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Department of Sociology Newsletter

Issue 14: September 19, 2022
Dear Colleagues and Friends,

Welcome back! I hope your fall semester is off to a good start. It has been great to see many of you around campus.

Many exciting things are afoot at Rutgers Sociology.  We are thrilled to welcome three new faculty colleagues this fall: Danielle Falzon, Karam Hwang, and Ricardo Martinez-Schultdz. You can learn more about their research interests below. We also extend a warm welcome to our incoming cohort of graduate students.  Please take a moment to stop by and say hello to our new department members.  It is truly wonderful to have you all as part of our community.

Check out our events coming up this semester, including a terrific speaker series organized by Karen Cerulo, Steve Brechin, Leslie Jones, Catherine Lee, Ricardo Martinez-Schultz, and Hana Shepherd. Our series this year will be a mix of in-person and zoom talks. I'm also pleased to share the news that Aghil Daghagheleh has been selected to present this year's Jason B Phillips Memorial Lecture. Congratulations, Aghil! I hope you'll join us for the teaching lunch and several departmental social events, including a happy hour in honor of our outgoing GPD, Steve Brechin, this week.

Rutgers undergraduate majors and minors, we now have a new option to pursue an internship for academic credit towards your degree.  The UG Sociology Club will be planning a couple of fun events for you to enjoy this year. Details are below.

We are finally emerging, I hope, from a two plus year period of exhaustion and worry, and of being physically apart, as a result of the pandemic. As are so many, we are re-evaluating our priorities and reimagining the workplace. The fall speaker series is hybrid, but we have planned a good deal of in-person events -- whether meetings, talks, workshops, or social events -- on Wednesdays. We'd love to see as many of you as possible on that day, so that we can maintain strong social connections and intellectual vitality within the department.

Please stop by when you're in the department and say hello!

Julie Phillips
Department Chair
News
We are delighted to welcome three new colleagues who join our faculty this fall: Danielle Falzon, Ricardo Martinez-Schuldt and Karam Hwang.  You can learn a little more about them below. Please reach out and make them feel at home at Rutgers Sociology.
Danielle Falzon

Danielle Falzon received her Ph.D. in Sociology from Brown University in 2022 and joins our faculty as an assistant professor. Her research brings together insights from environmental sociology, global and transnational studies, organizations, and critical development. She also draws upon insights from the environmental humanities, science and technology studies, and political ecology.

Danielle’s work uses primarily qualitative methods to examine power and inequality in decision-making about climate change. She aims to work across scales, connecting the global to the local through meso-level organizational intermediaries.

Her current research focuses in two (connected) sites: the UN climate negotiations and the field of climate adaptation work in Bangladesh. At each site she examines the relational and structural power differentials between actors and how these dynamics work for or against climate justice. Her current work at the UN climate negotiations examines obstruction in the areas of loss and damage, climate finance, and adaptation. Her work in Bangladesh elucidates the field of organizational actors involved in efforts to adapt communities to climate impacts and analyzes the implications of the norms and priorities that guide their efforts. She is also developing individual and collaborative projects on climate displacement, locally-led adaptation, and a text-based analysis of global flows of aid and climate finance.

Danielle is affiliated with the International Centre for Climate Change (ICCCAD) in Bangladesh and the Climate Social Science Network (CSSN).
 

Welcome, Danielle!

Ricardo Martinez-Schuldt

Ricardo received his PhD in sociology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2019 and joins us as an assistant professor. Broadly, his research examines how local contexts shape human behavior and institutional actions in the areas of criminology and international migration.

His current research focuses on the neighborhood and city-level correlates of crime, crime reporting behavior, and officer-involved shootings. In particular, his work considers the impact of immigrant “sanctuary” policies, immigration, and non-profit organizations on city-level violence as well as their effects on the likelihood that individuals report crime victimization to law enforcement officials.

He is also the co-principal investigator (with Kraig Beyerlein, University of Notre Dame) for the Chicago Congregation Project. With his colleagues, he employs a diverse array of methodologies to locate, identify, and study religious congregations in urban areas. In particular, the Chicago Congregation Project will allow them to study how community-level contexts impacts religious congregations, especially as it pertains to engagement in their local communities. At the same time, the project aims to better understand the role of congregations in shaping community-level dynamics.
 

Welcome, Ricardo!

 
Karam Hwang

Karam joins our faculty as an Assistant Teaching Professor. She teaches core courses for the Sociology Major, including Introduction to Social Research, Six Great Reads, and Introduction to Sociology. Her research uses interpretive and statistical methods to explain variations in perceptions and lived experiences of race, class, and gender inequality both within and outside of the United States. Her dissertation used original longitudinal interview, survey, social network, and observational data to examine how differing campus cultures shaped the aspirations, race consciousness, and friendships of an ethnoracially and socioeconomically diverse sample of U.S. undergraduates.


Welcome, Karam!

New Book!
Professor Karen A. Cerulo and Graduate Program alumna Janet M. Ruane published Dreams of a Lifetime: How Who We Are Shapes How We Imagine Our Future. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, June 21, 2022.

Congratulations, Karen!
Welcome to our incoming students!
Please extend a special welcome to our incoming cohort of graduate students! Hanee Choi, Jael Humphry-Skomer, Dewan Lamisa, Seungyn Lee, Bradley Myers, Stella Petkova and Kathryn Wanner.  Check out their profiles on our website to learn more about their research interests. We look forward to working with you. 
Publications

An excerpt of the book Dreams of a Lifetime: How Who We Are Shapes How We Imagine Our Future. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press by Professor Karen A. Cerulo and Graduate Program alumna Janet M. Ruane was published in The Big Think on August 23, 2022.

