by using the categories of positive outcomes (institutional change, new programming tools, improvement in refugee situation) and unintended outcomes (cultural and religious opposition, one-sidedness, negative conception). Finally, the authors present a comparison of the applications and implications of the 1990 UNHCR Policy from a global perspective, focusing primarily on the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada as exemplary countries. The paper concludes with a set of recommendations for policymakers and project managers to further improve protection and assistance programs to meet the needs of refugee women and girls worldwide.

And finally, congratulations to soon-graduating Ph.D. students Justin Denney and Jeff Dennis for landing tenure-track jobs in the Lone Star State! Justin has accepted a position as assistant professor of sociology at Rice University. He will start at Rice in the fall. Jeff has accepted a job offer as Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Texas of the Permian Basin in Odessa, TX. Jeff will also start in the fall.

January 06, 2010

Sharon L. Harlan, Associate Professor of Sociology at Arizona State University will be presenting on "Urban Vulnerability to Climate Change" Thursday, March 11, 2010. The talk will be held in Ketchum Hall, Room 33 from 12:30 pm - 1:30 pm. View flyer

December 18, 2009

Last week Devon Thacker successfully defended her dissertation proposal, titled "Mandatory Arrest Laws: A Case Study of Colorado."

Christie Sennott also successfully defended her dissertation proposal, entitled, "Childbearing and Motherhood in the Context of HIV/AIDS in South Africa." Christie is off to South Africa for 6 months, where she will be teaching Introduction to Population Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand from February 1 - March 12th and collecting qualitative data for her dissertation from January 7 - June 22, 2010.

Congratulations to John Tribbia and Casey Blalock, who passed their specialty comps this semester and thereby also made progress towards the interdisciplinary demography certificate.

Mike Radelet has a new publication: The Executioner’s Waning Defenses, pp. 19-45 in Charles Ogletree & Austin Sarat (eds.), The Road to Abolition (New York: New York University Press, 2009). This chapter was written while Radelet was a guest of Professor Ogletree (President Obama’s mentor at Harvard Law School) while on sabbatical in 2007.

Mike Radelet was one of three dozen death penalty and legal scholars from around the world invited to attend an International Symposium on the Universal Abolition of the Death Penalty in Madrid, December 9-11. The Conference, sponsored by the European Union and the Spanish government, was designed to develop a strategy for how Spain can intensity efforts to abolish the death penalty worldwide when it assumes the presidency of the European Union in January. The Conference began with addresses by Yayi Boni, President of the Republic of Benin, and Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, President of the Government of Spain.

Professor Emeritus Rolf Kjolseth had a letter to the editor published in THE NATION last week: "The several authors in your recent special issue on Afghanistan agree that Obama's stated goal of defeating the terrorists is not achievable, and all suggest different routes to withdrawal. But watch: the Obama administration will not withdraw. Why? For the reason mentioned by none of your analysts, all apparently having accepted the administration's "anti-terrorism" story: it's all about (again) control of gas and oil; in this case pipelines The administration has set the frame, and your analysts are running around with it. The Great Game goes on."

Belknap, Joanne also has a new publication: “Meda Chesney-Lind,” in Keith Hayward, Shadd Maruna, & Jayne Mooney (Eds.) Fifty Key Thinkers in Criminology.New York, NY: Routledge, pp. 272-277.

Jenn Bair has had a new publication accepted in Signs: "On Difference and Capital: Gender and the Globalization of Production." ABSTRACT: This paper is both a review of, and an intervention in, the literature on gender and the global assembly line. Via a discussion of six key texts analyzing the gendered dimension of transnational production over the past two and a half decades, from Maria Mies's Lacemakers of Nasrapur (1982) to Melissa Wright's Disposable Women and Other Myths of Global Capitalism (2006), I show that, over time, the interest has shifted towards an emphasis on the highly variable and context-specific constructions of gendered labor at the global-local nexus. With scholars increasingly focused on demonstrating variation in gendered production regimes, I argue that it is also critically important to ask what is similar about the many specific locations on the global assembly line that have been studied. What the cumulative weight of research suggests is that how gender matters in a particular location on the global assembly line is contingent; that gender matters is not. My argument is that a satisfactory answer must look to how gender, as a set of context-specific meanings and practices, intersects the structure of the global economy and its systemic logic of value extraction and capital accumulation. In other words, while capitalism does not determine the concrete modalities of gender that exist in a given locale, it is essential for explaining the gendered dimension of transnational production as a patterned regularity of the contemporary global economy.

December, 11, 2009

Lori Hunter gave two invited talks in Mexico City, at a seminar entitled “The Demographic Factor in the Contemporary Environmental Crisis”, co-sponsored by El Colegio de México, UNFPA, and CONAPO (Dec 3-4). Within a session on “Gender, Livelihoods and Environment,” Lori presented an overview of a book chapter written by herself and Emmanuel David entitled “Climate Change and Migration: Considering the Gender Dimensions.” The manuscript is presently under consideration by UNESCO for a collection of papers on Migration and the Environment.
CUPC Working Paper
In a session on “Health and Environment,” Lori presented her collaborative work with Wayne Twine, Laura Patterson and Aaron Johnson on HIV/AIDS mortality, food security and natural resources within the Agincourt Demographic and Health Surveillance Site in rural South Africa. CUPC Working Papers:
• http://www.colorado.edu/ibs/pubs/pop/pop2009-0001.pdf
• http://www.colorado.edu/ibs/pubs/eb/eb2005-0004.pdf

Kudos to Joanne Belknap and Courtney McDonald, who have had a paper accepted in the Canadian Journal of Criminology & Criminal Justice. “Judges’ Attitudes about and Experiences with Sentencing Circles in Intimate Partner Abuse Cases.”
ABSTRACT:
During the 1980s and 1990s, two important changes that occurred in criminal processing were seemingly at odds for intimate partner abuse cases. First was the move to treat gendered violence cases more seriously and punitively. Second was the design and implementation of restorative justice practices, which became mandated for consideration in First Nation cases in R. v. Gladue in 1999. There has also been an ongoing debate globally as to whether restorative justice is appropriate in gendered violence cases. Additionally, some First Nation scholars worry that restorative justice is simply another medium to control and punish Aboriginal people. This study draws on interviews with 27 judges in a large Western province, a year before the Gladue decision, regarding their attitudes about and experiences with sentencing circles in intimate partner abuse cases. The findings suggest cautious judicial support tempered by serious concerns.

Congratulations to 3 department members on their new publication in a special issue on health: Denney, Justin T., Richard G. Rogers, Patrick M. Krueger, and Tim Wadsworth. 2009. “Adult Suicide Mortality in the United States: Marital Status, Family Size, Socioeconomic Status, and Differences by Sex.” Special Issue on Health Policy and Healthy Populations, /Social Science Quarterly/ 90(5):1167-1185.
ABSTRACT:
*Objective*. This article addresses the relationship between suicide mortality and family structure and socioeconomic status for U.S. adult men and women.
*Methods*. We use Cox proportional hazard models and individual-level, prospective data from the National Health Interview Survey Linked Mortality File (1986–2002) to examine adult suicide mortality. *Results*. Larger families and employment are associated with lower risks of suicide for both men and women. Low levels of education or being divorced or separated, widowed, or never married are associated with increased risks of suicide among men, but not among women.
*Conclusions*. We find important sex differences in the relationship between suicide mortality and marital status and education. Future suicide research should use both aggregate and individual-level data and recognize important sex differences in the relationship between risk factors and suicide mortality—a central cause of preventable death in the United States.

Stef Mollborn is relieved to finally have her job talk paper accepted at a journal: Stefanie Mollborn. "Predictors and Consequences of Adolescents’ Norms against Teenage Pregnancy." Forthcoming, Sociological Quarterly. ABSTRACT: African American and Latino teenagers and communities are frequently assumed to have weaker norms against teenage pregnancy than Whites. Despite their importance, adolescents’ norms about teenage pregnancy have not been measured or their correlates and consequences documented. This study examines individual-level and contextual variation in adolescents’ embarrassment at the prospect of a teenage pregnancy and its relationship with subsequent teenage pregnancy. Descriptive analyses find that norms vary by gender and individual- and neighborhood-level race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. In multivariate analyses, neighborhood-level racial/ethnic associations with embarrassment are explained by neighborhood-level socioeconomic status. Embarrassment is associated with a lower likelihood of subsequent teenage pregnancy but does not mediate racial, ethnic, or socioeconomic influences, underscoring the importance of both norms and structural factors for understanding teenage fertility.

