Sociology Department News
Professor Ryken Grattet presented with the 2010 Distinguished Scholarly Public Service Award by the UC Davis Academic Senate
Professor Grattet was given the award for his research and public service on hate crime law and the California prison and parole system.
Raoul Lievanos invited to participate in the Advanced Spatial Pattern Analysis workshop at UCSB
Raoul Lievanos was one of 24 Ph.D. students, post-doctoral fellows, and early faculty members invited to participate in the National Institutes of Health-supported Advanced Spatial Pattern Analysis national workshop offered by The Pennsylvania State University Population Research Institute and the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) Center for Spatially Integrated Social Sciences.
New Article by Drew Halfmann and Michael P. Young on Grotesque Images and Social Movements
The article examines the uses and effects of grotesque imagery in the antislavery and antiabortion movements and considers implications for theories of movement framing and mobilization.
Professor Thomas D. Beamish analysis of the Gulf of Mexico Platform Heritage Disaster, "The BP Disaster and the Hobson's Choice of Oil Production" has been published online at ClimateProgress.com and MIT Press
Why weren't containment chambers on shore and ready for deployment? That is one of the many questions that Dr. Thomas D. Beamish poses in this guest post.
Daniel Herda's Article, "How Many Immigrants?" Forthcoming in Public Opinion Quarterly, Summer 2010
This paper explores the tendency to over-estimate minority and immigrant population sizes across 21 European nations, using data from the 2002 European Social Survey.
Kim Ebert invited to attend the Young Scholars Conference hosted by The Center for the Study of Social Movements
Kim Ebert was one of the 12 nominees selected to be a participant in the "Young Scholars Conference" hosted by The Center for the Study of Social Movements at the University of Notre Dame on April 9, 2010.
Robin Pleau's article "Gender Differences in Post-Retirement Employment" forthcoming in Research on Aging, May 2010
This paper examines gender differences in post-retirement employment, using 1992-2006 data from the Health and Retirement Study on Americans born between 1931 and 1941. Gender is shown to be an important factor in understanding transitions into post-retirement employment for this cohort.
"Alliance-Building Across Social Movements: Bridging Difference in a Peace and Justice Coalition" by Thomas D. Beamish and Amy J. Luebbers published in Social Problems
Alliance building across social movement groups is an important aspect of social movement dynamics, contributing to their viability and capacity to promote social change. Yet, with few exceptions, cross-movement coalitions have received little sustained theoretical or empirical attention.
Sarah Ovink Awarded AERA Dissertation Grant
Sarah Ovink was awarded one of 15 dissertation grants ($20,000) from the American Education Research Association (AERA).
Diane Felmlee, David Orzechowicz, and Carmen Fortes's article, "Fairy Tales: Attraction Processes in Same-Gender Relationships," published in Sex Roles
Article challenges stereotypes about same-gender relationships often found in discourses on same-gender marriage.
Raoul S. Lievanos and co-authors Fraser Shilling and Jonathan K. London published in Environmental Science and Policy
New article by Raoul S. Lievanos and co-authors Fraser Shilling and Jonathan K. London published in a special issue on collaborative governance and adaptive management in California’s Water Program, CALFED, in the international journal, Environmental Science and Policy.
Bruce Haynes designated for 2009 Chancellor's Award
Bruce Haynes was awarded the 2009 Chancellor's Award, Soaring to New Heights Special Citation for Diversity and Principles of Community. This award recognizes staff members who, through their own personal efforts, have made significant contributions to affirmative action/equal employment opportunity or heightened awareness and sensitivity to diversity.
Professor Natalia Deeb-Sossa and Eric Nelson nominated for Teaching Award
Professor Natalia Deeb-Sossa and Eric Nelson have been nominated as finalists for the 7th annual Excellence in Education award in the College of Letters of Science.