Paul Hirschfield wrote an article for Foreign Affairs which explains why rates of public mass shooting shootings are much higher in the United States than elsewhere in the world, especially Latin America.  You can read the article for free via this link.

Lei Lei has recently published an article "The COVID-19 pandemic and residential mobility intentions in the United States: Evidence from Google Trends data" in Population Space and Place. Please check it out here  

Arlene Stein published an essay (coauthored with Phil Zuckerman) on the dangerous implications of two recent Supreme Court cases concerning religion.
 
In September, Arlene Stein's coedited volume, Perils of Populism was published by Rutgers University Press, which concerns the global rise of right-wing populism and the threat it poses to democracy. It collects lectures presented by leading academics and activists at the Institute for Research on Women, Rutgers.
 
In October, Beacon Press will be releasing a new edition of Arlene Stein's 2001 book The Stranger Next Door: The Story of a Small Community’s Battle Over Sex, Faith, and Civil Rights, updated to take into account the growing power of the populist right in the US. 

Eviatar Zerubavel published the article "Learning from Goffman: Toward a Concept-Driven Transcontextual Sociology" in Michael H. Jacobsen and Greg Smith (eds.), The Routledge International Handbook of Goffman Studies (Routledge).  
Undergraduate News
Welcome Back, Rutgers Sociology Undergraduates!
We hope you all had a great summer and that your first couple of weeks of classes have started well.  It's so great to have you back on campus!

Please don't hesitate to reach out to the department and/or your instructors if you have any difficulty or problems. Our Undergraduate Program Coordinator position is currently vacant but we are working on filling this position ASAP.  Please reach out via email (undergrad-soc@sociology.rutgers.edu) or you can contact the Undergraduate Director Jeff Dowd via email (ug-dir@sociology.rutgers.edu) .
The Sociology department encourages all junior and senior Sociology majors and minors to consider completing an internship for academic credit in our program.  Internships create important pathways toward future employment. They can help students gain professional experience for their resume, sort through career choices, establish credentials and contacts in a job field, and apply the knowledge they’ve learned through coursework to real-world work.  You can learn more here and we encourage you to reach out to the undergraduate office if you have any questions. We'd love to support your efforts.

The Rutgers Sociology Department has reinitiated our Chapter membership of Alpha Kappa Delta, the International Sociology Honors Society.  All eligible undergraduates may apply.  Members this year will coordinate several events for all our undergraduates through the RU UG Sociology Club.  Please join us.

Stay tuned for more detail! 
Alumni News

Lee, Po-Han & Ying-Chao Kao. 2022. “Health Apartheid during COVID-19: A Decolonial Critique of Racial Politics between Taiwan and the WHO.” International Journal of Taiwan Studies 5(2):375–402. (Equally shared authorship)

Kao, Ying-Chao. 2022. “One Virus, Two Worlds: A Taiwanese Queer Stranger’s ‘World’-Traveling and Loving in the COVID U.S.” Pp. 216–229 in Global Feminist Autoethnographies During COVID-19: Displacements and Disruptions, edited by M. Heath, A. Darkwah, J. Beoku-Betts, and B. Purkayastha. New York: Routledge.

Kao, Ying-Chao. 2021. “The Coloniality of Queer Theory: The Effects of ‘Homonormativity’ on Transnational Taiwan’s Path to Equality.” Sexualities. Online First, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/13634607211047518

Our faculty colleague Karen A. Cerulo and Graduate Program Alumna Janet M. Ruane have done several media appearances for their new book Dreams of a Lifetime: How Who We Are Shapes How We Imagine Our Future, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. In every issue, the Culture Section Newsletter focuses on a cultural sociologist that has influenced the field in important ways.  Our faculty colleague, Karen Cerulo, was the subject of the latest article on this topic.  Read “Four questions for Karen A. Cerulo.” 

Tom Davidson was invited to speak to an expert group at the European Commission's EU Observatory on the Platform Economy on September 20th, 2022 about his research on hate speech detection and content moderation. Tom will present his findings to an expert panel focused on discrimination and content moderation. You can find out more about the European Commission's work in this area here.
Paul Hirschfield provided background consulting for a feature segment about School Resource Officers for an episode of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, which originally aired on June 5th, 2022. You can also learn more about Paul's research below:

Marty Oppenheimer, who turned 92 in July, will once again be leading a discussion group for Evergreen Forum, part of the Princeton Senior Resource Center's educational programming. The course is "The Sociology and Psychology of Oppression." His courses the past two Fall semesters have been on Fascism, and Socialism.  His latest publication appears in New Politics magazine, Summer, 2022. Title: "Will the Real Fascists Please Stand Up?" It can be accessed online. 

In Fall 2022, Arlene Stein is a senior visiting fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies, University College London, Fall 2022, where I will be working on my project “Forgetting American Fascisms.” 
 
 
Some Photos from Randy Smith's Retirement Send-Off and our Welcome Lunch.

Our very own Lisa Iorillo will be running in the Berlin marathon on Sunday, September 25.  

Go, Lisa!

What's going on in Davison Hall? 
Please mark your calendar for these other department events this fall.

 
September 28  12-1:30pm   Teaching Lunch co-sponsored with GUSS 
 
September 21  5pm  Department Happy Hour (Thank you, Steve!)

 
October 12. 11:30am-1pm. Learning Goals Assessment Meeting
                                                                        
October 19  UG social event (Sociology Club)
                              
November 2. 3-4pm. Department Tea or Happy Hour 
 
November 16 11:30am. Jason B Phillips Memorial Lecture: 
Aghil Daghagheleh
 
November 23  Happy Thanksgiving!
                                           
December 21. 12 -2pm. Holiday Gathering (Woodlawn Mansion)
                                                         
Please share your news and events for inclusion in the next department newsletter.
 
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