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Sociology Department News

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.

Week of December 19, 2008:

Congratulations to Leslie Irvine on a new publication: "Animals and Sociology," Sociology Compass 2(6):1954-1971 (2008). You can find the citation information and download a PDF offprint here.

Also, Leslie will be interviewed about the growing numbers of people giving their animals to shelters because of the recession:

KGNU's "Morning Magazine" (88.5), Friday 12/26 (between 8:10 and 8:27 a.m.)

850 KOA Saturday 12/27, 6:22 a.m.

Congratulations to Bethany Everett, Justin Denney, and Jeff Dennis, who all successfully passed their Population and Health specialty comprehensive exams. Bethany's committee included Professors Boardman, Belknap, Fernando Riosmena in Geography, and Rogers (Chair), Justin's committee was Professors Boardman, Pampel, Menken, and Riosmena (Chair), and Jeff's committee, chaired by Professor Mollborn, included Professors Rogers, Pampel, Boardman, and Riosmena. Great news to end the year with.

Week of December 12, 2008:

Congratulations to Susie Strife (ENVS), who successfully defended her dissertation entitled "The Concrete Jungle: Environmental Awareness and Experiences of Nature among Urban Children."

Lori Hunter recently attended a meeting in Beijing at the Institute of Population Research at Peking University on "Urbanization, Environment, and Development in China." She participated on behalf of the journal Population & Environment to facilitate creation of a special issue based on research presented at the Beijing symposium.

Medical Sociologist Mike Radelet recently attended a conference in St. Croix on Health Disparities and consulted on a grant on Health Disparities in the Virgin Islands, funded by National Institutes of Health, National Center on Minority Health and Health Disparities. Among those attending were six or eight members of the Congressional Black Caucus, including Civil Rights icon John Lewis.

Kathleen Tierney has been selected to serve on the National Research Council's Committee on America's Climate Choices--Panel on Informing Effective Decisions and Actions Related to Climate Change.

Congratulations to Traci Lacock, whose first professional paper was accepted for publication this week. Her paper entitled "Do Executions Lower Homicide Rates? The Views of Leading Criminologists" (coauthored with Mike Radelet) will be published in Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, one of the top journals in the field.

And special kudos to Tom Mayer, who yesterday taught his last class at CU. Tom will be on phased retirement and not teaching Spring 2009, and formally retires at the end of Spring semester, after 40 years on our faculty. Congratulations!

A huge congratulations to Dr. Tara Opsal, who successfully defended her dissertation this morning.

Tara did extremely well on the job market this fall, and will be joining the faculty at the University of Northern Iowa in the fall.

Week of December 5, 2008:

This week’s Friday Kudos comes to you from Carambola Beach.

Congratulations to Tamara Williams, who had an abstract entitled "Out of the Mouths of Babes: Feminist Theater as Sexuality Research" accepted for presentation at the Sexual Literacy Western Regional Training, which took place at San Francisco State University 10/30-31/08. And, during the selection process, a panel of students and staff at SFSU selected her paper as the best student presentation, for which the National Sexuality Resource Center paid for her flight and registration to attend the 2008 Annual Meeting and Conference for the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality (SSSS) in San Juan, Puerto Rico, November 5-9.

Congratulations to Tim Wadsworth, who (with John Roberts) has a paper in the current issue of Criminology: "When Missing Data are not Missing: A New Approach to Evaluating Supplemental Homicide Report Imputation Strategies."

Congratulations to Bryce Merrill, who successfully defended his dissertation entitled "Making it, not Making it: Creating Music in Everyday Life."

Congratulations to Christine Bevc, who successfully defended her dissertation proposal on Monday (and to her Chair, Kathleen Tierney).

Congratulations to Amy Wilkins, who has won a $2,500 award from CARTSS to support her project, "Race, Class, Gender, and Military Identities."

Congratulations to Jenn Bair, who has won a $2,000 award from CRCW to support a conference she is organizing in February on "commodity chain analysis." The conference will be held at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton.

Week of December 2, 2008:

Special Kudos to Amy Wilkins and James Rose, who find themselves in a "family way," with the stork expected to arrive in mid-June. Good work!

Week of November 21, 2008:

Congratulations to Lori Hunter, who has won a $2,000 award from CARTSS to help support her project entitled The Reciprocality of Social and Environmental Well-Being: Reforestation in Rural Kenya.

