Sociology Faculty and Students
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Department of Sociology

Gender, Sexuality and Embodiment

  • Brooks, Ethel

    • Ethel Brooks
    • Ethel Brooks
    • Associate Professor and Chair of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
    • Ph.D. New York University, 2000
    • Office: 132 George Street
    • Phone: 732-445-7395
    • Dr. Brooks is an Associate Professor in Women’s and Gender Studies and Sociology, teaches courses in comparative and historical sociology, globalization and postcolonial social formations. She is currently finishing a book on transnational organizing in the garment industry with a focus on Dhaka , San Salvador and New York City.

      Dr. Brooks is interested in relations of gender, race, class, labor practices and nation-state formations, with a focus on South Asia, Central America and the United States. Her research explores areas of critical political economy, globalization, social movements, feminist theory, comparative sociology, nationalism, urban geographies and post-colonialism, with close attention to epistemology. In her dissertation, she examined three transnationally-organized protest movements for workers' rights in the global garment industry: (1) against poor working conditions in export-processing zones in El Salvador; (2) against the use of child labor in the Bangladesh garment industry; and (3) against immigrant sweatshops in New York City. Her work focuses on the relationship between protest organizers and the mostly women workers they represent, as part of the everyday manifestations of globalized production practices. She is currently working on a book that looks at transnational labor organizing, women's work and relations of globalization and empire.

      Dr. Brooks's recent and forthcoming publications include "Transnational Protest, Production and Women's Labor: The politics of sweatshops and the global garment industry," forthcoming in The Journal of International Labor and Working Class History, 2001; "Bangladesh's Garment Industry, Child Labor and Urban Sustainability," forthcoming in Saskia Sassen, ed., The Encyclopedia of Urban Sustainability, (UNESCO: 2001); "Globalized Chinese Capital in Central America," with Amy Freedman, in Asian Pacific Perspectives, May 2001; "Campañas transnacionales de protesta y la nueva división internacional de trabajo: Cuestiones de género en el sector maquila," in Apuntes de Investigación, November 2000; and "After the Wars: Cross-Border Organizing in Central America" with Winifred Tate in NACLA: Report on the Americas, Special Issue on Labor, January/February 1999. Her future projects include an examination of consumption practices and discourses of empire, gender and agrobusiness in Central America and South Asia and a critical study of Romanies and discursive formations of "gypsiness." Professor Brooks has a joint appointment with the Department of Women's and Gender Studies.

    • Program Areas:
    • Culture and Cognition
    • Gender, Sexuality and Embodiment
    • Global Structures
    • Organizations, Networks, and Work
  • Bzostek, Sharon

  • Kempner, Joanna

    • Joanna Kempner
    • Joanna Kempner
    • Associate Professor
    • Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania, 2004
    • Office: Davison Hall, 134
    • Personal Website
    • Curriculum Vitae
    • Joanna Kempner, associate professor of sociology at Rutgers University, works at the intersection of medicine, science, gender, and the body. Kempner’s research investigates knowledge production as cultural work, inscribed with and shaped by tacit cultural assumptions and social relations. Her award-winning book, Not Tonight: Migraine and the Politics of Gender and Health (Chicago 2014), examines the social values embedded in how we talk about, understand, and make policies for people in pain. Kempner is also on the vanguard of research investigating what we do not know, aka the social production of ignorance. She is currently writing a book that tracks the role that citizen scientists are playing in the reemergence of psychedelic medicine.

      Professor Kempner received her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, participated in the Robert Wood Johnson Scholars in Health Policy Research Program and worked as a Research Associate at the Center for Health and Wellbeing at Princeton University. She has won several awards for her research, including the 2016 American Sociological Association’s Eliot Freidson award for Outstanding Publication in Medical Sociology, the 2016 Eileen Basker Memorial Prize, awarded by the Society for Medical Anthropology, and the Rutgers Board of Trustees Research Fellowship for Scholarly Excellence, one of Rutgers’ highest honors. She writes for a wide variety of audiences, publishing in journals like Science, Social Science & Medicine, Gender & Society, and Public Library of Science Medicine. You can follow her on twitter at @joannakempner or read about her work on her website at www.joannakempner.com.

    • In the Public Eye:
    • Faculty Article(s):
    • Collective self-experimentation in patient-led research: How online health communities foster innovation
    • Faculty Bookshelf:
    • Not Tonight: Migraine and the Politics of Gender and Health
    • Program Areas:
    • Culture and Cognition
    • Gender, Sexuality and Embodiment
    • Health, Population, and Biomedicine
  • Lee, Catherine

    • Catherine Lee
    • Catherine Lee
    • Associate Professor
    • Ph.D. University of California, Los Angeles, 2003
    • Office: Davison Hall, 141
    • Personal Website
    • Phone: 848-932-7807
    • Curriculum Vitae
    • Catherine Lee is associate professor of sociology and faculty associate at the Institute for Health, Health Care Policy, and Aging Research. As a political sociologist, she examines how meanings of race and ethnicity shape social relations and inequalities across three critical sites: immigration; science and medicine; and law and society. Catherine is the author of Fictive Kinship: Family Reunification and the Meaning of Race and Nation in American Immigration (2013, Russell Sage) and co-editor of Genetics and the Unsettled Past: The Collision of DNA, Race, and History (2012, Rutgers University Press). Her current projects include an investigation of the use of DNA testing in family reunification cases in the United States and Europe and of the meaning of diversity in U.S. biomedicine given shifting ethnic and racial demographics and the rise of multiraciality due to increased immigration.