December, 4, 2009

After skipping a week for Thanksgiving, we have a lot of good departmental news.

Jenn Bair recently presented a paper entitled “The Place of Disarticulations: Global Commodity Production in La Laguna, Mexico” at the Social Science History Association conference, which took place in Long Beach, CA November 13-15. Jenn was also invited to participate as a critic on an author meets critic panel discussing Loic Wacquant’s most recent book, "Publishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity.”

On November 20, Mike Radelet was a guest at Utah Valley University in Orem, where he presented a paper entitled "Does the Death Penalty Help Families of Homicide Victims?" The occasion was their 5th Annual Symposium on Restorative Justice and the Death Penalty.
Mike also graced the back cover of the 2009 edition of "Just the Facts: University of Colorado at Boulder," with a description of his recent research on expert consensus about the effectiveness of the death penalty.

The Department of Sociology was well-represented at this year's "Women Who Make A Difference" recognition event on Wednesday December 2nd. Congratulations to Joanne Belknap, Rebekah Dury, and Dawn Stanley for being recognized for your work by the Women's Resource Center, CU students, and staff.

Joanne Belknap also has two new publications:
Chesney-Lind, Meda, and Joanne Belknap. 2009. “Trends in Delinquent Girls’ Aggression and Violent Behavior: A Review of the Evidence,” in Women’s Lives, K. Ferraro, (Ed.) Boston, MA: Pearson, pp. 230-241.
AND
Belknap, Joanne. 2009. “The Multi-Pronged Potential Effects of Implementing Domestic Violence Programs in Men’s Prisons and Reentry Programming,” in Natasha A. Frost, Joshua D. Freilich, & Todd Clear (Eds.) Contemporary Issues in Criminal Justice Policy. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, pp. 397-400.

And finally, congratulations to Mary Robertson, who has had a paper accepted to the "Gender and Traditionalism in Global Times" session at the International Sociological Association annual meetings coming up next summer in Sweden. The title is "Prostitution Discourses in Transnational Labor Sites."

November, 20, 2009

Jason Boardman is in Bethesda today, where is he giving a talk in the Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research Lecture Series at the National Institutes of Health Campus in Bethesda. His talk is entitled, "The Challenges and Opportunities of Interdisciplinary Research: The Case of Genetics and Demography." A brief description of the lecture series can be found here.

Brandi Gilbert recently attended the American Evaluation Association conference in Orlando, FL and presented two papers: “Assessing Disaster Preparedness Among Community-Based Organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area” (co-presented with Liesel Ritchie Ph.D.) and “Examining Stakeholder Input: A Culturally Responsive Evaluation of the Women's Resource Center Student Volunteer Program.” She also served on the AEA Student Travel Award Winners in Dialogue Panel to discuss her essay on the importance of this year’s conference theme, Context and Evaluation.

At this last weekend's Social Science History Association conference in Long Beach, CA, Isaac Reed presented two papers: "Don't let the women near the cosmos: The Imagination of Agency and the Puritan Crisis of Patriarchy" and "Identifying the Mechanism and Disclosing the Landscape: Notes on Social Causation in History." Isaac also served as the discussant on a panel on Culture and Agency.

Congratulations to Angel Hoekstra, who successfully defended her dissertation, "A Socio-cultural Analysis of the Use of Clickers in Higher Education."

Eric Bonds received good news that his manuscript has been accepted for publication in the journal Critical Sociology.
Title: "The Knowledge-Shaping Process: Elite Mobilization and Environmental Policy."
Abstract:
Both using and contributing to power structure research, this paper presents evidence that corporate and military elites form networks and mobilize resources to influence the development of environmental policy. This influence may be achieved when elites form and utilize knowledge-shaping processes, which involve four principle exercises of power. First, elites suppress information that may threaten their interests. Second, elites organize and fund institutions to produce and promote research that may be useful in efforts to secure their goals. Third, elites fund experts willing to attack and discredit potentially damaging research. Finally, they attempt to exert influence in knowledge administration, or the selection of what information counts as knowledge and what does not. Archival evidence is used to construct a case study of a knowledge-shaping process created to influence the national policy debate over ammonium perchlorate, which is the primary constituent of solid rocket fuel and is a widespread water contaminant in the US.

November, 13, 2009

Lori Hunter was an invited panelist at a conference organized by the Steinbrenner Institute for Environmental Education and Research at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh (Nov 9-10). The conference focused U.S. carrying capacity within three main topics:
1. Measures of U.S. resource consumption, including rates, amounts and origins of the resources.
2. Measures of U.S. food production and implications of population growth.
3. Measures of impacts of population growth on resources and quality of life.

Congratulations to Christie Sennott, who passed her specialty comp, entitled "Sexual Behavior, Fertility, and HIV/AIDS in South Africa."

Mike Radelet was profiled in the Daily Camera for his work on the death penalty, and he ended up on the "most viewed" list online: here.

Stef Mollborn was elected to the council of the Pacific Sociological Association for a two-year term.

Joanne Belknap and Tamara Williams recently attended the National Association of Women Judges Conference in Memphis. See the attached photographic evidence!

Also, Joanne Belknap presented a co-authored paper on the racial differences in sexual abuse histories among women prisoners, participated in a round table on incarcerated women's trauma histories, participated in a panel on teaching about violence against women, served on a panel on batterer intervention programs as part of male prisoners' re-entry into society, and conducted with others a workshop for new faculty at the American Society of Criminology meeting last week.

November, 6, 2009

Sociology graduate students actively participated in this year’s Southern Demographic Association’s annual meeting held from October 22-24 in Galveston, Texas. Justin Denney presented “The Impact of Health Indicators and Household Formations on Suicide Mortality in the United States;” Bethany Everett presented “Expectational Life Outlooks and Educational Achievement: Examining the Role of Neighborhood,” and “Education Differentials in Mortality;” and Jeff Dennis presented, “Exploration of Factors Contributing to the Weathering Hypothesis in Low Birth Weight Using Nationally Representative U.S. Data.” The presentations were as insightful as they were well received. Importantly, the Department of Sociology, the Population Program, the Graduate School, and individual faculty grants generously provided travel support.

Christie Sennott and Stef Mollborn just had an article accepted for publication in Journal of Marriage and Family, with Paula Fomby at CU-Denver as the lead author: Fomby, Paula, Stefanie Mollborn, and Christie Sennott. "Race/Ethnic Differences in Effects of Family Instability on Adolescents’ Risk Behavior."
ABSTRACT:
We used data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (N = 7,686) to determine whether racial and ethnic differences in socioeconomic stress and social protection explained group differences in the association between family structure instability and three risk behaviors for White, Black, and Mexican American adolescents: delinquent behavior, age at first nonmarital sex, and age at first nonmarital birth. The positive association between mothers’ union transitions and each outcome for White adolescents was attenuated by social protection. The association of instability with age at first sex and first nonmarital birth was weaker for Black adolescents, but not for Mexican American adolescents. The weaker association was explained by Black adolescents’ more frequent exposure to socioeconomic stress in the context of union instability.

October 30, 2009

Gender & Society has accepted a paper by Leslie Irvine & Jenny Vermilya, entitled "Gender Work in a Feminized Profession: The Case of Veterinary Medicine."
Abstract:
Veterinary medicine has undergone dramatic, rapid feminization while remaining gendered masculine. With women currently constituting approximately half of its practitioners and nearly 80 percent of students, veterinary medicine is the most feminized of the comparable health professions. Nevertheless, the culture of veterinary medicine glorifies stereotypically masculine actions and attitudes. This paper examines how the women who now compose the majority of veterinarians understand the gender dynamics within the profession. Our analysis reveals that the discursive strategies available to women sustain and justify the status quo, and thus preserve hegemonic masculinity. Women use strategies previously used toward female tokens in non-traditional jobs, such as role encapsulation, and strategies previously used by male tokens in traditionally female jobs, such as distancing from the feminine. Through this discursive "gender work," women unwittingly help to maintain the institutionalized inequality and the masculine ethic of the profession. Veterinary medicine thus illustrates the importance of considering organizational context in studies of feminization.