Congratulations to Dr. Emmanuel David, who successfully defended his dissertation, Women of the Storm: An Ethnography of Gender, Culture and Social Movements Following Hurricane Katrina on Monday.

Congratulations to Eric Bonds, who last week became the proud papa of Carson Taylor Bonds, who checked in at 8 pounds, 5 ounces. And congratulations also to his wife, Emily (the mama).

Congratulations to Amy Wilkins and Hillary Potter, both of whom received unanimous positive votes on their Comprehensive Reviews from the Personnel Committee, College of Arts and Sciences.

Week of November 14, 2008:

Congratulations to Amy Wilkins, whose proposal for special funding to offer a Maymester course on Youth Sexuality has been funded by the Associate Vice Chancellor for Summer Sessions.

Congratulations to Jenn Bair, who edited (with Peter Gibbon and Stefano Ponte) the current issue of Economy and Society (Vol. 37, No. 3, August 2008), a special issue on "Governing Global Value Chains." In addition to an introduction to the collection, Jenn also has a sole-authored paper included, entitled "Analysing Economic Organization: Embedded Networks and Global Chains Compared."

And … also appearing in her mailbox on the very same day was a copy of her just-published book: Jennifer Bair (ed.), Frontiers of Commodity Chair Research (2008 Stanford University Press). Just in time for holiday presents!

And … congratulations to Jenn for winning a $700 travel grant from the Dean’s Fund for Excellence.

Jenn is not the only one with a new book this week -- congratulations to Hillary Potter on the publication of her monograph, "Battle Cries: Black Women and Intimate Partner Abuse," published by NYU Press: http://www.nyupress.org/books/Battle_Cries-products_id-7897.html

NOTE: At this rate, our faculty will publish 104 books in the next year. Finally, congratulations to Erica Kuligowski, now working at NIST in Maryland, who successfully defended her dissertation proposal last week (Kathleen Tierney, Chair).

Week of November 7, 2008:

Congratulations to Rep. Paul Weissmann, who yesterday was elected to the post of House Majority Leader, Colorado House of Representatives. Of course, Paul's first love remains the Sociology course he is teaching for us: SOCY 2011, "Contemporary Social Issues and Human Values". This is a wonderful honor for a wonderful person!

Population Program faculty and students were active at this year's Southern Demographic Association Annual Meeting in Greenville, South Carolina, October 30-November 1, 2008. Justin Denney, Rick Rogers, and Robert Hummer presented "Investigating the Education Gap in Mortality: The Case of Cigarette Smoking." Bethany Everett, Rick Rogers, Bob Hummer, and Anna Zajacova presented Educational Degrees and Mortality in the U.S." And Rick Rogers chaired a session, Mental Health.

Week of October 31, 2008:

Some unusually terrific faculty accomplishments to report this week …

Congratulations to Hillary Potter, whose article entitled “An Argument for Black Feminist Criminology: Understanding African American Women’s Experiences with Intimate Partner Abuse Using an Integrated Approach” has won an Award for “Outstanding Journal Article” for Volume 1 of Feminist Criminology. A Committee reviewed all journal articles published in that volume and decided that hers was most notable based on several criteria including: significance and originality of contribution, feminist approach, potential impact on the field, quality of writing and coherence, and quality of research design and analysis (or theoretical development). Hillary will receive the award (including a plaque and a check from Sage Publications) at the meetings of the American Society of Criminology in St. Louis in a couple of weeks.

Congratulations to Tim Wadsworth, whose three-year faculty reappointment has been unanimously approved by the Personnel Committee, College of Arts and Sciences.

Congratulations to everyone in the Department for building one of the country’s top Sociology programs in Gender. The most recent newsletter from “Sociologists for Women in Society” announced that our department got three awards from them: making the list of departments with the highest proportion of female faculty in the country (at sixth place in the nation with 60% female faculty), getting the SWS Seal of Approval for Gender Scholarship with 32% of our faculty listing gender or inequality among our specialties, and receiving the SWS Seal of Excellence for meeting both of these criteria, which just 22 departments did.

Lori Hunter was interviewed for "Earth and Sky," a syndicated radio broadcast that plays on a global network of 1600 radio outlets. The broadcast explores her collaborative research on HIV/AIDS and natural resources in rural South Africa, and over the next couple of months, the interview will be heard 12 million times across the globe. You can lisen to podcast here: http://www.earthsky.org/clear-voices/52841/lori-hunter-connects-aidsenvironment-in-south-africa.

