Department of Sociology

News

Sociologists at Tulane University have been busy lately. Below is just some of the many impressive things we’ve done!

2022:

A part of a multi-organizational grant, Christopher Oliver was awarded a National Academy of Sciences Gulf Research Program grant for $1.3 million. The grant is to support research on creating environmental justice curriculum for K-12 schools in Louisiana. Chris will lead a team of Tulane affiliates that includes Rebecca Snedeker (Clark Executive Director of the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South), Denise Frazier (Assistant Director of the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South), and Richard Snow (Director of Tulane’s Digital Media Practices Program Senior and Professor of Practice in the Department of Music). The Louisiana Environmental Action Network (LEAN) will lead the grant and teachers from several Louisiana Parishes who specialize in STEM and curriculum development are also part of the project. Chris’ years of service learning work with LEAN (for which he won the 2021 Barbara Moely award for best service learning course at Tulane University) helped pave the way for this successful collaboration. Congrats Chris and everyone who contributed.

Laura McKinney was quoted in an article discussing climate change, disasters, and waste published in USA Today and Yahoo News.

2021:

The sociology department at Tulane University is happy to welcome its newest member, Lisa Wade. Dr. Wade is an associate professor of sociology and affiliated member of the Gender and Sexualities Studies Program and Newcomb Institute. In addition to numerous peer-reviewed articles at high-ranking outlets, she is the author of American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus; Gender: Ideas, Interactions, Institutions; and Terrible Magnificent Sociology (2021). Welcome to Tulane Lisa!

Carl Bankston’s book American Ideas of Equality: A Social History, 1750-2020 is now available as an e-book.

David Smilde has an opinion piece in El País and the Washington Post on President Biden’s policy position towards Venezuela.

Amalia Leguizamón discussed her book Seeds of Power on agriculture and soybeans in Argentina with the Southern Food & Beverages Museum’s podcast entitled Tip of the Tongue.

Stephen F. Ostertag won a university grant to support research at the New York Public Library into the Joseph Campbell archives.

Stephen F. Ostertag has published an article in Cultural Sociology, titled “A Cultural Sociology of Social Media: Social Drama, Cultural Affordances and Blogging in the Wake of Hurricane Katrina”.

Robin Bartram has published an article in the American Journal of Sociology, 126(5), “Cracks in broken windows: How objects shape professional evaluations.”

2020:

Ostertag, Stephen F. (2020). “News as Relational Social Practice.” International Journal of Communication. Available online (invited submission for a special issue on media practices).

Carl L. Bankston III, along with Min Zhou, published “The Model Minority Stereotype and the National Identity Question: The Challenges Facing Asian Immigrants and their Children” in Ethnic and Racial Studies 43: 233-253.

Carl L. Bankston III, along with Min Zhou, published "Involuntary Migration, Context of Reception and Social Mobility: The Case of Vietnamese Refugee Resettlement in the United States" in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.

Carl L. Bankston III published “Southeast Asian Refugees in North America” in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780199340378.013.598

Carl L. Bankston III published “Vietnamese in Louisiana” in 64 Parishes.

Lisa Wade published “In Pursuit of the Potential of Sexual Field Theory: A Research Agenda” in Sexualities.

Robin Bartram (with Japonica Brown-Saracino and Holly Donovan) recently published an article in Social Problems titled “Uncertain Sexualities and the Unusual Woman: Museum Depictions of Jane Addams and Emily Dickinson.”

Robin Bartram (with Japonica Brown-Saracino) published “Emily Dickinson, ‘The Greatest Freak of Them All’?” in Public Books: a magazine of ideas, arts, and scholarship (May 15, 2020).

Xin Jiang and Xiaojin Chen have a forthcoming article in the International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology titled "Self-Control, External Environment and Delinquency: A Test of Self-Control Theory in Rural China."

Xin Jiang received the University Senate Committee on Research Fellowship at Tulane University.

Katie Johnson (with Richard M Simon) published “Privilege in the Delivery Room? Race, Class, and the Realization of Natural Birth Preferences, 2002-2013” in Social Problems.

David Smilde was awarded a residential fellowship at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame, as well as an Award to Louisiana Artists and Scholars from the Louisiana Board of Regents for academic year 2020-21. He will use this support to complete his book Venezuela's Transition to Illiberalism.

Amalia Leguizamón published Seeds of Power: Environmental Injustice and Genetically Modified Soybeans in Argentina with Duke University Press.

CCC graduate student Dustin Robertson, along with sociology faculty Christopher Oliver (and Eric Nost) published “Short-Term rentals as digitally-mediated tourism gentrification: impacts on housing in New Orleans” in Tourism Geographies.

Christopher Oliver was quoted in Fortune Magazine (November 30, 2019) in an article about short-term rentals in New Orleans: “Airbnb changed New Orleans – and now New Orleans cant’ live without it.”