Society & Animals has accepted a paper by Leslie Irvine & Colter Ellis, entitled "Reproducing Dominion: Emotional Apprenticeship in the 4H Youth Livestock Program."
Abstract:
This paper examines young people's socialization into the doctrine known as "dominionism," which justifies the use of animals in the service of human beings. Using qualitative research, it focuses on the 4-H youth livestock program, in which boys and girls raise cattle, pigs, goats, and sheep for slaughter. The analysis portrays 4-H as an apprenticeship in which children learn to do cognitive emotion work, use distancing mechanisms, and create a "redemption" narrative to cope with contradictory ethical and emotional experiences. Although this paper focuses on young people's relationships with animals, and particularly with types of animals that have received little scholarly attention, the conclusions have implications for understanding the reproduction of inequalities, more generally. An understanding of the means through which people learn to justify the treatment of the animals known as "livestock" can shed light on the mechanisms involved in generic processes of inequality.

Christine Bevc has a new paper appearing in this month's issue of the international journal, Disasters. The paper was co-authored with two undergraduate students, who participated in the Natural Hazards Center's Research Experience for Undergraduates Program. The article is available online with the following citation:
Christine A. Bevc, Ashly N. Barlau, and Nick Passanante. 2009. “Mapping Convergence Points in the Initial Emergency Response to 9/11.“ Disasters: The Journal of Disaster Studies, Policy and Management, 33(4):786-808.

On October 9th, Christine presented ongoing research in San Antonio, Texas at the annual meeting of the Association for Applied and Clinical Sociology. The presentation, entitled “Toil and Trouble: Katrina’s Toxic Soup and Lingering Contamination in New Orleans” with J. Steven Picou, provided preliminary findings on the ongoing, longitudinal study of more than 2,500 Hurricane Katrina survivors and the more than one half million environmental data samples from the Gulf Coast region gathered by the EPA in the wake of the storm. The presentation provided a first glimpse into the project's incredible geocoded data set of social and environmental variables. This project is part of the Social Science Research Council's Katrina Task Force co-chaired by Kai Erickson and CU alum, Lori Peek.

On October 19th, Christine also gave an invited presentation at the "'If You Build it Will They Use it?' Optimizing the Homeland Security Network Conference" at Georgetown University. Her presentation, entitled “STARTing Points: Patterns in Preparedness," presented findings related to the recent three-year study on community preparedness networks and the Urban Areas Security Initiative. Along with the work and contributions of Ali Jordan, this research comes from the DHS Center of Excellence on the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) grant lead by Kathleen Tierney. The presentation was recorded and broadcasted by C-SPAN and is now available in their video library.

Peter Caughey passed along the good news that Rob Gardner, a graduate of our department, recently earned the Samuel H. Graf Faculty Achievement Award at Linfield College, where he is assistant professor of sociology. Gardner, at Linfield since 2004, received his B.A. from Bowling Green State University and his Ph.D. from the University of Colorado-Boulder. He was selected for the Samuel H. Graf Faculty Achievement Award in recognition of his strong commitment to teaching, research, service learning and the academic success of Linfield students. He integrates service learning into his courses and research, involving his students in research on improvisation in disaster response, grassroots volunteerism and rural homelessness. He is the faculty advisor for the Alternative Spring Break, Colloquium advisor and participates on the Colloquium review committee. In addition, he leads the Linfield curriculum individual and society working group and the Fulbright interview committee. Outside of Linfield, he is a member of the Yamhill County Action Partnership homeless count committee and the Multnomah Neighborhood Association land use planning committee.

October 23, 2009

Lori Hunter has a new publication:
Michael J. White and Lori M. Hunter. 2009. “Public Perception of Environmental Issues in a Developing Setting: Environmental Concern in Coastal Ghana.” Social Science Quarterly. 90(4):960-982.
Abstract: Objective. Balancing environmental quality with economic growth in less developed settings is clearly a challenge. Still, surprisingly little empirical evidence has been brought to bear on the relative priority given environmental and socioeconomic issues among the residents themselves of such settings. This research explores such perceptions. Methods. We undertake survey research with 2,500 residents of coastal Ghana on policy issues, focusing on environmental topics. Results. Our analyses reveal a significant amount of environmental awareness, with education and political engagement consistently predicting higher levels of concern. In addition, environmental issues are deemed important even when considered relative to other socioeconomic issues. Conclusion. In the end, we argue that our work sheds light on global environmentalism and the ways local populations in less developed settings prioritize social and environmental concerns. This work also has important policy implications since insight on local perceptions may help buttress policy responses designed to cope with global change.

Mike sends the following update (I'm jealous): After last weekend's snowstorm, Mike Radelet recommitted himself to working with historically black colleges, and presented a paper on Thursday entitled "Health Perceptions of Virgin Islanders" at the 2nd Annual Health Disparities Institute, sponsored by the Division of Nursing Education, University of the Virgin Islands, St. John, USVI. This is part of a six-year, $6 million project that Radelet is involved in, funded by the National Center on Minority Health and Health Disparities, NIH.

Bob Regoli's paper, "The More Things Change the More They Stay the Same: Race on the Cover of Sports Illustrated," has been accepted for publication in the National Social Science Journal. The paper is a study of the subtle transmission of messages related to racial ideologies. The institution of sport and the sports media have been both progressive and reactionary forces in the struggle for racial equality. The research examined Sports Illustrated covers spanning 51 years to see if there were any discernible patterns in determining the race of athletes featured on those covers. The principal findings include that the number of black athletes appearing on the covers of Sports Illustrated increased significantly beginning in the early 1960s; however that trend flattened and began to reverse in the early 1990s. Moreover, changing participation rates of athletes in the sports in question (football and basketball) had little if any impact on the race of athletes appearing on the covers.

October 16, 2009

Christina Sue spent last week at Princeton University as part of an international research team conducting an unprecedented survey on race in four Latin American countries - Mexico, Brazil, Peru, and Colombia.

Congratulations to Isaac Reed, who has been named to the 35-person international advisory board of the European Journal of Social Theory, starting in January 2010.

Joanne Belknap and Justin Denney published a new article:
Joanne Belknap, Heather C. Melton, Justin T. Denney, Ruth Fleury-Steiner, and Cris M. Sullivan. "The Levels and Roles of Social and Institutional Support Reported by Survivors of Intimate Partner Abuse." Feminist Criminology, 4(4):377-402.
Abstract:
This article explores the roles of social (informal) and institutional (formal) support in the lives of 158 women whose intimate partner abuse (IPA) cases reached the courts in three jurisdictions in the United States.Women were asked who knew about the IPA and their levels of supportiveness. Data analysis includes comparisons across the women in terms of social support and institutional support, and how these were related to the women’s demographic characteristics, whether they were still in a relationship with their abusers, the severity of the violence, and the women’s mental health.

Justin Denney, Rick Rogers, Patrick Krueger and Tim Wadsworth just had an article published in a special issue of Social Science Quarterly focusing on Health Policy and Healthy Populations. The article is entitled "Adult Suicide Mortality in the United States: Marital Status, Family Size, Socioeconomic Status, and Differences by Sex."

Tim Wadsworth and Charis Kubrin also had an article in the same special issue entitled, "Explaining Suicide Among Blacks and Whites: How Socioeconomic Factors and Gun Availability Affect Race-Specific Suicide Rates."

Last week Devon Thacker and Stef Mollborn presented research based on a collaborative project with Janet Jacobs and Leith Lombas at a conference organized by the Colorado Organization on Adolescent Pregnancy, Parenting, and Prevention, called Raising the Bar: Putting the Promise to Practice in Adolescent Reproductive Health and Supporting Young Families. The presentation was titled, “Colorado Teen Parents Talk about the Resources They Have, Want, and Need.”

Two faculty members were included in this week's edition of Inside CU. Liam Downey's research on family structure and environmental inequality.