Week of October 25, 2008:

Thanks to some funding from the Arts and Science Dean's Office, the Sociology Department has gotten permission to give a "sabbatical leave" to one of our GPTIs. Each semester, until the money runs out, we will pay the full GPTI stipend to one grad student, but excuse that person from teaching so she or he can concentrate on finishing the dissertation. Congratulations to Dawn Stanley for being the first recipient of this Award. On Monday we will cancel her Spring course, and she will receive the full stipend.

Also, congratulations to eleven graduate students who will split about $8,000 in one-shot research funds as gifts from the Sociology Department: Christie Sennott, Christina Kahl, Leith Lombas, John Reid-Hresko, Dan Haught, Dawn Stanley, Shelby McKinzey, Bryan Snyder, Devon Thacker, Jesse Smith, and Patrick O'Brien.

Lori Hunter gave an invited talk at The Nature Conservancy on Monday entitled “From Boulder Open Space to Global Hotspots: Highlighting the Social Dimensions of Conservation.” Several key players in the development of TNC’s Africa program were there and Lori is working hard to get them to integrate social aspects into their emerging conservation strategies – and also hoping they’ll be interested in collaborating on research within their fascinating environmental initiatives.

Also on Monday, Jason Boardman gave an invited talk to the Carolina Consortium on Human Development, Center for Developmental Science at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill entitled "Gene-environment interplay among adolescents and young adults."

Last week I mentioned that Jane Menken gave the 2nd Annual Joan Huber Lecture in Population, Ohio State University, "Women, Health, and Fertility in Bangladesh: Intended and Unintended Effects of Interventions,: on October 3. One of my students asked who Joan Huber was, so I thought I would pass it along: Joan was one of the founders of Sociologists for Women in Society and served as President of SWS, the Midwest Sociological Association, and ASA. She told Jane that she was the FIRST woman dean at Ohio State University - and that was in 1984. I have know her since I was an undergraduate at Michigan State, 40 years ago. She is a real hero.

Jane Menken was also a coleader and presenter in the HIV and AIDS session of the first annual Perspectives on Global Health at CU-Denver on October 17. She presented on AIDS in the developing world and a case study of the South Africa Agincourt Project run by the University of the Witwatersrand.

Week of October 17, 2008:

Congratulations to Marshall Smith for passing his specialty comprehensive exams.

Congratulations to Dawn Stanley for defending her dissertation proposal.

Congratulations to John Reid-Hresko for passing his specialty comprehensive exam in Environmental Sociology with focus on literature exploring rends in globalization, neoliberalism and the environment, and political ecology (Committee members: Hunter, Downey, Bair, Yeh (GEOG) and Goldman (GEOG)).

Congratulations to Laura Patterson for passing her specialty comprehensive exam in Environmental Sociology with focus on the literature on environmental concern and on the relationships between environmental perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors (Committee members: Hunter, Downey, Boardman, Tierney, Zimmerman (PHIL and ENVS)).

Congratulations to Lori Hunter, who won $900 from the ASC Dean’s Fund for Excellence. Congratulations to Leslie Irvine, who was a plenary speaker at Speaking Their Truth, the 23rd Annual International Compassionate Living Festival, held in Durham, North Carolina, October 3-5. She spoke about her work on animal selves, particularly the research in her book, If You Tame Me: Understanding Our Connection with Animals.

Congratulations to Jane Menken, who gave the 2nd Annual Joan Huber Lecture in Population , Ohio State University, "Women, Health, and Fertility in Bangladesh: Intended and Unintended Effects of Interventions," on October 3.

Congratulations to Janet Jacobs for two new publications:

Jacobs, Janet, "Memorializing the Sacred: Kristallnacht in German National Memory", in Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 47 ( Fall 2008):485-498.

Jacobs, Janet, "Gender and Collective Memory: Women and Representation at Auschwitz", Memory Studies 1 (May 2008): 211-225.

Week of October 3, 2008:

Congratulations to Terence Thornberry, who received a new $300,000 grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention to study gang prevention programs.

Congratulations to Peter Lovegrove, who received a well-deserved unconditional pass on his comprehensive examination.