    • In the Public Eye:
    • Program Areas:
    • Culture and Cognition
    • Gender, Sexuality and Embodiment
    • Health, Population, and Biomedicine
    • Politics and Social Movements
    • Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration
  • MacKendrick, Norah

  • Salime, Zakia

    • Zakia Salime
    • Zakia Salime
    • Associate Professor
    • Ph.D. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2005
    • Office: Davison Hall, 137
    • Phone: 848-932-7798
    • Curriculum Vitae
    • Zakia Salime teaches courses in feminist theory, gender, globalization, contemporary social theory, social movements, postcolonial theory. Salime’s book: Between Feminism and Islam: Human Rights and Sharia Law in Morocco (Minnesota, 2011) illustrates this interplay of global regimes of rights and local discourses by exploring the spaces of encounters of liberal feminism and Islamism in Morocco.  Her co-edited volume Freedom Without Permission: Bodies and Spaces in the Arab Revolutions (Duke, 2016) explores how bodies, subjectivities and memories were constituted and constitutive of sexed and gendered spaces during the North African and Middle Easter Uprisings of 2011. Salime’s current book manuscript explores global extractive modes of governance through the study of land-and-resource-grab in Morocco. The study unpacks the nexus of law, power, gender, and capital through attending to peasant populations' quotidian dealing with the state and its regimes of legality, citizenship, inclusion and exclusion.  Salime publications encompass a wide range of interests including urban youth protests and music, Islamophobia, war and racial politics in the U.S.

      My current book manuscript Seeing like a Woman: Land and Extractive Governance in Morocco foregrounds peasant women’s own understanding of the social and cultural transformations taking place in the context of intensified land privatization and extractivist governance. I write these stories by centering women’s daily dwelling to unpack the bureaucratic and legal regimes obstructing their access to land, the words through which they grapple with economic and social change, and the desireshopes, and pain through which they articulate the present and imagine the future. This project documents these hopes and desires as an integral part of the present history of neoliberal encounters. I understand this present history as messy and traversed with antagonistic meanings of value, place, legality, and gender. My ethnographic fieldwork and research help answering a set of questions: What do we learn about neoliberal encounters by listening to un-schooled, dispossessed yet resourceful rural women? What does women’s mobilization against land and resource privatization tell us about the hasty implementation of development projects, and the slow yet daily penetration of ‘rent’, and circulation of multiscalar capital? What do we learn about the state, its ‘verticality’, or ‘effects’ at this juncture of privatization and protests? What kind of legitimation and reconfiguration of political power takes place when women engage with the capitalist penetration of their local community? What kind of power and authority are strengthen and disrupted?

    • In the Public Eye:
    • Faculty Bookshelf:
    • Freedom Without Permission: Bodies and Space in the Arab Revolutions
    • Program Areas:
    • Culture and Cognition
    • Gender, Sexuality and Embodiment
    • Global Structures
    • Politics and Social Movements
  • Springer, Kristen W.

    • Kristen W. Springer
    • Kristen W. Springer
    • Associate Professor
    • Ph.D. University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2006
    • Office: Davison Hall, 040
    • Curriculum Vitae
    •  

      Kristen W. Springer is Associate Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University (PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2006; MA, Yale University, 2000; MPH, Emory University, 1997; BS, University of California at Santa Cruz).

      Professor Springer’s scholarship focuses broadly on gender and health, prioritizing the intersection of social and biological influences. Her current research explores how the anti-transgender legislative climate harms health access for transgender youth, with a particular focus on how youth of color are affected. Other recent areas of research include: 1) experimental studies of biosocial reactions to masculinity threats; 2) conceptual and methodological interventions for how to best research gender and health using biosocial and intersectional frameworks; and 3) quantitative analyses on masculinity ideals, socioeconomic status, marriage, and men’s health. She has published in journals including American Journal of SociologyAmerican Journal of Public HealthGender & Society, Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Journal of Marriage and Family, Social Science & Medicine, and Social Science Research. Professor Springer’s research has also been featured in national and international news sources including ABC News, LA Times, The New York Times, US News & World Report, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today. She teaches classes on research methods, family, gender, and biosociology.

    • Faculty Article(s):
    • Beyond a catalogue of differences: A theoretical frame and good practice guidelines for researching sex/gender in human health
    • Program Areas:
    • Gender, Sexuality and Embodiment
    • Health, Population, and Biomedicine
  • Stein, Arlene

Undergraduate Program

Undergraduate Program

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Graduate Program

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In the Public Eye

Featured Courses

Upcoming Events

Culture Workshop
03 Apr 2024
11:30AM - 12:45PM
Undergraduate Honors Presentations
10 Apr 2024
09:00AM - 12:00PM
Department Luncheon
10 Apr 2024
12:00PM - 01:00PM
Executive Committee Meeting
17 Apr 2024
10:00AM -

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