Jane Menken's recent laureate honor was highlighted here
Her award was also featured in the CU Faculty and Staff Newsletter here

October 9, 2009

Jane Menken, Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Director of the Institute of Behavioral Science, was honored as the 2009 Laureate of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population during the recent quadrennial meeting in Marrakech, Morocco.
The IUSSP Laureate Award was established in 1991 to recognize the life-time achievements of outstanding IUSSP members. The award is based on contributions to the advancement of population sciences and distinguished service rendered to the organization. To be eligible for consideration, an individual must have been a member of the IUSSP for at least 20 years and be nominated by five or more IUSSP members from different countries.
During the award ceremony on Sept 30, 2009, Menken was honored by John Cleland, Professor of Medical Demography at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and current IUSSP President, as well as former students and colleagues. Cleland described Menken as “the great matriarch of demography” and the ultimate facilitator of the discipline. He reviewed her distinguished contributions to the field particularly in developing mathematical models of the reproductive process that initiated a new area of research in reproductive and child health, combined with her contributions to research involving the Matlab Demographic Surveillance System in Bangladesh. Menken’s efforts in research capacity development through the African Population Studies Training Program at CU-Boulder were also lauded.
Former student Alex Ezeh (Executive Director of the African Population and Health Research Center in Nairobi, Kenya) reminisced about Menken’s influence as a teacher, coach and mentor. Other colleagues, including Professor José Alberto Magno de Carvalho (Brazil) and Professor and Senator of the Italian Parliament Massimo Livi Bacci (Italy), described her organizational impacts on the IUSSP and the Population Association of America, as she has worked to make the associations more accessible and inclusive. Hania Zlotnick, another former student and current Director of the UN Population Division, recalled her first impression of Menken, whom she met soon after Menken had finished her PhD at Princeton. Menken had written a book with Mindel Sheps entitled Mathematical Models of Conception and Birth, and Zlotnick had a sense it would be highly influential in the field of fertility studies. Zlotnick noted that the book, like the author, possessed a “light and cheery cover but with heavy content.” She described Menken as an influential scholar “in human form” with both “general intelligence and high emotional intelligence.”
Prior to joining the University of Colorado, Boulder in 1997, Menken was a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University. She is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

***

The latest "Arts and Sciences Magazine" contains two articles of special interest. The first focuses on the work of Liam Downey and Brian Hawkins on environmental inequality.
The second is about an outstanding alumna, Jen Hlavacek, who did such a tremendous job teaching our "Sociology of Religion" class for several years (and will so again in 2010). Jen continues to help us make that course an important and growing part of our curriculum.

***

The University of Colorado Population Center (CUPC) and Population Program recently funded five outstanding developmental grants totaling $30,000.
These awards represent an invaluable way to support junior and senior faculty, fund graduate students, bridge programs, and encourage interdisciplinary research. These proposals grapple with central demographic issues and are quite likely to result in cutting-edge research contributions.
The CUPC Developmental Grant Review Committee—composed of Fred Pampel and Tim Wadsworth—made the following awards to sociology faculty:

Jason Boardman: The Integration of Genome-Wide Data into Social Demographic Research

Lori Hunter: The Reciprocality of Social and Environmental Well-Being: Reforestation in Rural Kenya

Sanyu Mojola: Understanding the Role of Transitions to Adulthood in Shaping HIV Risk among African Americans

Stef Mollborn and Paula Fomby (CU-Denver): The Transition to School among Children of Teen Parents

The Population Program and CUPC expect to make similar awards next year.

Congratulations!

October 2, 2009

We've had lots of great research-related and lederhosen-related activity lately! See below for details.

Jane Menken won a major international demography award this week--details to follow in the next kudos.

Bethany Everett recently had a paper accepted in Demography, coauthored with Randall Kuhn and Rachel Silvey: "The Effects of Children's Migration on Elderly Kin's Health: A Counterfactual Approach."
ABSTRACT:
Recent studies of migration and the “left behind” have found that elders with migrant children actually experience better health outcomes than those with no migrant children, yet they raise many concerns about causation, particularly with respect to self-selection. Using three rounds of panel survey data and employing a counterfactual framework, we examine the relationship between having a migrant child and the health of elders age 50+, as measured by activities of daily living (ADL), self-rated health (SRH), and mortality. As in earlier studies, we find a positive association between old-age health and children’s migration, an effect that is partly, though not fully, explained by an individual’s propensity to have migrant children. The positive impacts of migration are much greater among elders with a high propensity to have migrant children than those with low propensity. We conclude by noting that migration is one of the single greatest sources of health disparity among the elders in our study population, and point to the need for research and policy aimed at broadening the benefits of migration to serve whole populations.

Jules J. Wanderer has just had a piece, "When Film Critics Agree: Does Film Genre Matter?" accepted by the journal Empirical Studies of the Arts. It examines the links between film genres and ratings agreements and disagreements among 45 film critics.
ABSTRACT:
This paper reports the results of an analysis of patterns of “agreements” and "disagreements” among 45 professional critics’ ratings of over 1300 films. These ratings - awarded along a scale from 0 to 5 stars - were examined, first, to determine whether increases in the sheer number of critics rating a film was associated with its average rating; second, to determine whether the number of ratings was more or less related to levels of agreement among critics’ ratings; and third, to determine whether certain types of films (genres) were more likely to produce ratings agreement than others. Chi-square tests supported the contention that film genres were not distributed proportionally in subsets of films with very high and very low levels of ratings agreement, ranging, e.g., from most agreement for horror films, to least, for drama.

Mike Radelet has had a busy month. On September 8-10 he visited Morehouse College in Atlanta, meeting with faculty and recruiting students for our graduate program as part of the Morehouse-CU initiative that we started last summer. He then went to Orlando, where he gave an hour-long address to some 400 attorneys and investigators involved in death penalty defense. On September 16, he met with representatives of several foundations in New York as part of a committee that identifies priorities for funding death penalty work. Last Saturday he spoke to approximately 200 death penalty lawyers in Los Angeles, discussing how to prepare race claims in capital cases. On Saturday night, Mike continued his participant observation study of different ethnic cultures under the tutelage of our department's former First Lady, Lisa, who comes from a family that cherishes their Austrian heritage. Lisa and her sister amused themselves by dressing Mike in lederhosen and bringing him to the Hollywood Bowl, where a crowd of 17,500 participated in the dress-up sing along production of "The Sound of Music." See the attached photographic evidence!

September 25, 2009

Congratulations to Liam Downey for several great accomplishments this week. His work was just highlighted in the Colorado Arts & Sciences Magazine.

As a result of the article, Liam has been asked to give a talk on his research on Nov. 2 at the campus’ 2009 Annual Diversity conference. He also gave a talk on Wednesday at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Based on his forthcoming American Journal of Sociology article, the talk was titled “Inter-Neighborhood Migration, Race, and Environmental Hazards.”

Christina Sue gave an invited public lecture last week at Pomona College titled: "Race Mixture and Multiraciality in Comparative Perspective: The Cases of the U.S. and Mexico."

Stef Mollborn and Peter Lovegrove recently had an article accepted for publication in Journal of Family Issues, titled "How Teenage Fathers Matter for Children: Evidence from the ECLS-B."
ABSTRACT:
Much is known about the influence of having a teenage mother on children’s outcomes, but the relationship between having a teenage father and child health and development is less well-documented. Using recent data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort, we explored this relationship, asking how teenage fathers matter for children in descriptive analyses and why they matter in multivariate analyses. We expected teenage fathers’ influence on their children’s health and development to differ from adult fathers’ in three domains: the child’s household context, the father-mother relationship, and the father-child relationship. Descriptive findings showed that teenage fathers were less often married and more often cohabiting or nonresident, and their children experienced a variety of social disadvantages in their household contexts. The quality of the father-child relationship frequently did not differ between adolescent and adult fathers. Fathers’ marital status and children’s household context each fully explained the negative relationship between having a teen dad and children’s cognitive and behavior scores at age 2. These findings suggest policy interventions could possibly reduce these children’s developmental gaps in the critical preschool years.

September 18, 2009

University of Colorado Denver is hosting a Health & Behavioral Science Colloquium. Check out the flyer for Dr. Margaret Lock's presentation titled "Divining the Future: Genetic Testing for Susceptibility Genes" for more information.

Devon Thacker, this year's lead teacher for the Graduate Teaching Program, hosted a Sociology fall workshop series on Saturday morning. Devon, Leslie Irvine, Glenda Walden, and Stef Mollborn led discussions centered around teaching Sociology. The turnout and discussions were great.

Jennifer Bair recently published a review essay of Giovanni Arrighi’s Adam Smith in Beijing entitled “The New Hegemon?: Contingency and Agency in the Asian Age.” The essay is part of a special symposium on Arrighi’s book that appears in the current issue of the Journal of World Systems Research. This issue is featured in the September version of “ASA Members News and Notes”; at the bottom of the page, under the “Hot off the Press: Journal Highlights” section there is a link to this issue of the journal featuring the symposium of Arrighi’s book.

