Andrea Sempertegui

Lafayette College

Email     : andrea.sempertegui@gmail.com

Website: https://www.andreasempertegui.com/

Andrea Sempertegui is an interdisciplinary researcher. His work focuses on struggles over territory and natural resource extraction, indigenous politics, popular feminist movements, and decolonial thought in Latin America. Dr. Sempertegui received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the Justus Liebig University, Gießen, Germany. She is currently serving as a visiting instructor in Anthropology and Sociology at Lafayette College, the US.

Publications:

Sempértegui, Andrea (2020). “Decolonizing the Anti-Extractive Struggle: Amazonian Women’s Practices of Forest-Making in Ecuador.” Journal of International Women’s Studies, 21(7), 118-134.

Sempértegui, Andrea. 2021. “Indigenous Women’s Activism, Ecofeminism, and Extractivism: Partial Connections in the Ecuadorian Amazon.” Politics & Gender 17(1):197–224.

Anna P. Hidalgo

Columbia University

Email     : aph2144@columbia.edu

Website: https://annaphidalgo.com/

Anna P. Hidalgo is a scholar of gender, sexuality, race, and culture. Her research examines the resourceful and creative ways that people cope with the marginality they experience in everyday life. She undertakes this work using an intersectional and transnational lens. Her dissertation explores how people cope with structural and personal disappointment in their lives by enacting fantasies.

Drawing on an ethnography of transnational intimate relationships in a Peruvian coastal town, she shows how fantasy operates as a type of future-making that enables people to opt out of socially and structurally constrained conditions. She further demonstrates how class, race, and gender shape and limit these processes. This research will contribute to our understanding of how fantasy animates everyday life and provide a framework for understanding other instances in which fantasy emerges as a generative response to experiences of marginality and constrained possibilities.

In an earlier project, Anna examined how scholars of color, women, and people from low-income backgrounds navigate social and cultural closure within academia through mastering hidden curriculums and leveraging their relationships with academic gatekeepers and brokers. This research argues that explanations for inequality that focus on “pipeline” problems fall short and help us to gain a clearer understanding of the persistent inequality in academia.

Publications:

Hidalgo, Anna. “Rethinking Female Sex/Romance Tourism.” (In Progress)

Hidalgo, Anna. “Social and Cultural Closure and the Persistence of Inequality in Academia.” (Under Review) Hidalgo, Anna and Shamus Khan. 2020. Blindsight Ethnography and Exceptional Moments. Etnografia e Ricerca Qualitativa 2: 185-193.

White Hughto JM, Hidalgo A, Bazzi A, Reisner S, Mimiaga M. 2016. “Indicators of HIV-risk resilience among men who have sex with men: A content analysis of online profiles.” Sexual Health 13: 436-443.

Dustin Wayne Mabry Kiskaddon

University of California, Davis

Email     : dmabry@ucdavis.edu

Website: –

Dustin Wayne Mabry Kiskaddon finished his PhD in the Spring of 2021. His ethnographic research employs the sociology of embodiment, bodies, and body labor to understand and explain people at work. His dissertation, Blood and Lightning: The Embodied Production of a Tattooer, is the first sociological account of tattooing to stem from direct experience becoming a tattooer. It employs auto-ethnographic description to explain how becoming a tattooer can shape a person’s physical, mental, emotional, and moral life. His committee included sociologists Laura Grindstaff, Maxine Craig, and Mary Kosut—scholars who remain mentors while he transforms his dissertation into a book manuscript.

Dr.  Kiskaddon has published in academic volumes and with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He’s an associate editor of Theory and Society, a Lecturer of Sociology with his degree-granting institution, the University of California, Davis, and he remains a working tattooer in Oakland, California.

Publications:

Kiskaddon, Dustin. 2021. “Tattooers at Work: An Emotional and Permanent Body Labor.” Pp. 306-315 in The Routledge Companion to Body Politics. Edited by Maxine Craig. New York: Routledge.