Graduate students present at PAA 2009
Four sociology graduate students – Cassie Hartzog, Dan Herda, Robin Pleau and Jesse Rude – recently presented their research at the 2009 meeting of the Population Association of America (PAA) in Detroit, Michigan. This is the most successful showing of our students at PAA to date. They presented in regular paper sessions and poster sessions, received a lot of interest and positive feedback from discussants and session participants, and were even the subject of a Wall Street Journal blog entry.
Bruce Haynes designated the 2009 Martin Luther King Outstanding Educator by the Martin Luther King Jr. Scholarship Fund
Bruce Haynes has been designated the 2009 Martin Luther King Outstanding Educator by the Martin Luther King Jr. Scholarship Fund. Last week, he was honored for this at a large dinner and awards ceremony which also honored new mayor of Sacramento, Kevin Johnson, and others who were recipients of scholarships, lifetime achievement awards, and outstanding community service awards.
Ryken Grattet's paper, "The Urban Ecology of Bias Crime: A Study of Disorganized and Defended Neighborhoods" published in the February issue of Social Problems
Ryken's article examines the neighborhood characteristics that affect bias crime and compares bias crime to other kinds of criminal offending.
Bill McCarthy and Teresa Casey's paper, "Love, Sex and Crime: Adolescent Romantic Relationships and Offending" published in the American Sociological Review
Bill McCarthy and Teresa Casey's paper, Love, Sex and Crime: Adolescent Romantic Relationships and Offending, was recently published in the American Sociological Review (ASR) and was highlighted in the ASA December newsletter's Hot Off the Press: Journal Highlights section and on the ASR homepage.
Eric Nelson will receive the "Kenny Joseph" award from the Peace Officer's Research Association of California (PORAC)
Eric Nelson will receive the award from the Peace Officer's Research Association of California on November 22 2008. The "Kenny Joseph" award is given to an individual who has made a substantial contribution to the advancement of police welfare in the last year. Earlier this year Eric was requested by State Assembly Majority Speaker Karen Bass to research Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus infections in police officers and firefighters in order to quantify the extent of the problem, and the statistical likelihood that MRSA infections are work related. Eric testified five times before California Senate and Assembly committees, leading to passage of AB2754 which Governor Schwarzenegger signed into law recently. The findings will be submitted for publication shortly.
Ryken Grattet has a new article in the September 2008 issue of Social Forces entitled "Transforming Symbolic Law into Organizational Action: Hate Crime Policy and Law Enforcement Practice."
For decades sociologists, criminologists, political scientists and socio-legal scholars alike have focused on the symbolic and instrumental dimensions of law in examinations of the effects of social reform and policy implementation. Following in this tradition, we focus on the relationship between hate crime policy and hate crime reporting to identify the conditions under which a symbolic law is accompanied by instrumental effects at the initial phase of the law enforcement process – the official recording of a hate crime event.
Laura Grindstaff offered and accepted a three-year term as Director of the Consortium for Women and Research
We begin this new academic year with an announcement about our colleague Laura Grindstaff, who has been offered (and has accepted) a three-year term as Director of the Consortium for Women and Research.
Raoul Lievanos awarded two research fellowships
Raoul Lievanos has been awarded a UC Community Forestry and Environmental Research Partnerships (CFERP) Predissertation Fellowship from the Ford Foundation and the UC Berkeley College of Natural Resources in the amount of $2,000 for summer 2008. CFERP fellowships are highly competitive and open to graduate and undergraduate students from all over the U.S. The program goals are (1) to develop good participatory research skills in practitioners, (2) to nurture a new generation of scholars committed to engaging constructively with communities, and (3) to build community capacity to steward natural resources and have a voice in their own affairs. This predissertation fellowship will allow Lievanos to explore potential field sites for future research and will aid him as the current lead field researcher and project manager for the "Environmental Justice Coalition for Water Delta Health Study." Funded additionally by the Rose Foundation and the UC Davis Environmental Justice Project, this project seeks to identify and assess the full range of environmental risks and concerns to human health resulting from poor water quality in the Delta, and sharing this information with participating communities, the broader public, and policy-makers in the Delta Vision Strategic Planning process.
