Job Market Candidates
Joanna Veazey Brooks is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests include medical sociology, work and identity, sociology of professions, and organizational culture. She explores how professional and personal identities are formed as a result of working and interacting within institutions that embody cultural and societal values.
"Valuing Family Medicine: Historical Journey, Institutional Hostility, and Individual Narratives."
Charles Bosk, Robin Leidner, Jason Schnittker, Melissa Wilde
I am an ABD joint PhD candidate in Sociology and the Graduate School of Education (Education, Culture, and Society) at the University of Pennsylvania, and a 2012-2013 Penn Center for Teaching and Learning Graduate Fellow for Teaching Excellence. I expect to complete my degree in May 2013.
I am broadly interested in cities, arts, and social change, particularly on the level of social interaction and the production of "community".
My dissertation, “Experiencing Diverse Cities: Community Based Arts, Social Interaction, and Progressive Politics ,” is based on ethnographic research conducted over a period of 8 years at three different community-arts organizations in a major Mid-Atlantic city. Recent scholarship and public policy ask arts to drive economic growth for urban revitalization; this perspective takes positive social interaction as a given within the larger project of arts-based urban economic development. However, the social life of community-based art and related democratic practices provide another lens to explore the role of arts and arts organizations within the contemporary city. Within the fractured context of American cities (racial and ideological segregation), community-based arts provide a testing ground for social interaction across demographic difference (race, class, geography), a place where “culture builds community” (Stern & Siefert, 2002), albeit not unproblematically. This dissertation explores democratic practices around diversity within urban community-based arts organizations devoted to progressive social change.
At Penn, I have taught a graduate-level School and Society class for the past 5 years to Master’s candidates and to Teach for America corps members. I am also a longtime TA in the Graduate School of Education’s Ethnographic Methods course. I have taught sociology, education, and community-based arts courses to undergrads at Ursinus College and Moore College of Art and Design. Outside of higher education, I am a longtime community-based educator, having worked with K-12 students and adults in museum settings, violence prevention nonprofits, and a variety of arts organizations, including The Girls’ DJ Collective, of which I am co-founder.
“Experiencing Diverse Cities: Community Based Arts, Social Interaction, and Progressive Politics.”
Stanton E. F. Wortham, Charles L. Bosk, Randall Collins, and Kathy Hall
My research focuses primarily on how contentious social issues, commonly thought of as "culture war" issues, in the United States become increasingly salient among religious groups, how framing and understandings of the issues change over time, and how stances on such issues are negotiated along with religious groups' understandings of boundaries between themselves and others, both religiously and more broadly.
Curriculum Vitae
“Creating the Litmus Test: Abortion, Mainline Protestants, and the Rise of the Religious Right.”
Melissa J. Wilde, Charles L. Bosk, Jerry A. Jacobs, Robin L. Leidner
Ksenia Gorbenko holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Pennsylvania, an MA from Central European University in Budapest, Hungary, and a diploma from Vologda State Pedagogical University in Vologda, Russia. Her dissertation, entitled "From Print to Pixel: Visual Media and the Fate of Nonviolent Social Movement Activism," examined how news images are strategically deployed by different actors during nonviolent protests, reflecting struggles for and against social change. Ksenia is currently a research associate on the University of Pennsylvania team at the Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality Improvement at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Currently Ksenia is working on the ethnographic part of the national Surgical Unit-based Safety Project (SUSP) that aims to reduce surgical site infections (SSI) and other complications. She is interested in the role of social networks and technology in patient safety work.
"From Print to Pixel: Visual Media and the Fate of Nonviolent Social Movement Activism"
Jessica Ho is a joint Ph.D. Candidate in Demography and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests include demography, medical sociology, health disparities, aging and the life course, health care systems, stratification, population health, international comparisons, and quantitative methods. Her research focuses on the social determinants of health, aging, and mortality, with particular emphasis on explaining differences in health across populations. She has been engaged in two main areas of research: she examines variation in population health among developed and developing countries and health inequalities within the United States. One strand of her research uses international comparisons to address the question, “Why is life expectancy in the United States so much lower than in other high-income countries?” Her second strand of research examines social, behavioral, and institutional factors that contribute to racial/ethnic and socioeconomic health disparities.
"Comparative Studies of Health and Mortality."
Irma T. Elo, Samuel H. Preston, and Jason Schnittker
Ning Hsieh is a PhD candidate in Demography and Sociology. Her research and teaching interests include sociology of mental health, population health in global contexts, medical sociology, social networks, demography, international comparisons, and quantitative and comparative methods. Her research investigates factors in health disparities within and between various social contexts, with a focus on the link between social relationships and health between nations.
“Social Networks, Social Support, and Mental Health: Three Essays in Cross-National Comparative Perspective”
Jason Schnittker (chair), Hans-Peter Kohler, and Emily Hannum
I do research in economic sociology, focusing on how institutions shape, and are shaped by, market activities. My dissertation is historical-comparative and tries to explain why American corporate law developed into its modern form. I'm also working on a series of papers on free software production. I teach contemporary theory and introduction to methods. Click the links above for more information.
Explaining the Emergence of Modern Incorporation Law (working title)
Randall Collins, David Gibson, Mauro Guillen, Walter Licht
Caroline Hartnett received her Ph.D. in Sociology and Demography at the University of Pennsylvania in 2011 and is currently a postdoc in the Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan. Her research agenda focuses on American families and race-ethnicity (particularly Latinos) using a quantitative approach. One line of research examines social support, including financial transfers within families and the quality of intergenerational relationships. Her second line of research examines decision-making around childbearing, including attitudes towards children, parity desires, and unintended pregnancy.
"Three Essays on Racial-Ethnic Variation in Fertility in the United States, with a Focus on Hispanics"
Emilio Parrado, Samuel Preston, Kristen Harknett, Frank Furstenberg