Kiskaddon, Dustin. “But Wasn’t He Drunk? Research Among the Intoxicated.” Ethnographic Marginalia. (Forthcoming)

Kiskaddon, Dustin. 2018. “Plenty of Skin.” Open Space, SFMOMA. https://openspace.sfmoma.org/2018/05/plenty-of-skin/

Gordon Brett

University of Toronto

Email     : gordon.brett@utoronto.ca

Website: https://gordonbrett.me/

Gordon Brett is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Sociology, the University of Toronto, Canada. His research examines how cognitive processes and social and cultural life interrelate.  This includes examining how cognition shapes creativity and human behavior in social contexts, how people develop patterns of thought and action, and how the cognitive sciences can improve sociological theory and research.

Gordon’s dissertation, The Embodied Dimensions of Creativity, examines how improvisational theatre troupes collaboratively create new jokes, characters, stories, and scenes in real-time, drawing on interview and observational data with experienced improvisers from the Toronto improv scene. From this data, he develops an account of how creativity emerges out of interactions between cognitive processes, corporeal and material states and conditions, and the social and cultural environment. His research is published or forthcoming in Sociological Science, Poetics, Social Psychology Quarterly, Sociological Forum, and Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour.

Publications:

Leschziner, Vanina, and Gordon Brett. 2021. “Have Schemas Been Good to Think With?” Sociological Forum. (Forthcoming) 

Brett, Gordon, and Andrew Miles. 2021. “Who Thinks How? Social Patterns in Reliance on Automatic and Deliberate Cognition.” Sociological Science 8: 96-118.

Brett, Gordon, Daniel Silver, and Kaspar Beelen. 2020. “The Right Tool for the Job: Problems and Solutions in Visualizing Sociological Theory.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 50(2):223-248.

Leschziner, Vanina, and Gordon Brett. 2019. “Beyond Two Minds: Cognitive, Embodied, and Evaluative Processes in Creativity.” Social Psychology Quarterly 82(4):340-366.

Brett, Gordon. 2017. “Reframing the Violence of Mixed Martial Arts: The Art of the Fight.” Poetics 62 (2017): 15-28.

Heidi Nicholls

University of Virginia

Email     : hcn4fq@virginia.edu

Website: –

Heidi Nicholls is a historical sociologist of race and settler colonialism. Her dissertation, Whiteness at the Edges of U.S. Empire: Settler Indigenization in Virginia and Hawaii, compares how settler colonists use the social and scientific constructions of whiteness to further settler colonial processes. Providing evidence from historical archives, media, and visual mediums, this dissertation demonstrates how theological, statist, and biological notions of whiteness have worked in tandem historically as settlers made false claims to indigeneity and attempted to dismiss Indigenous sovereignty and relations to land.

Borrowing from postcolonial relationalism, Heidi traces how whiteness as a racial ideology is constructed through connections between metropole and colony, colony as metropole, and back again as newly annexed territories are conscripted into genealogies of race and empire. Her forthcoming article in Political Power and Social Theory explains how the U.S. state and military actors attempt to culturally re-signify Kanaka Maoli and Hawaii as American, and how various movements resist these processes.

Heidi has taught courses in postcolonial sociology and on the racial politics of the U.S. Empire. She currently holds fellowships with the Religion, Race, and Democracy Lab and the Society of Fellows at the University of Virginia.

Publications:

Nicholls, Heidi C. 2021. “Colonial and Decolonial Resignification: U.S. Empire-State Sovereignty in Hawai‘i.” Political Power and Social Theory. (Forthcoming)

“Theories of Degeneration: Racial Teleologies on the Eastern Seaboard and in Oceania” (In Progress)

“Colonial Duplicity: The Many Faces of U.S. Empire” (In Progress)

Nicholls, H.C. and Matt Ito. 2020. Kū Kiaʻi Mauna: Mauna Kea, Protecting the Sacred, and the Thirty Meter Telescope. Religion, Race and Democracy Lab. University of Virginia. https://religionlab.virginia.edu/projects/ku-kia%ca%bbi-mauna-mauna-kea-protecting-the-sacred-and-the-thirty-meter-telescope/

Jason C. Mueller

University of California, Irvine

Email     : muellej1@uci.edu

Website: –

Jason C. Muller’s research interests entail sociological theory, globalization, protest and social change, political economy, post-colonial Africa, culture and knowledge production, and continental philosophy. His research primarily explores macro political, economic, and ideological structures, and how they touch down and are contested in concrete circumstances. He has applied this framework to conduct case studies on a variety of issues, from studying the drivers behind the emergence of the al-Shabaab insurgency in Somalia, to the conditions of postmodernity that birthed the OK Boomer‚ a meme in the US.