Liam Downey just had an article accepted with Kyle Crowder in the prestigious American Journal of Sociology, titled "Inter-Neighborhood Migration, Race, and Environmental Hazards: Modeling Micro-Level Processes of Environmental Inequality." It is scheduled to appear in January, 2010. Abstract: This study combines data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics with neighborhood-level industrial hazard data from the Environmental Protection Agency to examine the extent and sources of environmental inequality at the individual level. Results indicate that profound racial and ethnic differences in proximity to industrial pollution persist when differences in individual education, household income, and other micro-level characteristics are controlled. Examination of underlying migration patterns further reveals that black and Latino householders move into neighborhoods with significantly higher hazard levels than do comparable whites, and that racial differences in proximity to neighborhood pollution are maintained more by these disparate mobility destinations than by differential effects of pollution on the decision to move.

Yesterday, Jeff Dennis and Stef Mollborn presented their research on “Sociodemographic Differences in Birth Outcomes” at the 2009 Frontiers in Pregnancy Research Symposium, University of Colorado Denver School of Medicine.

2005 CU Sociology Ph.D. Lori Peek (now an assistant professor of Sociology at CSU) was the 2009 winner of the prestigious Early Career Award from the American Sociological Association's Section on Children and Youth. See the very nice writeup of her tremendous accomplishments since receiving her degree.

Bob Regoli's paper (with John D. Hewitt), "Negotiating Roles and Relationships: Stepping Through the Minefield of Co-authors and Textbook Publishers," has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Scholarly Publishing. Briefly, when single authoring a scholarly monograph that will be self-published, either in print format or digitally on-line, an author has complete control of the writing process, deadlines, and production of the product. On the other hand, publishing textbooks typically involves a number of interdependent participants, including co-authors and an assortment of publishing company people, including acquisition editors, developmental editors, copy editors, photo editors, marketing specialists, and sometimes more senior managing editors. Co-authors and editors bring unique personalities and egos to the writing project. Sometimes these personalities and ego work like well-oiled machines, while at other times they are significantly uncoordinated. This paper examines the array of potentially problematic roles and relationships encountered when pursuing the publication of a co-authored textbook.

Eric Bonds has been chosen as the "faculty football coach of the game" for this Saturday's showdown against Wyoming. He will attend practice and watch the game from the sidelines.

Stef Mollborn and Angel Hoekstra recently had an article accepted in Teaching Sociology, forthcoming in January 2010: “'A Meeting of Minds': Using Clickers for Critical Thinking and Discussion in Large Sociology Classes." Abstract: Because lecture-based teaching limits student learning, many instructors are interested in pedagogical strategies that support critical thinking, student participation, and group discussion in large classrooms. Audience response systems, or “clickers,” are an emerging tool for addressing this problem, but predominant pedagogical models for clicker use developed in the natural sciences often do not encourage the “inquiry-guided learning” that is often useful in sociology. This article introduces readers to clicker technology and outlines a new pedagogical model for clicker use designed to address sociological learning goals, including critical thinking, applications of concepts to real-life experiences, and critiques of sociological methods. We discuss the effects of clickers for classroom interaction and student experiences in three undergraduate sociology courses, using quantitative and qualitative data about students’ perceptions of the effects of this pedagogical model on learning. Results suggest that the model positively affects participation, critical thinking, and classroom interaction dynamics. We conclude with practical suggestions for instructors considering implementing clickers in sociology courses.

September 11, 2009

We have lots of achievements to celebrate this week! Just a quick note that there has been a policy change, so you're welcome to send in news of accepted publications that aren't yet in print. We can run two items on a publication, one when it's accepted and another when it's come out in print (so that people can get a link if they want to download and read it). If you got something accepted in the past few months that is not yet in print, please let me know and include an abstract.

Congratulations to Professor Ying Lu, who recently left our department, and her husband Brent Giles, on the birth of their daughter Molli Lu Giles, born in Manhattan Sept 4th, 7lbs, 2oz. Mom and baby are doing well.

Please congratulate Dr. Alison Hatch, who successfully defended her dissertation, "Saying 'I Don't" to Matrimony: An Investigation of Heterosexual Couples Who Resist Marriage," on September 4, 2009. Way to go, Ali!

Professor Mike Radelet was profiled for his work on the death penalty in an article in The Coloradan this month. It's definitely worth reading; link here.

Ph.D. student Kris Hoyt presented two projects in Madison at the Rural Sociological Society Annual Meetings in July/August. They were titled "Renewable Energy Frames as Discourse: The World Bank in Sub-Saharan Africa", and "Reproducing Power?: Renewable Energy and the Mass Media".

Professor Patti Adler will be giving the Keynote Address at the International Conference on "Deviance(s)" sponsored by CLIMAS - American history, sociology, literature and the arts, at the University of Bordeaux, in Bordeaux, France, September 18, 2009. The title of her talk will be: "Sin, Sick, and Selected: The Rhetoric of Stigma in Deviance."

Professor Tim Wadsworth just had a paper accepted at Social Science Quarterly, entitled "Is Immigration Responsible for the Crime Drop? An Assessment of the Influence of Immigration on Changes in Violent Crime Between 1990 and 2000."
Abstract:
The idea that immigration increases crime rates has historically occupied an important role in criminological theory, and has been central to the public and political discourses and debates on immigration policy. In contrast to the common sentiment, scholars have recently questioned whether the increase in immigration between 1990 and 2000 may actually have been responsible for part of the national decrease in crime during that period. In the current work, I use both cross-sectional and longitudinal strategies to evaluate the influence of immigration on crime in urban areas across the United States. The findings offer insights into the complex relationship between immigration and crime and suggest that immigration may have been responsible for part of the precipitous crime drop of the 1990s.

Professor Emerita Martha Gimenez has been keeping quite busy lately. Here's an update on her activities: "At the ASA meeting, in the Session on Race, Social Class, Gender and the U.S. Presidential Elections, I presented the paper, "Reflections on Presidential Politics: Obama and the American Dream." At the Critical Sociology Conference, San Francisco, August 10, I was the discussant of Robert Newby's plenary paper, "Race and Politics in the Obama Era." And I have a new publication, a book chapter, "Global Capitalism and Women: From Feminist Politics to Working Class Women's Politics," pp. 35-48 in Ligaya Lindio-McGovern and Isidor Wallimann, eds., GLOBALIZATION AND THIRD WORLD WOMEN. Exploitation, Coping and Resistance. Ashgate, 2009. See the attached flier. And finally, the Section on Marxist Sociology decided to recognize my work with the Lifetime Achievement Award - but the award committee forgot or did not know I had received this wonderful Section award five years ago! So I told the council not to announce it. Of course, if in the future they give it to me again, I will keep it. :)"

Finally, a little bird told me that on top of the many rave reviews she has received in the media, Professor Leslie Irvine has been receiving fan mail for her recent book, Filling the Ark. Go Leslie!

September 4, 2009

Joanne Belknap and Courtney McDonald are two of the 4 presenters at the Domestic Violence Research and Action Coalition (DVRAC) Biennial Research Forum on Current Intimate Partner Violence Research in Colorado, Friday September 18th from 11:30-1:30. Courtney’s presentation, based on her dissertation work is entitled, “Same-sex Partners in DV Relationships,” and Joanne’s is based on a paper in press with Justin Denney, “Levels and Roles of Institutional and Social Support Reported by Survivors.” (The event is $10 and includes “a delicious lunch” at Maggiano’s Restaurant, 500 16th St. in Denver. If anyone is interested in attending, please call 303/315-2489 or email cdv@ucdenver.edu).

Leslie Irvine's new book, "Filling the Ark," was featured in the latest issue of the CU system's faculty and staff newsletter.

Our former colleague and head of our data lab, Jeff Hayes, has recently accepted a position as the data analyst at the Institute for Women's Policy Research (www.iwpr.org) in Washington, DC.

And last but definitely not least, Dr. Mike Haffey has been chosen to serve as this week's "faculty coach of the game" between CU and CSU. In addition to participating in the pre-game coin toss and being granted sideline access, he also took part in Thursday's practice and film review with the quarterbacks. He then addressed the team after Thursday's practice with a "pep talk" entitled "You can't teach speed." He then challenged any and all comers to a 40 yard dash to display the historic "Haffey Blazing Speed." (He is still recovering.) Mike hopes that coach Dan Hawkins will allow him to call all of the offensive plays in the third quarter. So if you see the Buffs run the flea-flicker "a lot" in the third quarter, you'll know why.