Christopher Oliver was recently awarded a grant from the Newcome Institute for community-engaged research and instruction to continue his work on environment industrial pollution with communities along Cancer Alley and to investigate their high rates of COVID-19 cases. He will use these funds to help support several undergraduate students as part of his coursework.

Christopher Oliver was invited to collaborate on a joint project involving Tulane University, North Carolina State University and Louisiana State University’s Superfund Center. The team recently submitted a proposal to the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) to fund research exploring COVID-19 and environmental exposure among communities in Louisiana’s Cancer Alley.

Patrick Rafial (with John McCarthy, Clark McPhail, Ed Walker, and Andrew Martin) published an article in Social Forces on campus riots, “Issueless Campus Riots: Toward a Structural Account of Disorderly Gatherings, 1997-2007.”

Kevin Gotham (PI), Laura McKinney (Co-PI), Patrick Rafial (Co-PI), and Carol Reese (Co-PI) won a Department Enhancement Program grant that will be used to enhance the CCC graduate program.

Kevin Gotham was invited to revise and resubmit the manuscript “Security Challenges of Formulating, Implementing, and Enforcing Parental/Youth Escort Policies in Shopping Malls” with the Journal of Applied Security Research.

Kevin Gotham, with CCC graduate students Clare Cannon, Bradford Powers and Katie Lauve-Moon published “The Climate Change Double Whammy: Flood Damage and the Determinants of Flood Insurance Coverage, the Case of Post-Katrina New Orleans” in Climate Risk Management.

Kevin Gotham published “‘Place or Character’ of a Business Environmental Criminology and Negligent Security Litigation” in the Journal of Applied Social Science.

Kevin Gotham (with Daniel B Kennedy) published “Analyzing Crime Foreseeability: Premises Security Litigation and the Case of Convenience Stores/Gas Stations” in Security Journal.

Stephen F. Ostertag published an invited piece for a special issue of the International Journal of Communication on Practice Theory titled “News as Relational Social Practice: A Theoretical Framework.

2019:

Mimi Schippers published Polyamory, Monogamy, and American Dreams: The Stories We Tell About Poly Lives and the Cultural Production of Inequality with Routledge Press.

Christopher Oliver worked with a team of 13 undergraduate students and CCC graduate students Natalie Blaustone-Dye, Megan Faust, and Chloe Tucker and as part of the Critical Visualization and Media Lab (CVML) to co-produce “The American Dream Denied: The New Orleans Residents of Gordon Plaza Seek Relocation”, an exhibit on display in the Tulane Newcomb Art Museum during the Fall 2019 semester (and starting September 2020 it will be displayed in the Diboll Gallery in Tulane’s School of Public Health in downtown New Orleans.

Kevin Gotham (with Daniel B. Kennedy) published Practicing Forensic Criminology with Elsevier Press (2019).

Kevin Gotham (with Megan Faust) published “Antagonism of Adaptation: Climate Change Adaptation Strategies in New Orleans and New York” in Laska, S. (ed.) Louisiana’s Response to Extreme Weather: A Costal State’s Adaptation Challenges and Successes with Springer (2019).

Kevin Gotham published “Back to the Spectacle: Reflections on the Society of the Spectacle a Half-Century Later.” in Analog Sea Review: An Offline Journal. 2019. Number Two. Pp. 89-99.

Kevin Gotham (with CCC graduate student Arianna J. King) published “Urbanization” in the Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Sociology. Second Edition. Edited by George Ritzer and Wendy Wiendenhoft. New York: Wiley-Blackwell Publications. Chapter 16 (pp. 267-82) (2019).

Kevin Gotham published “Spectacle” in Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Urban and Regional Studies. Edited by Anthony Orum. April 2019.

Kevin Gotham (with CCC graduate student Cate Irvin) published “Urban Sociology” in Core Concepts in Sociology. Edited by J. Michael Ryan. Wiley-Blackwell. 2019.

The Sociology Colloquium Series recently hosted Ruha Bejamin, Associate Professor & Arthur H. Scribner Bicentennial Preceptor in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University. Her talk was titled “A New Jim Code?: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life” took place on September 6, 2019.

  • A big thank you to Robin Bartram and Mariana Craciun for running the sociology colloquium series this year, and to Camilo Leslie and Amalia Leguizamón for the work they’ve done on the colloquium in previous years.

The Tulane Culture Workshop recently hosted Robin Wagner-Pacifici, the University in Exile Professor of Sociology at the New School of Social Research to discuss her work-in-progress “Habermas in Starbucks; Starbucks in Philadelphia” on October 4, 2019.

Patrick Rafail was awarded a grant from the Russell Sage Foundation in Computational Social Science to fund a project examining fatal police shootings between 2014 and 2018.