Jason’s dissertation uncovers the drivers of forced population displacement‚ for the sake of accessing diamond deposits‚ in two different cases in Southern Africa, speaking to issues of predatory extractive economies, post-colonial statehood, and global discourses on‚ clean/conflict diamonds. He also has several ongoing research projects on protests for racial and Indigenous justice, in the US and abroad.

Publications:

Mueller, Jason C., and John McCollum. 2021. “A Sociological Analysis of OK Boomer.” Critical Sociology. (Online first). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/08969205211025724

Mueller, Jason C. 2020. “Political, Economic, and Ideological Warfare in Somalia.” Peace Review 31(3): 372-380. https://doi.org/10.1080/10402659.2019.1735174

Mueller, Jason C. 2019. “What Can Sociologists of Globalization and Development Learn from Nicos Poulantzas?” Progress in Development Studies 19 (4): 284‚ 303. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464993419860953

Mueller, Jason C. 2018. “The Evolution of Political Violence: The Case of Somalia’s Al-Shabaab.” Terrorism and Political Violence 30(1): 116-141. https://doi.org/10.1080/09546553.2016.1165213

Kevin Kiley

University of Iowa

Email     : kevin-kiley@uiowa.edu

Website: krkiley.github.io

Kevin Kiley is a cultural sociologist and quantitative methodologist with a focus on understanding the development of political, moral, and cultural beliefs over the life course. Dr Kiley received his Ph.D. from Duke University. His dissertation work developed statistical methods to measure change and stability in survey response over time, employing these methods to adjudicate theoretical debates in cultural sociology. One project, published in the American Sociological Review, explored whether cultural change is more likely to be driven by people actively updating their beliefs and behaviors in the face of new information or by people forming stable dispositions after early socialization. A second project quantifies the prevalence of ambivalence across a range of topics and adjudicates its social, cognitive, and cultural causes. Other work explores whether competing models of belief systems accurately predict belief change over time.

Dr. Kiley is currently serving as a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Iowa where he employs computational methods to understand how the culture of online communities evolves. He has a strong interest in teaching quantitative and computational methods at both the graduate and undergraduate levels.

Publications:

Vaisey, Stephen, and Kevin Kiley. 2021. “A model-based method for detecting persistent cultural change using panel data.” Sociological Science.

Kiley, Kevin, and Stephen Vaisey. 2020. “Measuring Stability and Change in Personal Culture Using Panel Data.” American Sociological Review 85(3): 477-506.

Kiley, Kevin. “Ambivalence Is Everywhere: Quantifying Opinion Behavior Across Topic Domains.” American Journal of Sociology. (Revise & Resubmit)

Michael Rotolo

University of Notre Dame

Email     : mrotolo1@nd.edu

Website: mrotolo.com

Michael Rotolo is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Sociology at Notre Dame. His research examines the origins, development, and outcomes of morality, including political views, religious views, future aspirations, and notions of “the good life” and life’s purpose. His current work focuses on American adolescents, young adults, and families and engages cutting-edge research on culture, cognition, and emotion.

Michael’s book, Religious Parenting: Transmitting Faith and Values in Contemporary America (Princeton University Press 2020), coauthored with Christian Smith and Bridget Ritz, explores American parents‚Äô strategies, experiences, and beliefs regarding religious transmission to their children using hundreds of in-depth interviews with parents from around America.

His dissertation, “Seeking the Good Life: The Moral Development of Young People in America,” examines how young Americans develop their moral and ideological views, drawing on longitudinal interview and survey data collected over 10 years from the National Study of Youth and Religion (NSYR). One of his recent chapters examines the development of Christian nationalist ideology on the far-right. Another focuses on the development of “Extremely Liberal” ideology on the far left.

Michael holds an M.A. in Sociology from Notre Dame, an M.Div. from Princeton Theological Seminary, and a B.A. in Religious Studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is also a graduate of the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics.

Publications:

Rotolo, Michael. 2021. “Culture Beneath Discourse: A Conceptual Model for Analyzing Nondeclarative Cultural Knowledge.” American Journal of Cultural Sociology. (Forthcoming)

Rotolo, Michael. 2021. “Moral Religiosities: How Morality Structures Religious Understandings during the Transition to Adulthood.” Sociology of Religion 82(1):63-84.

