Current Sociology PhD Students

Sociology

Dr. Marisa Allison graduated with her Ph.D. in Public and Applied Sociology from George Mason University in December 2022. While working on her doctoral degree, Marisa served as the Research Director with the New Faculty Majority Foundation, a grassroots research and advocacy non-profit focused on improving the working conditions for contingent faculty in higher education. She continues to hold a Research Fellow position with the organization. With a strong commitment to organic public sociology, action research, and liberatory higher education, Marisa entered into the emerging field of critical university studies after several years in the higher education movement arena where her scholarship and activism has focused on academic labor conditions, gendered work, student debt, and corporate influence in higher education. Marisa has been involved in the academic labor movement in the U.S. for the last 13 years, working with unions and campus organizers to better labor conditions on college and university campuses. Because of that work, along with her experience as an adjunct for the last two decades, she has sat on two U.S. Congressional Briefing Panels speaking on working conditions in U.S. colleges and universities and is the 2015 recipient of the American Sociological Association’s Robert Dentler Award for Outstanding Student Achievement in Sociological Practice and Public Sociology. Marisa served on the American Sociological Association’s Contingent Faculty Task Force, is a board member for the Center for the Study of Academic Labor at Colorado State University, and is a founding member of the contingent faculty interest group at the National Women’s Studies Association. Her work has been featured in the Washington Post, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed, Virginia Public Radio, NPR’s Marketplace, Science, and Feministing. Now back in Alabama, she is involved in the Solidarity Economy in the South Network that is affiliated with the Highlander Center and continues to work in community with other publicly engaged academics to see how solidarity economies can work to help reimagine a higher education for the public good. Marisa continues to teach for the Sociology program in an online capacity.