Congratulations to Brandi Gilbert, who received a grant from the American Evaluation Association/Duquesne University Graduate Education Diversity Internship Program for 2008-2009. This highly competitive and prestigious award is intended to train graduate students in evaluation research methods and involves participation in four evaluation seminars as well as an opportunity to attend the American Evaluation Association annual conference.

Congratulations to Bob Regoli, who has been invited to serve as a “Coach of the Game” for the Texas football game on Saturday, October 4th. For each home game, two faculty/staff members are selected to serve in this capacity. As Coach of the Game, he attends position meetings and practice during the Tuesday prior to the game. In addition, he joins the team on the sideline during the game on Saturday.

And … Bob has also been named a “CU Volleyball Professor of the Match.” Throughout the season, CU Volleyball players have been selecting professors who have impacted them as students in a positive way, and Bob will be recognized at an upcoming home match. He was nominated by undergraduate Sociology major and CU vollyball star Amber Sutherland.

Week of September 25, 2008:

We need one of those pin maps of the western hemisphere to see where our faculty are hiding out:

Tomorrow Lori Hunter is giving a lecture at Arizona State University (Tempe) on her research on HIV/AIDS and natural resources in rural South Africa.

Tomorrow Jason Boardman will present a paper entitled "A Sociological Examination of Gene-Environment Interplay," at Penn State University.

Tomorrow Mike Radelet is presenting a paper on historical research on the death penalty at University at Albany, New York. Last weekend he gave one of the keynote addresses to 230 felony attorneys at the meeting of the Colorado Public Defenders Association in Crested Butte.

On Tuesday, Jenn Bair will be presenting a paper entitled ”Una industria global cambiante: Impactos e implicaciones para America Latina" as the opening plenary of a three-day conference organized by the Maquila Solidarity Network (a Canadian labor-rights NGO) in San Pedro Sula, Honduras. Her talk focuses on the theme of labor rights and working conditions in the global clothing and footwear industry. Basically, she will be discussing how trade liberalization and preferential trade agreements in the Americas are reshaping the geography of production and with what consequences for firms and workers in Mexico and Central America.

Joanne Belknap gave an invited talk, "The Sexual Abuse Histories of Incarcerated Women," at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga Sept 11, 2008.

New Publication: McDaniels-Wilson, Cathy, and Joanne Belknap. (2008) "The Extensive Sexual Violation and Sexual Abuse Histories of Incarcerated Women." Violence Against Women, 14(10):1090-1127. The Department has received a very nice note of thanks for our warm hospitality from Michael Goldman, following his September 11 visit to Boulder.

Week of September 19, 2008:

Congratulations to Isaac Reed, who just published a review essay entitled "Social Theory, Post-Post-Positivism, and the Question of Interpretation" in the journal International Sociology. In the editor's introduction, the essay is described thusly: "Reed surveys theoretical treatises written in different parts of the world that seek to decipher the meaning of sociology in a 'post-post-positivist' era." It can be read here: http://iss.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/23/5/665

Congratulations to Bob Regoli, who has been named by the Boulder Faculty Assembly as our representative on the system-wide Privilege and Tenure Committee.

Congratulations to Angel Hoekstra, whose first article has been accepted for publication. The paper, "Vibrant student voices: Exploring effects of the use of clickers in large college classrooms," will be published in an international British peer reviewed journal called "Learning, Media, and Technology."

Congratulations to Patti Adler, who will be honored at this year's Homecoming football game (Oct. 4; Texas) for the Teaching Recognition Award that she won earlier this year. As part of the celebration, she will ride in style in the October 3 Homecoming Parade.

Week of September 5, 2008:

Congratulations to Amy Wilkins, who has been invited to present a paper at the University of California-San Diego sociology department's winter culture workshop, and at their interdisciplinary Christianities studies group. She has also been invited to kickoff San Francisco State's sexualities colloquium this fall. All these invitations are indications of Amy's rising national visibility -- a rising star as we call them. And risen star, veteran Lori Hunter, has several new feathers in her hat. She was lead Guest Editor of a special issue of the journal Population and Environment (Vol. 29 Nos. 3-5) devoted to HIV/AIDS and the Environment. She, along with co-editors and co-authors Roger-Mark deSouza (Population Reference Bureau) and Wayne Twine (University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa) also wrote the opening article entitled "The environmental dimensions of the HIV/AIDS pandemic: a call for scholarship and evidence-based intervention."