Rotolo, Michael. 2020. “Religion Imagined: The Conceptual Substructures of American Religious Understandings.” Sociological Forum 35(1):167-188.

Smith, Christian, Bridget Ritz, and Michael Rotolo. 2020. Religious Parenting: Transmitting Faith and Values in Contemporary America. Princeton: Princeton University Press. (Equal authorship)

Rotolo, Michael. “Fight-or-Flight for America: The Development of Christian Nationalist Ideology during the Transition to Adulthood.” (Under Review)

Rotolo, Michael. “The Perceptual Bases of Morality and Politics: A Tripartite Model of Political Orientation.” (Under Review)

Miray Wadie Philips

University of Minnesota

Email     : phili191@umn.edu

Website: –

Miray Wadie Philips is currently a PhD Candidate in Sociology at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. In 2019-21, she was a visiting research scholar at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. She received her BS in Psychology and Sociology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Grounded in the sociology of religion, migration, human rights, and knowledge, Miray’s interests revolve around understanding how communities make sense of discrimination and violence at the intersections of religion and human rights, transnationally. Her dissertation, Politics of Persecution: Contested Advocacy on Middle East Christians in US Foreign Policy, examines how conservative American Christians mobilized around the “Persecuted Church” in the Middle East, and the transformative impacts of this polarized advocacy on both Coptic and Egyptian diaspora mobilization in the wake of the Arab Spring.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Washington, DC, Miray examines fragmented advocacy by International Religious Freedom organizations, Egypt advocacy and research organizations and Coptic lobbies, and their consequences for contested US politics and policies towards Egypt. Her research has been supported by the Louisville Institute, the Center for Arab American Philanthropy, the Global Religion Research Initiative at Notre Dame, as well as the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, the Human Rights Program, the Graduate School, and the Sociology Department at the University of Minnesota. Her public writing can be found at Egypt Migrations, the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy, and the Society Pages.

Publications:

Philips, Miray. “We love martyrdom, but we also love life”: Coptic Cultural Trauma between Martyrdom and Rights. (Revise & Resubmit)

Philips, Miray. “The Garden of Faith is Under Threat: Religious Freedom Advocacy for the “Persecuted Church” in the Middle East.” (In Progress)

Philips, Miray. “Knowing Christian Persecution: Technologies of Truth, Knowledge Entrepreneurs, and the Quantification of Persecution.” (In Progress)

Savelsberg, Joachim and Miray Philips. “Filtering the Filtered in News Media: Reporting on the Armenian Genocide in Legal, Political, and Commemorative Field Events.” (In Progress)

Moses Adie Uyang

Our Nigeria News Magazine, Abuja

Email     : uyadiemoses@gmail.com

Website: –

Moses A. Uyang is a development and humanitarian aid worker. His work revolves around human rights, peace and development. He has actively campaigned against female genital mutilation and child carriage. Moses has authored two books and some poems.

Moses speaks French and holds a BA in Education from the Catholic University of Eastern Africa, Nairobi, Kenya. He currently seeks a scholarship opportunity to pursue an advance degree in international development, international studies, or related fields.

Publications:

Abubakar, Akanimo, Uyang, Iorte, and Jimoh, ed. 2020. The Nation Builders at 60: A Compendium of 60 Nation Builders at 60. Federal Capital Territory: Sprezzatura Publishing.

Uyang, Moses. 2016. The Trek. Ado-Ekiti. king Julius Publishers.

Noah Amir Arjomand

Indiana University – Bloomington

Email     : narjoman@iu.edu

Website: https://www.noaharjomand.com/

Noah Amir Arjomand received his PhD in Sociology from Columbia University. His dissertation research was supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and Institute for Turkish Studies. Dr. Arjomand has been the Mark Helmke Postdoctoral Scholar in Global Media, Development, and Democracy at Indiana University, Bloomington, since 2018. The position is co-sponsored by the National Endowment for Democracy and the Center for International Media Assistance.  