August 28, 2009

We have several Sociology Department members to congratulate this week:

The Sociology course "Social Construction of Sexuality," currently taught by Matt Brown and Glenda Walden, was featured in a Colorado Daily article this Tuesday on "Coveted Course Loads." The article focused on classes that are so popular that they fill almost immediately. Kudos to Glenda and Matt!

Congratulations to Liane Pedersen-Gallegos, who has won a Mariner Smith teaching award.

Amy Wilkins received another glowing review of her latest book, "Wannabes, Goths, and Christians: The Boundaries of Sex, Style, and Status." C.J. Pascoe, a recent guest speaker in our department, wrote the review in Contemporary Sociology. See this link.

Patti Adler has agreed to serve on CU's NCAA Gender Equity Subcommittee. This committee is charged with reviewing and updating the Athletics Gender Equity Plan every five years, and with preparing the campus for the 2012-13 10-year, "Third Cycle," re-certification of compliance with Title IX and other NCAA regulations. Thanks to Patti for her service to the university.

Congratulations to all!

August 21, 2009

We have a lot going on in the Sociology department this week.

Congratulations to Sanyu Mojola, who has joined the board of the Boulder County AIDS Project. See this link.

Leslie Irvine's new book, Filling the Ark: Animal Welfare in Disasters, was reviewed in "Inside CU." See this link. A Google search on the book title will give you a sense of the incredible press Leslie is receiving for her work.

Kudos to Joanne Belknap, who just published a book review:
Belknap, Joanne. (2009). Review of Jan Jordan (2008). Serial Survivors: Women’s Narratives of Surviving Rape, in Theoretical Criminology, 13, 396-397.

Bob Regoli's new book, Delinquency in Society, 8th edition, has recently been published. The book provides a systematic introduction to the study of juvenile delinquency, criminal behavior, and status offending youths. The book examines the theories of juvenile crime and the social control of delinquency, including the relevance of families, schools, and per groups. Reorganized and thoroughly updated to reflect the most current trends and developments in juvenile delinquency, the 8th edition includes discussions of history, institutional context, and societal reactions to delinquent behavior. Delinquency prevention programs and basic coverage of delinquency, as it relates to the criminal justice system, are also included to add to context and support student comprehension. The research of several current and past members of the University of Colorado Sociology Department is cited in the text. The research of Rachel Bandy (Simpson College), Joanne Belknap, Jason Boardman, Mark Colvin (Kent State), Matt DeLisi (Iowa State University), Delbert Elliott, Finn Esbensen (University of Missouri- St. Louis), Abbey Fagen (University of South Carolina), David Huizinga, Scott Menard (Sam Houston State University), Sharon Mihalic, Michael Radelet, Terry Thornberry (University of Maryland), Tim Wadsworth, Kirk Williams (University of California-- Riverside), are referenced and/or discussed. Thank you colleagues for making a good book better! If you are interested in receiving a complimentary copy of the 8th edition of Delinquency in Society text for possible classroom adoption, let me know and I will arrange to have one forwarded to you.

Finally, our department had a terrific turnout at the American Sociological Association's annual meeting in San Francisco last week. I counted 32 people on the program. My apologies to anyone who was missed--please email me in that case so I can catch you in next week's kudos. Also please make sure to email me if you received an award, so you can be singled out for kudos. Sociology department participants included: Patti Adler, Jennifer Bair, Christine Bevc, Casey Blalock, Jason Boardman, Eric Bonds, Matt Brown, Justin Denney, Jeff Dennis, Liam Downey, Marc Eaton, Colter Ellis, Bethany Everett, Martha Gimenez, Allison Hicks, Lori Hunter, Janet Jacobs, Kelly Knight, Katherine Martinez, Sanyu Mojola, Stefanie Mollborn, Fred Pampel, Laura Patterson, Isaac Reed, Rick Rogers, Christie Sennott, Katie Sirles, Marshall Smith, Bryan Snyder, Christina Sue, Kathleen Tierney, and Jill Williams.

August 07, 2009

Congratulations to Jenn Roark and John Kirby, who welcomed Cash David to the world on August 3rd! He weighed 7 pounds and 11 ounces, and Joanne Belknap reports that Mom and baby are doing swell!

Christina Sue just had another article (co-authored with Tanya Golash-Boza) come out, in the Latino(a) Research Review 7(1-2), titled "Blackness in Mestizo America: The Cases of Mexico and Peru." In the article the authors challenge conventional uses of the diaspora concept by addressing the relationship between slavery, ancestry, and identity among populations of African descent in Mexico and Peru.

July 31, 2009

Mike Radelet presented a paper entitled "How U.S. Virgin Islanders Talk About Health and Health Care" at the meetings of the National Black Nurses Association, Toronto, August 5. The paper reports the results of focus group interviews that Mike organized in the Virgin Islands with colleagues at the University of the Virgin Islands. This is part of our department's outreach to Historically Black Colleges and Universities -- which also includes Morehouse University in Atlanta.

Congratulations to Christina Sue on her new publication in the Annual Review of Sociology, titled Race Mixture: Boundary Crossing in Comparative Perspective" (co-authored with Edward Telles).
ABSTRACT: In this article, we examine a large, interdisciplinary, and somewhat scattered literature, all of which falls under the umbrella term race mixture. We highlight important analytical distinctions that need to be taken into account when addressing the related, but separate, social phenomena of intermarriage, miscegenation, multiracial identity, multiracial social movements, and race-mixture ideologies. In doing so, we stress a social constructivist approach to race mixture with a focus on boundary crossing. Finally, we also demonstrate how ideologies and practices of race mixture play out quite differently in contexts outside of the United States, particularly in Latin America. Race-mixture ideologies and practices in Latin America have been used to maintain racial inequality in the region, thus challenging recent arguments by U.S. scholars that greater racial mixture leads to a decline in racism, discrimination, and inequality.

Kudos to John Tribbia for publishing a book review:
Tribbia, J. (2009). Mobile Phone Cultures (book review). Technology and Culture, 50(3): 728-729.

Stef Mollborn and Liz Morningstar have a new publication that is the focus of an ASA press release:
Mollborn, Stefanie and Elizabeth Morningstar. 2009. "Investigating the Relationship between Teenage Childbearing and Psychological Distress Using Longitudinal Evidence." Journal of Health and Social Behavior 50(3):310–326.
ABSTRACT: The high levels of depression among teenage mothers have received considerable research attention in smaller targeted samples, but a large-scale examination of the complex relationship between adolescent childbearing and psychological distress that explores bidirectional causality is needed. Using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) and the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study—Birth Cohort, we found that teenage mothers had higher levels of distress than their childless adolescent peers and adult mothers, but the experience of teenage childbearing did not appear to be the cause. Rather, teenage mothers’ distress levels were already higher than their peers before they became pregnant, and they remained higher after childbearing and into early and middle adulthood. We also found that distress did not increase the likelihood of adolescent childbearing except among poor teenagers. In this group, experiencing high levels of distress markedly increased the probability of becoming a teenage mother. Among nonpoor teenage girls, the relationship between distress and subsequent teenage childbearing was spurious.
See www.asanet.org or link for a press release and the article:

Congratulations to Bryan Snyder, who will be joining the Arizona State University wrestling program this fall as head assistant coach. Read more about his past accomplishments and new job.

And last but not least, congratulations to Leslie Irvine on publishing her newest book, released by Temple University Press on July 7.
Filling the Ark: Animal Welfare in Disasters, by Leslie Irvine.
Her book is being highlighted on the Arts and Sciences website.
Excerpts from reviews:
“Be they human or animal, as Irvine shows, the more oppressed and exploited, the more is the suffering when disaster strikes.”
“…a fascinating combination of scholarship, public policy, and animal advocacy.”
“…Irvine weaves a tale that is both eye-opening and tragic.”
“…a highly informative and very readable package."

July 23, 2009

Congratulations to Brandi Gilbert, who was selected to receive a $500 travel scholarship to attend this year’s American Evaluation Association conference in Orlando, FL. This achievement involved writing an essay focusing on this year's conference theme, Context and Evaluation. The process is quite competitive, and Brandi was one of nine individuals who received the award.