Lori recently had an article published in popular press (World Watch Magazine) on the biodiversity hotspot development initiatives in which she has been involved over the past 2 years. Entitled "Population, Health, and Environment Through a Gendered Lens," the article offers an overview of gender roles as related to fertility and environment with examples of integrated development interventions. Hunter, Lori M. 2008. "Population, Health and Environment Through a Gendered Lens." World Watch Magazine. 21:5, pp. 16-21. On Friday, September 12, Mike Radelet will be a guest of the School of Criminal Justice, Michigan State University (Joanne Belknap's alma mater), presenting a lecture entitled "Emerging Issues in Contemporary Death Penalty Debates."

Week of August 28, 2008:

Congratulations to Liam Downey, who this week learned that he is receiving two NIH awards. The first is an R21 award for Liam (PI) and Kyle Crowder: "Exploring Micro-level Sources of Environmental Inequality," National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, $250,000. The second award, which is for the same research project, is from the NIH Health Disparities Research Loan Repayment Program, which will pay 50% of Liam's student loans. The research project will examine racial and ethnic differences in household-level residential mobility between census tracts with varying environmental hazard levels, using innovative GIS techniques to merge household-level PSID data, environmental hazard data from multiple EPA datasets, and decennial U.S. census data. Data will be collected for the contiguous United States for the years 1990-2003.

Congratulations to Patti Adler, who was invited by the editors of the American Sociological Review to serve on their Editorial Board for a 3-year term beginning in January. Patti was also invited by the Program Chair of the American Society of Criminology to give a full-day workshop on Qualitative Analysis during the ASC meetings in St. Louis in November.

Congratulations to Jade Aguilar, who successfully defended her dissertation last week.

Congratulations to Joanne Belknap, who has been appointed to Presidential Candidate Barack Obama's Criminal Justice Policy Recommendation Committee.

Congratulations (and thanks) go to Rebekah Dury, Janie McKenzie, and Leslie Irvine for their exceptional work in making the front office run so smoothly over the past seven weeks while Rajshree's desk has been empty. Angela Stauffer joins us first thing Tuesday morning, and peace and tranquility will again return to 219 Ketchum.

Week of August 22, 2008:

Congratulations to Christi Sue, who has won a grant from the American Sociological Association’s “Fund for the Advancement of the Discipline” (with monies from NSF), to continue her work on how Mexicans and Mexican Americans in Los Angeles select names for their babies.

Congratulations to Adina Nack, a CU Sociology alum who earned her Ph.D. in 2001, who has had her first book published. Damaged Goods? (Temple University Press) delves into the lives of women who are dealing with genital herpes and HPV infections. It has received positive reviews by respected scholars, and may be useful for courses in gender and women's studies, social psychology, deviance/stigma, and medical sociology. While the book is based on the dissertation research and theoretically grounded, the author's goal was for it to be accessible to college-educated readers. Adina hopes that it will be helpful to those who are struggling with a STD diagnosis, those considering the cervical cancer vaccine, and medical practitioners who want to have a better understanding of how their patients might experience the social and psychological impacts of these stigmatizing diseases. For more information, including reviews and an interview with the author, please see http://www.temple.edu/tempress/titles/1936_reg.html or visit her website: adinanack.com

The University of Colorado Population Center (CUPC) and Population Program recently funded five outstanding developmental grants, which totaled approximately $30,000. These awards represent an invaluable way to support junior and senior faculty, fund graduate students, bridge programs, and encourage interdisciplinary research. The proposals grapple with central demographic issues and are quite likely to result in cutting-edge research contributions. The CUPC and Population Program Developmental Grant Review Committee – which consisted of Lori Hunter and Jane Menken – made the following awards to Sociology faculty:

Jason Boardman, “Gene Environment Interplay in the Development of Antisocial Behavior”

Tim Wadsworth, Rick Rogers, and Fred Pampel, “Individual and Contextual Factors Contributing to Suicide Mortality”

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

Week of August 8, 2008:

Our Department was well-represented at the Add Health Users Conference at NIH in late July. Jason Boardman was a coauthor for one of the plenary presentations, "Genetic Studies of Substance Use in Add Health: Progress and Pitfalls." Two papers by CU SOCY folks were presented in the session called "Sexuality: Contributors to Risk and Well-being": "The Correlates and Consequences of Incongruence in Parents' and Teens' Reports of Teens' Sexual Activity" by Stefanie Mollborn and Bethany Everett, and "The Dynamic Relationships between Sexual Minority Status and Health: A Longitudinal Analysis" by Bethany Everett. Bethany's presentation was especially well-received and generated a lot of interest from researchers and funding agencies.