Patrick Rafail and CCC graduate student Margaret Mahoney have a forthcoming article in The Sociological Quarterly titled “A Long Road to Freedom: The Exoneration Pipeline in the United States, 1989-2015.” https://doi.org/10.1080/00380253.2018.1547175

Partick Rafail and CCC graduate student Isaac Freitas published “Grievance Articulation and Community Reactions in the Men’s Movement Online.” In Social Media & Society https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119841387

Xiaojin Chen and Patrick Rafail. Have a forthcoming article in Crime & Delinquency titled "Do Housing Vacancies Induce More Crime? A Spatio-Temporal Regression Analysis." https://doi.org/10.1177/0011128719854347

Xiaojin Chen and Xin Jiang published “Are Grandparents Better Caretakers? Parental Migration, Caretaking Arrangements, Children’s Self-Control, and Delinquency in Rural China” in Crime & Delinquency.

Mariana Craciun published “The place of therapy: Between lab and field in the psychoanalytic office.” in Sociology of Health and Illness. Online first: doi: 10.1111/1467-9566.12977

Laura McKinney was named the Director of Environment Studies at Tulane University.

Laura McKinney and Arianna King published a chapter titled “Gender and Climate Change” in Women’s Journey to Empowerment in the 21st Century: A Transnational Feminist Analysis of Women’s Lives in Modern Times. Edited by Kristen Zeleski, Annalisa Enrile, Eugenia L. Weiss, and Xiying Wang,Oxford University Press.

Mimi Shippers’ latest book Polyamory, Monogamy, and American Dreams: The Stories We Tell about Poly Lives and the Cultural Production of Inequality is scheduled to be published in November 2019 with Routledge Press.

Kevin Gotham’s latest book Practicing Forensic Criminology (with co-author Daniel B. Kennedy) is now available through Elsevier, Academic Press.

Kevin Gotham published an invited chapter titled “Space/Time” in The Cambridge Handbook of Social Theory. Edited by Peter Kivisto, Cambridge University Press.

Kevin Gotham was invited to give the keynote presentation titled “Tenacity of the Troost Wall: Real Estate, Housing Policy, and Residential Segregation in Kansas City” during the Reflections on Education, Equity, and Integrated Communities conference, hosted by the University of Missouri, Kansas City (UMKC) Faculty Center for Excellence in Teaching (FaCET) & Rockhurst University. October 09, 2019.

Katherine M. Johnson (along with Arthur Greil, Ophra Leyser-Whalen, Julia McQuillan, Karina Shreffler, and Michele H. Lowry) have a forthcoming article titled “Does Self-Identifying as having a Health Problem Precede Medical Contact? The Case of Infertility." in Sociological Focus.

Katherine M. Johnson (along with Arthur Greil, Julia McQuillan, Michele H. Lowry Kathleen S. Slauson-Blevings, and Richard M. Simon) have a forthcoming article in Sociological Quarterly titled “Degrees of Medicalization: The Case of infertility Health-Seeking.”

Katherine M. Johnson has a forthcoming article in Sociological Forum titled “Making Milk and Money: Contemporary Working Mothers’ Orientations to Breastfeeding.”

Katherine M. Johnson (along with co-authors Richard M. Simon, Jessica Liddell, and Sarah Kington) has another forthcoming article titled “Feeding the Cesarean Cycle? Childbirth Education, Current Cesarean Outcomes, and Future Maternal Requests.” In Advances in Medical Sociology.

Katherine M. Johnson is the lead author (along with Arthur L. Greil, Julia McQuillan, Ophra Leyser-Whalen, Karina M. Shreffler) for the article “Infertility and Self-definition: Indeterminacy of the Illness-Self Relationship.” Published with Sociological Perspectives. DOI 10.1177/0731121419867691.

Robin Bartram has a forthcoming article titled “The cost of code violations: How building codes shape residential sales prices and rents” in Housing Policy Debate.

Robin Bartram was invited to participate in the Sociology of Housing Conference at Georgetown University. Her presentation is titled “Damned if you do and damned if you don’t: building inspections and housing inequality”.

Stephen F. Ostertag has a forthcoming invited chapter in the book Breaching the Civil Order: Radicalism and the Civil Sphere titled “Antiracism Movements and the US Civil Sphere: The Case of Black Lives Matter.” Edited by Trevor Stack, Jeffrey C. Alexander, and Farhad Khosrokhavar, Cambridge University Press.

Stephen F. Ostertag presented “Reciprocity of News in the Context of Disaster: News Sharing, Blogs and Collective Action Over Time” at the Sharing Society, International Conference in Bilbao, Spain (May 23-24).

Amalia Leguizamón published “The Gendered Dimensions of Resource Extractivism in Argentina’s Soy Boom” in Latin American Perspectives.

