The Matthew C. Brown Scholarship Fund will support Sociology graduate students with demonstrated commitment to making a positive social impact through teaching and who have faced unusual adversity and/or are from backgrounds that are historically underrepresented in Sociology.

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CU Boulder Sociology Newsletter

Message from the Chancellor COVID-19 Update: We are taking action to limit the spread; Additional updates in the coming days.

Kathleen Tierney, former Director of the Natural Hazards Center here at IBS, has recently been interviewed by multiple media sources about the COVID-19 situation. Check it out here

4/8/20

Please help me in congratulating Patricia Burton, Program Manager from the Department of Sociology as Dean Brown’s selected winner for the February 2020 Monthly Social Sciences Staff Recognition Award.  She received multiple award nominations and has been described as dedicated, compassionate, efficient and reliable.  She has a deep commitment to the mission of the unit and is focused on the students she serves.  Congratulations, Patti!

3/20/20

Lori Peek was a keynote speaker for the annual Pacific Risk Management Conference in Honolulu. She was joined by the prime minister of the Cook Islands and the Deputy Prime Minister of Samoa. Lori also gave a guest lecture to the Department of Sociology and Department of Urban Planning at the University of Hawaii.

Congratulations to Sherri Sasnett-Martichuski on the successful defense of her dissertation entitled "The Transgender Experience: Exploring the Politics of Being." 

Last week, Carrie Seay Fleming was awarded an NSF Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement grant to conduct field work on food security politics in Guatemala.  

Lori Peek announced a CONVERGE Virtual Forum to share research information and resources about COVID-19.  It was highlighted in the Daily Camera on Thursday.

Hillary Steinberg has been awarded the inaugural Sociology Graduate Research Fellowship, a one-semester research fellowship for Spring 2021  Hillary will continue her dissertation research which is an ethnography of a children’s hospital where she follows 15 focal patients of various ages and diagnoses. Congratulations Hillary!  

And for everyone else, keep your eyes out for the request for proposals next fall to support a student in Spring 2022!

3/6/20

Aubrey Limburg, Stefanie Mollborn, and Bethany Everett (alumni) had an article published in Journal of Women's Health this week: 

Limburg, Aubrey, Bethany G. Everett, Stefanie Mollborn, and Michelle Kominiarek. 2020. Sexual Orientation Disparities in Preconception Health. Journal of Women's Health. Published online ahead of print. Read it here

David Pyrooz, along with his coauthor Chantal Fahmy, Dylan Jackson, and Scott Decker, published the following article in the Journal of Criminal Justice, “Head injury in prison: Gang membership and the role of prison violence.” 

Leslie Irvine was interviewed for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's morning current affairs radio program "AM" about pets and trauma following disasters.  Listen here.

Leslie Irvine was also featured in an Australian Broadcasting Corporation web news article.

Last week at the 2020 ESS annual meetings, titled "Sociology as a Science and Vocation: In the era of National Populism" many from the department spoke on panels. Congratulations to David Cook-Martin, Adenife Modile, Christina A. Sue, Joris Gjata, and Hillary Steinberg!

2/28/20

Hillary Steinberg's paper Distance and Acceptance: Identity Formation in Young Adults with Chronic Health Conditions has been accepted at Advances in Life Course Research. This is based off my third year paper/masters work.

Leslie Irvine was interviewed for CU's "Brainwaves" podcast on why we love pets. Listen to the whole interview, or find Leslie at 8'22."

Stef Mollborn won the prestigious Boulder Faculty Assembly Excellence Award for Research, Scholarship and Creative Work.

Simone Domingue received the NSF Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Award for her work on coastal risk reduction efforts in Louisiana.

Congrats to Laurent Cilia, who successfully defended his dissertation entitled, “'It’s never been such a good Time to be a Beekeeper!' Large-scale Beekeeping and the Plight of Honey bees in the United States."

There’s a great new article out on David Pyrooz’s new book. Congratulations, David!

2/14/20

Leslie Irvine was interviewed on NPR's podcast "The Pulse," by WHYY in Philadelphia. The February 7 episode entitled "How Movies Move Us" features Leslie in the segment, "Can dogs really act or is it all an illusion?"  You can listen to it in full anywhere you get your podcasts, or here. If you want to just listen to/read the dog acting segment you can do that here. 

A revised and edited version of Mathieu Desan’s 2013 Sociological Theory article was translated into Italian and published in Bourdieu e Marx. Pratiche della critica (Mimesis Edizioni). 

1/24/20

Congratulations to David Pyrooz for a great book talk at Boulder Bookstore on Tuesday.  Amidst the public audience were several faculty and graduate students -- David did a great job of presenting his work and then fielded intriguing questions about methods, findings, and implications.  Congrats David!

Amanda Stevenson’s recent paper on judges vetoing teens’ abortion decisions was covered by a number of news outlets – including traditional ones. But most exciting to her former-nerd self was coverage by Gizmodo.

Also this week Amanda was an invited expert as Florida’s state senate deliberated changing its parental involvement law for abortion. Her public testimony is available here. Congrats Amanda!

1/17/20

Ryan Masters and Eric Reither (Utah State University) have a new paper in Population Health Metrics, "Accounting for biases in survey-based estimates of population attributable fractions." The paper is Open Access here

Congratulations to Sociology doctoral student, Candace Evans, and faculty member Lori Peek. Candace and Lori (along with Rachel Adams, who is a postdoctoral researcher at the Natural Hazards Center) have recently developed and released two new online training modules. The first is focused on the topic of Social Vulnerability to Disasters, while the second focuses on Disaster Mental Health. These resources are being developed as part of Peek’s NSF-funded CONVERGE grant. Info

Candace, Lori, and Rachel will be leading a webinar on January 17, where they will provide a brief demonstration of the newest training module. Find out more here, and please tune in if you can! 