Mike Radelet's recent publication, which was based on a survey of experts and which found that the death penalty does not deter homicide better than long prison sentences, has received widespread press attention in the national media.

On July 19, Christine Bevc presented work from her dissertation at this year's annual meeting of the International Sociological Association's International Research Committee on Disasters (RC-39) Researchers Meeting. Her presentation, “Tasks over Time: Exploring the Evolution of an Emergency Response,” discussed the interdependencies among the multiple activities that took place following the collapse of the WTC twin towers on September 11th, 2009.

Kudos to John Tribbia for his new publication:
Patricia Romero Lankao, John L. Tribbia, and Doug Nychka. "Testing Theories to Explore the Drivers of Cities’ Atmospheric Emissions." Ambio 38(4):236-244.
ABSTRACT:
Despite a growing body of evidence demonstrating the importance of cities as sources of many local, regional, and global impacts on the atmosphere, ecosystems, and human populations, most theories on the relationship between society and the environment have focused on the global or national level. A variety of theories exist on human–environment interactions; for example, ecological modernization, urban transitions, and human ecology. However, with the exception of urban transitions, these theories have been mainly concerned with nation states and have ignored the subnational and local (city) levels. This article aims at filling this gap by employing ordinary least squares regression to examine these theories at the city level using the STIRPAT formula. It finds that with the exception of population (which shows an unstable relationship with the impacts indicators applied in the analysis) a remarkable level of variation exists in the importance of drivers across the three exercises. This led us to conclude that urban atmospheric pollutants result from diverse activities (e.g., transportation, industrial), are formed through different processes (vehicle combustion, biomass burning), have a residence time ranging from hours to years, and are the outcome of diverse sets of societal and environmental drivers.

Congratulations to Jenn Bair for her new publication:
“After Sweatshops? Apparel Politics in the Circum-Caribbean”, co-authored with geographer Marion Werner, and published in volume 42, number 4 (July-August issue) of NACLA [North America Congress on Latin America] Report on the Americas magazine. To read the article and access a PDF download, go to https://nacla.org/node/5937.

Isaac Reed just released a book in paperback, including his own cover design:
Meaning and Method: The Cultural Approach to Sociology, edited by Isaac Reed and Jeffrey Alexander.
http://www.paradigmpublishers.com/books/BookDetail.aspx?productID=187025
This book addresses the relationship between the interpretation of culture and the standard theories and methods of American sociology. In the first chapter, "Culture as Object and Approach in Sociology," Isaac Reed outlines the theoretical basis for using the tools of cultural sociology to address a wide variety of sociological research problems. Part I consists of essays on the relationship of cultural sociology to economic sociology (Lyn Spillman), the sociology of organizations (Jerry Goodstein, Amy Wharton, and Mary Blair-Loy), the study of television and moral regulation (Kenneth Thompson), and the sociology of art and cultural production (Georgina Born). Part II contains a debate between Richard Biernacki and John H. Evans on the appropriateness (or inappropriateness) of abstract and quantifiable coding schemes for the sociological study of culture. Ranging from the philosophy of science to the concrete, practical problems of interpreting masses of cultural data, the debate raises the controversy over the interpretation of culture and the explanation of social action to a new level of sophistication.

June 19, 2009

Congratulations to Christie Sennott, who has been selected as a recipient of the Otis & Elsie Purchase Teets Endowed Scholarship ($1,875) for the 2009-2010 academic year. Christie has just returned from an invited seminar at Princeton University entitled "The Marital Divide: Race, Ethnicity, Class, and the Retreat from Marriage." Her trip was generously funded by the IBS Population Program.

Congratulations to Bethany Everett, who was awarded a visiting scholar fellowship to attend a demography workshop at the Max Planck Institute in Demography in Germany ($2,000). Furthermore, she has won two grants derived from her dissertation proposal regarding sexual orientation and health trajectories: 1) an NSF Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant for $9,825 to attend a series of ICPSR workshops, and 2) she received the Wayne F. Placek Award from the American Psychological Foundation for $15,000.

Congratulations to Christie Sue on a new publication: "An Assessment of the Latin Americanization Thesis," just published in Ethnic and Racial Studies (32:6). Abstract:
In 2004, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva published an article in which he proposed a provocative thesis he argued that the U.S. system of race is beginning to resemble that of Latin America. Despite the attention received from the U.S. side, there has been no response from scholars of race in Latin America. This article is a critical reply to Bonilla-Silva’s Latin Americanization thesis. In the article, I move the debate forward by introducing a Latin American perspective. I begin by outlining and addressing various claims made by Bonilla-Silva regarding the Latin American system of race. I then discuss how his thesis is put to the empirical test and briefly comment on the models ability to explain the future of race in the United States. I conclude with a proposal for future research and a discussion of how the racial terrain is rapidly changing in Latin America and the implications that this has on Bonilla-Silva’s theory.

Congratulations to Mike Radelet and Traci Lacock on the publication of a paper entitled “Do Executions Lower Homicide Rates?: The Views of Leading Criminologists,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 99 (Spring 2009): 489-508. Abstract: The question of whether the death penalty is a more effective deterrent than long-term imprisonment has been debated for decades or longer by scholars, policy makers, and the general public. In this Article we report results from a survey of the world’s leading criminologists that asked their expert opinions on whether the empirical research supports the contention that the death penalty is a superior deterrent. The findings demonstrate an overwhelming consensus among these criminologists that the empirical research conducted on the deterrence question strongly supports the conclusion that the death penalty does not add deterrent effects to those already achieved by long imprisonment.

June 12, 2009:

Congratulations to Liam Downey, who was recently informed that he will receive the ASA Environmental and Technology Section's Outstanding Publication award at this year's annual meeting in San Francisco. This award is given for publications of special noteworthiness in the field of environmental sociology. In alternate years publications are considered in either book or article form. This year the award committee considered series of thematically-related articles published between January 2004 and December 2008.

Liam also recently learned that he was awarded a $3,000 faculty research grant from the University of Colorado European Union Center of Excellence. He plans to use the funds to hire a graduate student who will conduct a literature review on environmental policy making in the EU.

And even more kudos: Liam was recently elected to the position of Membership Committee Chair, ASA section on Environment and Technology.

Congratulations to Bob Regoli on a new publication: Foreword, in Jeffrey M. London, Marijuana: Past and Present Histories (Mellen Press, 2010).

Congratulations to Lori Hunter, who has recently been elected to the council of the ASAs Section on Population for a 3-year term.

Congratulations to Eric Bonds, who recently learned that one of the papers he wrote for his Specialty Comps was selected for the 2009 Albert Szymanski-T.R. Young Award for best graduate student paper from the ASA's Section on Marxist Sociology. The prize carries with it $500. His paper is entitled “Explaining Militarized Environmental Harm.”

Congratulations to Christine Bevc, who presented a paper this week at the 2009 National Urban Areas Security Initiative (UASI) Conference in Charlotte, NC ( http://www.urbanareas.org/con/). Her social networks presentation, entitled "Partners, Patterns, and Preparedness: Results from a 3-Year UASI Research Project", was a featured keynote talk to more than 850 UASI program managers and participants from fire, police, emergency management, State Administrative Agencies, and federal agencies. This presentation stems from her work with Kathleen Tierney, Jeannette Sutton, and Ali Jordan as part of the Natural Hazards Center research with the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START).

May 29, 2009:

Congratulations to Sanyu Mojola, who has been informed that her dissertation won the 2009 “Richard Saller Dissertation Prize,” given annually to the “most distinguished dissertation” in the Social Sciences Division at the University of Chicago. This is the highest award associated with a dissertation in the social sciences at the University of Chicago. She was nominated for the award by Department Chair Kazuo Yamaguchi, Director of Graduate Studies Omar McRoberts, and the Chair of her dissertation committee, Linda Waite. The dissertation is entitled “Dangerous Transitions: Exploring the Gendered Disparity in HIV Rates Among African Youth.”

Congratulations to Mary Robinson, whose paper entitled “Negative Implications of U.S. Anti-Trafficking Policy on Transnational Feminist and Women’s Organizing” was among four submissions selected (from a pool of 15) for a panel on “Cross-border Organizing and Transnational Activism,” at a conference on “Social and Natural Limits of Globalization,” University of San Francisco, this August.