Dr. Arjomand’s research interests center around culture and media, with a regional focus on the Turkic and Persianate world. His first book, Fixing Stories: Local Newsmaking and International Media in Turkey and Syria, will be published by the Cambridge University Press in the Spring of 2022. The book is an ethnography of news fixers: local guides and interpreters who assist foreign journalists. He explains the roles and strategies of fixers and how they manage the powerful but precarious position of cross-cultural brokers between reporters and sources. Further information about the book can be found at this link: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/fixing-stories/3A0E3C4880CBDC00252AEC4EBE11B9E2.

Dr. Arjomand is also a documentary filmmaker and photographer. His first feature-length film, Eat Your Catfish, offers an ethnographic exploration of the lives of a family affected by disability and chronic illness. The film is in a late stage of post-production and has received support from Field of Vision, Cinereach, Catapult Film Fund, Sheffield DocFest MeetMarket, and the Istanbul Film Festival‚ Meetings on the Bridge forum. He has designed and taught courses on media and the Middle East at the Indiana University. He is also prepared to teach classical and contemporary theory, qualitative methods, global and transnational sociology, work and organizations, the sociology of disability, and visual sociology. Dr. Arjomand’s current CV is available upon request.

Publications:

Arjomand, Noah A. Forthcoming 2022. Fixing Stories: Local Newsmaking and International Media in Turkey and Syria. Cambridge University Press.

Arjomand, Noah A. Revise and resubmit pending. “Sociological Fiction: Using Composite Characters in Narrative Ethnography.”

Arjomand, Noah A. and Ali Ghazinejad. Under review. “Awareness Systems or Echo Chambers? Latin American Journalists’ Usage of Twitter as a Newsgathering Tool.”

Arjomand, Noah A. 2017. “Every Turk is Born a Soldier,”Public Culture 29(3):418-432.

Arjomand, Noah A. 2014. “The Struggle for Kabul’s Libraries,” Public Culture 26(3): 378-392.

Arjomand, Noah A. 2016. “Afghan Exodus: Smuggling Networks, Migration and Settlement Patterns in Turkey,” Afghanistan Analysts Network Dispatch.

Arjomand, Noah A. 2015. “The Folly of Double Government: Lessons from the First Anglo-Afghan War,” Afghanistan Analysts Network Discussion Paper.

Arjomand, Noah A. 2013. “Eagle’s Summit Revisited: Decision-Making in the Kajaki Dam Refurbishment Project,” Afghanistan Analysts Network Thematic Report.

Arjomand, Noah A. 2016. “Inside Turkey’s Media Crackdown,” Dissent, April 28.

Arjomand, Noah A. 2016. “Nobody Knows How Many Have Died in the Turkey-PKK Conflict,” Bullshitist, September 15.

Scott Westenberger

Stanford University

Email     : swestenb@stanford.edu

Website: sociology.stanford.edu/people/scott-westenberger

Prior to coming to Stanford, Scott Westenberger worked as a military intelligence analyst. He received a specialized training in social network analysis and counter-insurgency operations. In the military, one of the main goals of this work was to understand how seemingly random, micro-level terrorist acts can trigger macro-level disruption with strategic-level effects.

At Stanford, Scott’s research has continued to focus on uncovering the mechanisms by which micro-level social activity yield macro-level social change, but the outcome variable is now much more benign. Today, his work focuses on the wildly unpredictable world of fads and fashions. Throughout his dissertation, Scott attempt to uncover demand-side mechanisms and processes relevant to understanding macro-level popularity fluctuations and consumption trends, with the goal to better understand the rise and fall of popularity in pop culture markets like music and movies. His research agenda includes topics on social networks, social influence, and the structure and evolution of “taste.”

Publications:

Westenberger, S. 2021. “Drifting to the top? Disentangling mechanisms influencing the turnover rate of popular music.” The Journal of Mathematical Sociology. https://doi.org/10.1080/0022250X.2021.1956918

Westenberger, S. 2021. “Interacting Influence: A Survey Experiment Examining the Impact of Reviewer Partisanship and Education on Media Consumption Intentions.” (Under Review)

Westenberger, S. 2021. “No Decline Online: Internet Use Explains Post-1992 Decline of Omnivorous Music Consumption in the United States.” (Under Review)

Westenberger, S. “The Success of the Renaissance Band in a Cultural Market.” (Submitted)

 Westenberger, S. “Researchers and their Research: Examining the Interplay of Boundary-Spanning Producers and their Products.” (In Progress)