Amalia Leguizamón (along with co-authors Nienke Busscher, Eva Lia Colombo, Lidewij van der Ploeg and Julia Ines Gabella) published “Civil society challenges the global food system: the International Monsanto Tribunal” in Globalizations.

Amalia Leguizamón’s book Seeds of Power: Environmental Injustice and Genetically Modified Soybeans in Argentina is accepted and under contract with Duke University Press.

Christopher Oliver was appointed as one of the 2019-2021 Faculty Fellows in the Tulane Mellon Graduate Program in Community Engaged Scholarship (see website: https://cps.tulane.edu/academics/mellon-graduate-program)

Christopher Oliver and students from his Critical Visualization and Media Lab (CVML) worked with residents of Gordon Plaza to highlight the ongoing battle with toxicity, relocation and environmental justice in New Orleans. Their work is currently being showcased at the Newcomb Art Museum as part of “The American Dream Denied: The New Orleans Residents of Gordon Plaza Seek Relocation” exhibit.

  • This work is funded through a Newcomb Institute Community Engagement Grant and a Center for Public Service Community Engagement Grant.

Christopher Oliver is also a contributor to the Anthropocene Curriculum’s Risk /Equity Seminar, a project that “draws together heterogeneous practices of knowledge production and dissemination, inviting academics, artists, and activists from around the world to co-develop a new culture of capacity and awareness that responds to an unfolding global crisis.”

David Smilde continues to draw on his expertise on Venezuela to provide insight and analysis as the country continues to undergo civil and political unrest. With Abraham Lowenthal, he’s published a number of articles, opinion pieces and commentary in the nation’s leading news and political outlets:

Over the past year, David Smilde has traveled to Boston, New York, Washington D.C., Oslo, Brussels, The Hague, Bogotà, Caracas and Sao Paulo to talk about the Venezuela crisis.

Michele Adams was appointed by Tulane University President Michael Fitts to be the NCAA Faculty Athletics Representative (FAR) for Tulane University.

Other Notable News:

A big thank you to Camilo Leslie for running a very successful and active sociology colloquium series in 2018-2019. We hosted Javier Auyero (with help from Amalia Leguizamón), Kimberly Hoang, Stefan Timmermans, and Debbie Becher.

Amalia Leguizamón won the 2017 ASA Section on Environmental Sociology’s Robert Boguslaw Award for Technology and Humanism

Laura McKinney won the Morton Deutsch Award from the International Society for Justice Research for the best article published in Social Justice Research in 2015

Mariana Craciun published the lead article “Emotions and knowledge in expert work: A comparison of two psychotherapies.” In the American Journal of Sociology, (2018), 123(4): 959-1003.

Stephen F. Ostertag won the 2015 Barbera E. Moley Service Learning Teaching Award from Tulane University for his Criminology course’s ongoing work with the Orleans Public Defenders and their Client Division Services.

City Culture and Community PhD program news:

Wesley Cheek has been selected by the The Social Science Research Council for a fellowship from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. He will be a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Disaster Mitigation of Urban Cultural Heritage, Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto.

Curtis Davis will start a tenure track job at University of Southern Mississippi.

Emily Starr will join the Sociology faculty at Loyola University, New Orleans.

Jesse Chanin received a Spencer Dissertation Fellowship from the National Academy of Education.

Arianna King received a Fulbright for her dissertation research in Ghana.

2012-2013 Academic Year

Patrick Rafail received the National Science Foundation funding ($258,172) for his project with John D. McCarthy titled, "Accounting for the Emergence, Persistence, and Media Coverage of Social Action Organizations." (2013-2015).

2011-2012 Academic Year

Michele Adams won the newly renamed April Brayfield Teaching Award. (SLA Awards 2012)

2010-2011 Academic Year

Stephen Ostertag was named this year’s recipient of the International Communication Association’s James W. Carey Urban Communication Award

2009-2010 Academic Year

New Multi/Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Program in City, Culture, and Community (CCC) has been approved! (For more information, click on the Graduate Program menu at the sidebar.)

Sociologists featured in SLA Newsletter
December 22, 2009 ("Graffiti Art"")

Sociologists featured in New Wave
December 18, 2009 ("Crafts Projects Help Kids")
December 16, 2009 ("We’re a School of Creativity’")

"Faculty Gender Equity" Acknowledgment from the Sociologists for the Women in Society (2009)

Kevin Gotham was awarded National Science Foundation Urban Long-term Research Area (ULTRA) Exploratory Award (with John McLachlan, the Center for Bio-Environmental Research)
- $300,000 grant will fund their research focusing on the impact of trauma on urban ecological and social diversity (Abstract)

2008-2009 Academic Year

April Brayfield (SGA Excellence in Teaching Award 2008-09)

Prior to 2005

April Brayfield (Presidents' Award for Excellence in Teaching 2004)