Congratulations to Jenn Bair, who will be la professeure invitee aL’Institut des Sciences de l'Entreprise et du Management a l’Universite Montpellier (invited visiting professor at the Institute for Business and Management Science at the University of Montpellier), June 8-19. In addition to individual meetings with graduate students in sociology and management, she will be giving a public talk entitled “Organizational Perspectives on Social Corporate Responsibility in Global Industries,” and offering a seminar for graduate students on getting published in English language academic journals.

Congratulations to Devon Thacker, who has a dandy submission for a poster session hanging in the lobby of the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Denver, there for the meetings of the Law and Society Association.

May 8, 2009:

Commencement
The Sociology Department welcomes all graduates, their families, and friends to the Sociology Department graduation ceremony on Friday, May 8th from 11:00 AM to Noon in Hawthorne Court (outside), directly west of Ketchum. No tickets necessary, 600 chairs filled on a first-come, first-served basis with extra space on the grass. Parking is available in the Euclid parking area, with handicap parking reserved east of Ketchum along Colorado Blvd.

Awards and Honors will be handed out first, followed by PhD and MA candidates, and then undergraduates. The department will have printed programs with all the names of the graduates and hand out diploma covers (actual diplomas are picked up/mailed in July).

Light refreshments of cake and lemonade will be served. In case of rain, the program will be cancdele.

Special congratulations to Mike Haffey, who today completed his 40th consecutive semester teaching in our department (and this does not include the ten or so summers that he has also spent in the classroom). He began as a GPTI in the Fall of 1989, and has taught non-stop ever since. The only faculty remaining from when he started in 1989 are Professors Adler, Nielsen, Regoli, and Rogers. We hope for 40 more semesters!

Several of our graduate students were recognized for their accomplishments at this year's Graduate School's Graduate Student Awards. Justin Denney received the CU-Boulder Graduate School Student Research and Creative Works Award, 2009; Courtney McDonald received the Dorothy Martin Student Award, 2009; and Devon Thacker received a Spring 2009 Beverly Sears Graduate Student Grant.

Congratulations to Christi Sue, who (as PI) has won an award for $38,250 from the CU Innovative Seed Grant Program, for her work (with Fernando Riosmena) entitled "Immigration Policy and the Settlement Decisions of Mexican Immigrants in the U.S."

Sociology faculty, research associates, and graduate students actively participated in this year's 2009 Population Association Annual Meeting in Detroit, April 29 through May 2. Participants included Casey Blalock, Jason Boardman, Justin Denney, Jeff Dennis, Bethany Everett, Jane Menken, Sanyu Mojola, Stefanie Mollborn, Fred Pampel, Rick Rogers, and Jill Williams.

Special thanks to all those who helped with and participated in today's wonderful graduation ceremony for our students and their families. As usual, our office staff (Angela, Janie, and Rebekah) did a first-rate job. Patti Adler again coordinated everything, this year with the able assistance of Mike Haffey. And John Tribbia and Bryan Snyder set up and took down the chairs, among many other things. Thanks to all for a terrific celebration.

Congratulations to all of us -- we made it through another academic year, and as a collective, the Sociology Department continues to get better and better and a more enjoyable place to hang out!

Week of April 3, 2009:

Congratulations to Jason Boardman and Casey Blalock, who presented an invited paper at the 2009 meetings of the Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD) entitled "Changes in Genetic Influences on Smoking Across the 20th Century." The meetings were in Denver.

Congratulations to Lori Hunter, who was recently awarded $3000 through the American Sociological Association's 2009 Spivack Program Community Action Research Initiative for Collaborative Research with The Nature Conservancy and Kenya's Greenbelt Movement on socio-economic and environmental well-being as related to a reforestation effort in the Maasai Mau forest complex.

Congratulations to Patti Adler and Rick Rogers, whose work is featured in recent articles in the Arts & Sciences Magazine. Patti's work is the subject of an article entitled "On the Web, Self Injurers Find Help, Good and Bad." and Rick's is the subject of an article entitled "Like Americans Themselves, Baseball Players are Gaining Height, Weight."

Congratulations to Christi Sue, who was awarded a CRCW Junior Faculty Development award for my project on race and national ideology in Mexico.

Congratulations to Sanyu Mojola, who won funding from the same CRCW program for a pilot project she is starting on HIV among African American youth.

Congratulations to Isaac Reed, who has a book review in the current issue of Contemporary Sociology. The book he reviewed is called "Critical Realism and the Social Sciences: Heterodox Elaborations."

Congratulations to Stef Mollborn on a new publication:
Johnson, Monica Kirkpatrick and Stefanie Mollborn. "Growing Up Faster, Feeling Older: Hardship in Childhood and Adolescence," Social Psychology Quarterly, Volume 72, Number 1, March 2009, pp. 39-60. Publisher: American Sociological Association.
Abstract:
We examine whether hardship while growing up shapes subjective age identity, as well as three types of experiences through which it may occur. Drawing on data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, we find that hardship in several domains during childhood and adolescence is associated with feeling relatively older and self-identifying as an adult in the late teens and twenties. Specifically, young people who as adolescents felt unsafe in their schools or neighborhoods, witnessed or were victims of violence, had fewer economic resources in the household, and lived in certain family structures, reported older subjective ages (by one or both measures). We find no evidence that hardship's association with subjective age is mediated by work responsibilities in adolescence or by anticipating a very curtailed life span, but entering adult roles earlier mediates or partially mediates many of these relationships.

Week of March 20, 2009:

Congratulations to Bob Regoli, who presented a paper entitled "Valuing Textbook Writing in Academic Personnel Reviews," at the annual meeting of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences, March 11-14, 2009, in Boston. The paper examined whether faculty who write textbooks within their disciplines are frustrated by department, college, or university level policies that designate textbooks as something other than a traditional scholarly activity. Some place textbooks under teaching or pedagogical aids while others accept textbooks as a clearly secondary form of scholarly activity. Perhaps more problematic are situations where operating policies list textbooks as scholarship, colleagues on review committees sometimes denigrate the efforts of the author/s. This paper also examined faculty perceptions of the role and value of textbook writing and issues relating to placement in the personnel review process.

Congratulations to Leslie Irvine, who was interviewed by NewsTeam Boulder, a cable television program produced by students in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication. See “Economic Crisis Reaching Our Pets Too.”

Congratulations to Tamara Williams, who on March 13 won the 6th annual Boulder poetry slam.

Congratulations to Jenn Roark, who has done her best to help make our Department kid-friendly, with a new addition to her family expected this Fall. Jenn also had an article entitled "Victims and Politics" accepted for publication the article in the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Victimology and Crime Prevention (edited by Bonnie Sue Fisher and Steven P. Lab).

Congratulations to Sociology undergraduate major Megan Graham, who has won one of the 2009 Jacob Van Ek Awards (and to her nominator, Joanne Belknap).

Congratulations to Joanne Belknap who published a chapter entitled “Misdemeanor Domestic violence Cases in the Courts,” pp. 259-278 in Venessa Garcia and Janice Clifford (Eds.) Female Victims of Crime: Reality Reconsidered (2010) (with Jennifer Hartman, and Victoria L. Lippen).

Congratulations to Hillary Potter, who published a paper entitled “"'I Don't Think a Cop has ever Asked Me if I was OK': Battered Women's Experiences with Police Intervention,” in the same volume.

Thank you to Brandi Gilbert, Jo Painz, and Aanda Shigihara who (in addition to those listed in the e-mail circulated last week) were tremendously helpful with last week’s Open House.

Thank you to Stef Mollborn, who presented a workshop entitled “Scholarship of Teaching and Learning” (with Clayton Lewis) at the Faculty Teaching Excellence Program, March 11.

Congratulations to Amy Wilkins, who has won a grant of $3,500 from the IMPART Awards Program. Her project will examine identity formation among black middle class students at CU and at the University of Missouri.

Congratulations to Jason Boardman, who received a highly competitive Big XII fellowship. He will spend Spring Break at the Population Research Center and Department of Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin working with Professors Bob Hummer and Mark Hayward.

Week of January 9, 2009:

Lots of good publicity for the Sociology Department in the most recent Arts and Sciences Magazine:

Sociology Lecturer and House Majority Leader Paul Weissmann.

Lori Hunter's climate-related work.

Joanne Belknap's help in endowing a new scholarship.

Terry Thornberry's Sutherland Award.