Check out the SOAN Newsletter for May 2014

Recent Scholarly Activity
Recent publications (books, articles, blog posts, etc.)

Amy Best

Best, Amy “Racing Men: Boys, Risk and the Politics of Race” (2014) The Urban Ethnography Reader. Eds. Mitchell Duneier and Philip Kasinitz, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Reprinted from Fast Cars, Cool Rides: The Accelerating World of Youth and Their Cars (2006, NYU Press)


Best, Amy L. 2014. “Youth consumers and the fast-food market: The emotional landscape of micro-encounters, Situations as guide for action.” Food, Culture and Society: An International Journal of Interdisciplinary Research 17:2

Nancy Hanrahan

Her article, "Big Data, Little Music" was published online at Public Seminar: http://www.publicseminar.org/2014/03/big-data-little-music/#.U1AeGBROVDAst


Cortney Hughes Rinker


Cortney recently had her article, “Creating neoliberal citizens in Morocco: Reproductive health, development policy, and popular Islamic beliefs” accepted for a special issue of Medical Anthropology (expected January 2015) and her book review of Marybeth Macphee’s Vulnerability and the Art of Protection: Embodiment and Health Care in Moroccan Households will appear in the September issue of American Anthropologist. Also, Cortney is helping organize the Fifth Annual International Conference on Stigma, “Lean on Me: Standing Together for Human Rights in Health,” which focuses on stigmatization of HIV/AIDS and will take place on November 21, 2014 in Washington, D.C.

Rashmi Sadana

“Pitfalls of a Packaged Identity,” DNA (Daily News and Analysis). Print edition, p. 8, March 28, 2014. http://www.dnaindia.com/analysis/column-pitfalls-of-packaged-identity-1972756

Recent presentations (conferences, other universities, outside academia)


Shannon Davis

Tuttle, Joshua and Shannon N. Davis. “Religion, Infidelity, and Divorce: The Indirect Influence of Religiosity on Likelihood of Divorce.” Paper presented at the 77th Annual Meeting of the Southern Sociological Society, Charlotte, NC

Wills, Jeremiah B. and Shannon N. Davis. “How Do Child Characteristics Contribute to the Motherhood Wage Penalty?” Paper presented at the 77th Annual Meeting of the Southern Sociological Society, Charlotte, NC

Cortney Hughes Rinker

Cortney Hughes Rinker has presented at three conferences in Spring 2014. She gave two papers on preliminary data from her project on Islam, aging, and end-of-life care in the United States. The first was in March at the Religion and Medicine Conference in Chicago and the second was in April at the Western Social Science Association Annual Meeting in Albuquerque. Her paper from Chicago is being considered for the edited volume Treating the Person: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Perspectives on Medicine and the Body. She also gave a paper about previous research on Islamic feminism and reproductive health care in Morocco at the Southeastern Women’s Studies Association Meeting in March at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington.

Rashmi Sadana

“The Ethnography of Literature: Delhi as Field Site,” for a workshop on “Theorizing Fieldwork in the Humanities,” held at the University of Pittsburgh on March 28-29, 2014


"Architecture, Urban Design, and the Delhi Metro," paper presented at Cities at the Center of the World Conference sponsored by GMU's Center for Global Studies, April 22, 2014, at the Woodrow Wilson Center, Washington D.C.

Joseph Scimecca

"Playing Poker in Pubs: A Participant Observation," on April 10th at the International Organization of Social Science and Behavior Research," in Atlantic City, NJ.

Service (internships, consulting work, etc.)   
                                                                                                                                                          
Shannon Davis has been appointed the Program Committee Co-Chair for the 2015 Southern Sociological Society Annual Meeting (March 25-28 in New Orleans, LA).