Congratulations to Jill Williams, who has another paper in print: "Spatial Transversals: Gender, Race, Class and Gay Tourism in Cape Town, South Africa," Race, Gender and Class: An Interdisciplinary and Multicultural Journal. Volume 15, Number 1-2, 2008.

Congratulations to Christie Sennott, who won the 2008 Sociology AIDS Network (SAN) Scholarly Activity Award. The proposal she submitted describes a project aimed at investigating the relationship between gender, adolescent sexual behavior and fertility, and marriage on HIV/AIDS risk in rural South Africa utilizing a mixed-methods approach. The award was presented last Friday at the ASA meetings in Boston.

Week of July 27, 2008:

Congratulations to Jarron Saint Onge, Rick Rogers, and Patrick Krueger on a new publication: Saint Onge, Jarron M., Richard G. Rogers, and Patrick M. Krueger. 2008. “Major League Baseball Players’ Life Expectancies.” Social Science Quarterly 89(3):817-30. We examine the importance of anthropometric and performance measures, and age, period, and cohort effects in explaining life expectancies among Major League Baseball (MLB) players over the past century. We use discrete time hazard models to calculate life tables with covariates with data from Total Baseball, a rich source of information on all players who played in the Major League. Compared to 20-year-old U.S. males, MLB players can expect almost five additional years of life. Height, weight, handedness, and player ratings are unassociated with the risk of death in this population of highly active and successful adults. Career length is inversely associated with the risk of death, likely because those who play longer gain additional incomes, physical fitness, and training. Our results indicate improvements in life expectancies with time for all age groups and indicate possible improvements in longevity in the general U.S. population.

Congratulations to Joanne Belknap, who was elected as Executive Counselor (one of two), American Society of Criminology.

Congratulations to Matthew Brown, who was recently honored by the Office of Disability Services for his exemplary work in teaching students with disabilities.

Congratulations to Angel Hoekstra and Stef Mollborn, who will be presenting a 45-minute interactive session combining practical information and some results of our research on clicker use in sociology at the upcoming COLTT 2008 conference, Aug. 12-13, in the ATLAS building. More specifically: Stefanie Mollborn and Angel Hoekstra. “Strategies for Using Clickers in the Social Sciences and Humanities.” To be presented at the 2008 Colorado Learning and Teaching with Technology Conference, Boulder, CO.

Lori Hunter is featured in a Population-Health-Environment video playing on YouTube. "Population, Health, and Environment: Exploring the Connections," an original ECSP video, offers a lively, brief, and accessible explanation of population-health-environment connections, with examples and photos from successful programs in the Philippines. View the video on YouTube, then rate it, comment on it, favorite it, or post a video response. Presenter Lori Hunter of the University of Colorado, Boulder, spoke at the Wilson Center earlier this year as part of ECSP's PHE meeting series.

Congratulations to Traci Lacock and Mike Radelet, who received $5,000 from the Tides Foundation, San Francisco, to study the opinions of top criminologists on the question of whether the death penalty offers better deterrent effects than long imprisonment.

And, a lengthy report on the multiple activities that several faculty and graduate students were involved in during June and July in South Africa: Faculty, graduate students, postdoctoral research fellows, and staff from the Population Program were active in teaching and research in South Africa. Christie Sennott, Casey Blalock, Liz Morningstar and Laura Patterson helped Jani Little, Nizam Khan, and Jane Menken deliver a 2 week intensive course on longitudinal data management and analysis at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa.

After the course these students along with Rick Rogers and others visited the Agincourt Health and Demographic Surveillance Site in rural South Africa and then attended the 6th annual Wits, Brown, Colorado, APHRC Colloquium on Emerging Population issues in Johannesburg, South Africa. Several people chaired sessions, acted as discussants, and presented papers.

Rick Rogers presented "Reconceptualizing the Epidemiologic Transition Theory: Applications in Developing Countries."