"Privileged Emotion Managers: The Case of Actors" by David Orzechowicz appears in Social Psychology Quarterly
In the June 2008 issue of Social Psychology Quarterly, this ethnographic piece considers the structural conditions under which actors engage in emotion management and challenges the long standing emphasis in the emotions literature on the ways organizations constrain people's abilities to evoke and suppress feelings. David argues that theatre provides actors with resources that enable feeling management. He identifies three structures - theatre's division of labor, the rehearsal process, and formal training - that give actors important advantages in managing emotions compared to many other social settings. These structures outsource some emotion management from actors to others involved in the production of a show and provide a set of institutionally prescribed strategies that actors use to manage feelings in a production.
Dina Okamoto is the Recipient of the ASA Section on Asia and Asian America's Early Career Award
Dina Okamoto was announced as the recipient of the ASA Section on Asia and Asian America's Early Career Award. The Section's Early Career Award recognizes a scholar in the early stage of her/his career (no more than 10 years post Ph.D. award date) and who is conducting exemplary research on the sociology of Asia or Asian American communities. Dina will receive her award at the ASA Meetings in Boston in August.
Sarah Ovink Awarded National Science Foundation Dissertation Grant for 2008-09
Sarah Ovink has been awarded $7500 in funding through the NSF Dissertation Improvement Grant program. The National Science Foundation's Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences (BCS), Division of Social and Economic Sciences (SES), and Division of Science Resources Statistics (SRS) award grants to doctoral students to improve the quality of dissertation research. These grants provide funds for items not normally available through the student's university. Additionally, these grants allow doctoral students to undertake significant data-gathering projects and to conduct field and archival research in settings away from their campus that would not otherwise be possible.
"Lighting the Fire Inside: Vilification in the Pro-Life and Pro-Choice Movements," received an Honorable Mention
Sarah Augusto's paper, "Lighting the Fire Inside: Vilification in the Pro-Life and Pro-Choice Movements," has received an Honorable Mention in the Graduate Student Paper Award Competition of the ASA Emotions Section.
Diane Felmlee awarded Outstanding Mentor Award from the Consortium for Women and Research
The award honors Academic Senate and Academic Federation members for mentoring post-docs, graduate students and/or undergraduates in research, professional development.
Lucas Owen Kirkpatrick Receives the 2008 Community and Urban Sociology Section (ASA) Best Graduate Student Paper Award
Lucas Owen Kirkpatrick received the best graduate student paper award for his article titled "The Two 'Logics' of Community Development: Neighborhoods, Markets, and Community Development Corporations." This article was published in 2007 in POLITICS AND SOCIETY (vol. 35, issue 2, pp. 329-359). The Award will be presented at the ASA meetings in Boston (August 2, 2008).
New article on patient culture by Ming-cheng Lo and Clare Stacey published in Sociology of Health and Illness
In response to widely documented racial and ethnic disparities in health, clinicians and public health advocates have taken great strides to implement ‘culturally competent’ care. While laudable, this important policy and intellectual endeavor has suffered from a lack of conceptual clarity and rigour. This paper develops a more careful conceptual model for understanding the role of culture in the clinical encounter, paying particular attention to the relationship between culture, contexts and social structures.
Brian Dick Awarded Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellowship
Brian Dick was awarded the Spencer Dissertation Fellowship for Research Related to Education in the amount of $25,000 for the writing of his dissertation, Legitimating Superstring Theory: A Sociological Analysis of a Theory of Everything. The Spencer Foundations Dissertation Fellowship Program seeks to encourage a new generation of scholars to undertake research relevant to the improvement of education.
Community Policing, Ghetto-Style: Law and Order in Chicago's Southside
Sudhir Venkatesh, Professor of Sociology at Columbia University, will deliver the Sociology Department's 2008 Lemert Lecture. The Lecture will take place Thursday, April 17, 2008 and begins at 4:00 p.m. at the International House. A reception will follow.