Current Sociology MA Students

Margaret Zeddies

Margaret Zeddies

Margaret Zeddies

Sociology: Children and Youth, Cultural Sociology, Globalization, Humanitarian Aid, International Development, Public Sociology, Political Economy, Postcolonialism, Study Abroad

Margaret Zeddies is a Sociology PhD Student at George Mason University. Her dissertation focuses on postcolonial study abroad and how how study abroad can be part of global systems of power and inequality. A postcolonial approach to study abroad takes issue with the premise of global citizenship unless systemic and historical issues of power are addressed as well, and asks if study abroad is neocolonial. By looking at different forms of labor in study abroad, the project aims to make visible the ways that American students, Ghanian students, and host communities contribute value to study abroad, and how this contributes to or challenges the social reproduction of neocolonial relations. 

Her previous work includes discourses and the emotional debt of voluntourism with children in the Global South; the social construction of childhood within INGOs and the Millennium Development Goals; and how international development organizations rely on narratives of charity rather than solidarity, particularly when it comes to children. 

Before starting the PhD program at Mason, Margaret worked with global nonprofit organizations in the D.C. area on issues of refugee resettlement, international child labor, and building civil society. 

Selected Publications

Zeddies, Margaret and Szusza Millei. 2015. “It Takes a Global Village: Troubling Discourses of Global Citizenship in United Planet’s Voluntourism.” Global Studies of Childhood, vol. 5, no. 1 (part 2). https://doi.org/10.1177/2043610615573383

Bockman, Johanna and Margaret Zeddies. 2023.  “Neoliberalism.” Encyclopedia of Political Sociology. Edward Elgar Publishing. 

Zeddies, Margaret. 2020. “Millennium Development Goals.” The SAGE Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood Studies, edited by D.T. Cook. Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications, Ltd.

Zeddies, Margaret. 2020. “Non-governmental Organizations.” The SAGE Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood Studies, edited by D.T. Cook. Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications, Ltd.

 

Grants and Fellowships

Summer 2022 GMU Provost Research Fellowship

Fall 2022 Center for Humanities Research Residential Fellowship 

 

Education

M.Phil. Childhood Studies

Norwegian University of Science and Technology, 2013

B.A. Anthropology

University of Kansas, 2003