Jane Menken presented "The Stalled Fertility Transition in Bangladesh: The Effects of Gender and Number Preferences"

Casey Blalock presented "Village and Household-Level Determinants of Temporary Labor Migration

Christie Sennott presented a research proposal, "Adolescent Fertility, Marriage, and Disadvantage in Rural South Africa

The multiple activities provided a great opportunity for CU students and faculty to interact with faculty and students from Wits, Brown University, and the African Population and Health Research Center in Nairobi, Kenya. These activities are likely to result in future collaborations and research projects, such as dissertation research and grant proposals, and provide a wonderful way to integrate teaching and research across continents.

Week of July 18, 2008:

This week's Friday Kudos are reserved, of course, for Rajshree Shrestha, who leaves us today after three years of exceptional service. In large part because of her wisdom and hard work, she leaves the Department (in general) and the front office (in particular) in a whole lot better shape than it was in when she arrived. Thank you Rajshree, and we all wish you nothing but the best in the challenges that lie ahead!

Week of July 11, 2008:

Congratulations to Tracy Kirkland. The research she has been doing this summer with Dr. Jill Litt at the UC-Health Sciences Center in Denver has been accepted for presentation at the 7th Annual International Conference on Urban Health (ICUH) in Vancouver in October. This year's conference theme is "Knowledge Integration: Successful Interventions in Urban Health." Their abstract is entitled "Community in the Balance: Community Gardens, Collective Efficacy and Health in Denver, Colorado." Dr. Litt is an Assistant Professor with the Department of Preventive Medicine and Biostatistics at UC-Health Sciences Center and the Environmental Studies Program at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Congratulations to Terry Thornberry, whose receipt of the Sutherland Award from the American Society of Criminology resulted in a nice write-up in yesterday's Silver & Gold.

Week of June 27, 2008:

Congratulations to Tracy Kirkland, who was also married this week -- the second Traci in our department to be married in the past eight days!

Congratulations to Isaac Reed, whose paper entitled "Maximal Interpretation in Clifford Geertz and the Strong Program in Cultural Sociology: Towards a New Epistemology" came out in the journal Cultural Sociology. See http://cus.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/2/2/187.

Congratulations to Jenn Bair, whose paper entitled "Analyzing Economic Organization: Embedded Networks and Global Chains Compared" will be published in v. 37, no. 3 of Economy and Society (August 2008). Jenn is also one of the guest editors of this special issue on "The Governance of Global Value Chains."

Congratulations to former faculty member David Pellow, who has taken a new (and very prestigious) position at the University of Minnesota: David Naguib Pellow Professor and Martindale Chair of Sociology Department of Sociology University of Minnesota 909 Social Sciences Building 267 19th Avenue South Minneapolis, MN 55455 dpellow@umn.edu (612) 624-4300

Week of June 20, 2008:

Congratulations to John Reid-Hresko, who received a $1000 grant from CARTSS in support of preparatory work for his dissertation. John aims to examine how knowledge about HIV/AIDS is mobilized through conservation training programs at two wildlife colleges in sub-Saharan Africa. According to CARTSS, there was a "tremendous response so it was a very competitive process," and John's proposal was "very highly ranked by the board members."

Congratulations to Traci Garrett, hereinafter known as Traci Lacock, who is marrying Tom Lacock today in Wyoming.

Rick Rogers taught Demography of Adult Morbidity and Mortality through the Southampton Statistical Sciences Research Institute (S3RI) at the University of Southampton, England, June 11-13, 2008. Course participants included graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and faculty, and staff members from government agencies, including Imperial College, University of York, University of Southampton, the Department of Health in Northern Ireland, and the Office for National Statistics.

Rick also presented a paper entitled Sex Differentials in Mortality: The Importance of Demographic, Socioeconomic, and Behavioral Factors, the Division of Social Statistics, University of Southampton, June 10.

Congratulations to Mike Radelet, who recently won two grants: $56,000 from the Tides Foundation, San Francisco, to conduct several information sessions for Familiess of Homicide Victims and Missing Persons around the State of Colorado this summer (with Howard Morton), and, earlier this week, $50,000 from the Vital Projects Fund, New York, to continue his three-decade old project collecting data on Florida death penalty cases.

Congratulations to Sara Steen, whose project entitled Education Lawmakers and Criminal Justice Professionals about Parole Revocation won a $5,000 grant from the CU-Boulder Outreach Committee.