Awards

Honors given at the Sociology and Anthropology awards ceremony on April 16, 2014:


Sociology
Outstanding Sociology Graduate Student Award : Sara Moore
AKD Outstanding Graduating Senior Award:  Dana Rutkowski  
Outstanding Sociology Undergraduate Student Award: Brittany Owen
Aliza Kolker Award for Sociology: Samantha Fletcher

Anthropology
Outstanding Anthropology M.A. Thesis: Chelsey Dyer
Outstanding Anthropology Graduate Student: Erik Josephson
Outstanding Anthropology Undergraduate Student Award: Miranda Carver
Thomas Rhys Williams Award: Talia Wujtewicz    

Other Awards:


Doctoral student Katie Kerstetter has been awarded the AKD graduate student paper prize for her paper, "Care Work and Teacher Retention at an Urban Charter School" based on her dissertation research and will have an opportunity to publish the paper in Sociological Inquiry.


Jessica Emami has been awarded a summer Presidential Scholarship from the Provost's office for $6,000.
“I envision the funding will enable me to continue working with CSSR Director and my advisor Dr. James Witte to complete the merging and analysis of the data, and to refine the results in order to form the basis for a series of briefs for the Institute for Immigration Research about Iranian Americans' contributions to the United States economy and society. This data analysis will serve as the foundation for my upcoming field statement and dissertation, which will be about the civic and cultural characteristics of Iranian immigrants in the United States. I hope you will consider funding these exciting scholarly endeavors.”

Jessica has also received a contract for the second year in a row to conduct the 2014 National Iranian American Public Opinion Survey sponsored by the Public Affairs Alliance of Iranian Americans (PAAIA).

Naliyah Kaya received the Honored Instructors Award, Transfer2Terp Learning Community from the Adele H. Stamp Student Union-Center for Campus Life, University of Maryland.


Madison Spagnolo (Sociology) received one of the undergraduate Dean's Challenge Scholarships from the College of Humanities and Social Sciences for Fall 2014.

Graduate student accomplishments

-Jeff Johnson successful defended his dissertation proposal in April and has advanced to candidacy.
-Marisa Allison accepted the position Assistant Director of Research, New Faculty Majority Foundation and in this role recently testified before congress on the matter contingent faculty.
-Dr. Sara Moore has accepted a tenure-track position in Department of Sociology at Salem State University.
-Congratulations to Emilia Guevara and John Lunsford, two graduates of the Master's program in Anthropology. Emilia has been accepted into the Ph.D. program at the University of Maryland where she will be focusing on medical anthropology. Her M.A. thesis was entitled, Cultural Performance, Meaning, and the Day of the Dead. She has received funding for 4 years! John Lunsford will be beginning the Ph.D. program at Cornell in Fall 2014. He has an interest in science and technology and his thesis was, Toward a Thicker Description of Virtual Worlds as Sites of Deep Play: Technological Mediation of the Expression of Intent and Interpretation of Meaning in World of Warcraft's North American Servers.We are wishing Emilia and John all the best of luck in their future endeavors!

Mentions in the media

Rebecca Forrest

In March the University of Toronto Press posted a piece on the murder class Rebecca Forrest teaches. http://www.utpteachingculture.com/sharing-syllabi-murder-and-culture/


Johanna Bockman

-On April 10th, Johanna Bockman spoke on radio station WOL about cooperatives, sociology, DuBois, Durkheim, and Mayor Barry, as a kind of historical sociologist of the DC cooperative movement for the online Coop Directory of Coop DC, http://coopdc.org/.

Professional Development and Career Building

The Anthropology graduate program sponsored a workshop for its graduate students “Preparing for your Thesis or Project” on April 16, 2014 in addition to a graduate student Q&A session. Three of the current graduate students who are close to finishing (Erik Josephson, Michelle Roth, and Caitlyn Carr) in addition to a winter graduate (Darius Salimi) shared their experiences in the program with first year anthropology M.A. students and answered questions. It was a great opportunity for the students to meet each other and for the first-year students to learn more about what to expect as they progress through the Master’s program.

Other Announcements

Events happening within the department, college, and related centers ( e.g. CSSR, IIR, WGST)
-Remember that the DC Sociological Society will have its Annual Banquet on Wednesday, May 21st starting at 6:15pm. It's a great way to network with other grad students and faculty at area schools, as well as with sociologists working outside of academia. For more info, http://www.dcsociologicalsociety.org/events.html. Sociology grad students, if you have any questions, etc, feel free to contact Johanna Bockman (jbockman@gmu.edu).