In 2019, Sociology graduate students Simone Domingue and Lisa McDevitt both published independent book reviews in the International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters. Simone and Lisa originally wrote their reviews for Lori Peek’s graduate seminar on the Sociology of Disasters, which they then revised and submitted for publication. Congratulations Simone and Lisa!

Aubrey Limburg and Stefanie Mollborn have a new article published from their collaboration with SOCY alum Bethany Everett: 

Everett, Bethany G., Stefanie Mollborn, Virginia Jenkins, Aubrey Limburg, and Lisa M. Diamond. Published online ahead of print. “Racial/Ethnic Differences in Unwanted Births: Moderation by Sexual Orientation.” Journal of  Marriage and Family. 

Bertha Bermudez Tapia has been invited by the Nuevo León Council to participate as an immigration expert consultant in the revision of the Strategic Plan for the Mexican state of Nuevo León, 2015-2030. Bertha has also been invited to participate as a panelist at the Author Meets Critics session of the American Association of Geographers Annual Conference, to discuss the book: Deported to Death: How Drug Violence is Changing Migration on the US-Mexico Border by Dr. Jeremy Slack.

Amanda Stevenson has a paper with CU nursing professor Kate Coleman-Minehan and Texas attorney Susan Hays out this week documenting for the first time that abortion restrictions requiring parental involvement before minors can get care allows judges to deny teenagers’ abortion decisions.  “Denials of Judicial Bypass Petitions for Abortion in Texas Before and After the 2016 Bypass Process Change: 2001–2018” 

Check out the paper on CU Boulder Today! 

 

12/5/19

Congrats to four of our undergraduate Honors students will be presenting their research at the Pacific Sociological Association meetings in May 2020.  They have received funding from the Hanson Fund in Sociology designated to support undergraduate research, and also the Professional & Academic Conference Endowment Fund which supports undergraduate travel to professional meetings.

• Spencer Bajcar, “The Kachin Refugee Crisis and Its Influence on Gender Norms”
• Kieran Haffey, “County-Level Indicators of Suicide Rates Moderated by Level of Urbanization”
• Katy Halverson, “Experiences of Religious Change: Latter-Day Saint Womens’ Perceptions of Church Policy Shifts”
• Abby McConnell, “Challenges and Solutions: How Rights of Nature Activists Overcome Barriers to Achieve Their Goals”

11/22/19

Hillary Steinberg passed her comprehensive exams.

Adriana Nunez’s article, "Collateral Subjects: The Normalization of Surveillance for Mexican Americans on the Border" was published by Sociology of Race and Ethnicity.  Read it here.

The Department of Sociology was well represented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Criminology. The following presentations were delivered by faculty and/or students:

• Jenn Tostlebe, David Pyrooz, and Scott Decker. Legal orientations as an explanation of the gang membership-misconduct link.
• Elizabeth Weltman. Student fear of mass shootings and campus concealed carry.
• Jose Sanchez, Jenn Tostlebe, David Pyrooz and Scott Decker. Where colors collide: Does race moderate gang membership and inmate misconduct? 
• Erica Jackson. Understanding the development of delinquent behavior: An integrated biosocial and labeling theory approach. 
• Kyle Thomas, Eric Baumer and Tom Loughran. Structural determinants of individual perceptions and preferences.
• David Pyrooz, Elizabeth Weltman, and Jose Sanchez. Intervening in the lives of gang members in Denver: Evaluation of the Gang Reduction Initiative of Denver.
• David Pyrooz and Scott Decker. Prison misconduct, victimization, and their overlap: A group process perspective.
• Meghan Mitchell and David Pyrooz. The use of restrictive housing on gang and non-gang affiliated inmates in U.S. prisons: Findings from a national survey of correctional agencies.
• Kendra Clark. Rethinking Prisonization: A Longitudinal Investigation of Adherence to the Convict Code Across Stages of Incarceration   
• Kendra Clark received the Division of Corrections and Sentencing’s “Outstanding Student Paper” award

 

Rachel Rinaldo gave two talks in Indonesia last week. She was a keynote speaker for the International Conference on Social and Political Sciences at University Islam Negeri Syarif Hidayatullah in Jakarta on November 12, 2019. Her talk was called "The Women's Movement and Democratization in Indonesia." On November 13, she was a guest speaker for the International Relations department at Airlangga University in Surabaya on the topic of Transnational Contexts and the Indonesian Women's Rights Movement.

Lori Peek and colleague JC Gaillard published an article in Nature, calling for a code of conduct in disaster zone research. The article is available here.

Current post-doctoral researcher Tom Laidley, current graduate student Justin Vinneau, and Jason Boardman’s paper entitled “Individual and Social Genomic Contributions to Educational and Neighborhood Attainments: Geography, Selection, and Stratification in the United States” was just published in Sociological Science and is available here.

Former post-doctoral researcher (now Assistant Professor at Stanford) Ben Domingue, Jason Boardman, and others published “Implications of gendered behaviour and contexts for social mobility in the USA: a nationally representative observational study” in The Lancet: Planetary Health and the paper is available here.

Former CU Sociology PhD student Justin Denney (now Professor at Washington State) and Jason Boardman recently found out that their paper entitled “Hearing quality, social resources, and mortality among US adults” was accepted for publication in the Journals of Gerontology: Social Sciences.

Former post-doctoral researchers Brooke Huibregtse and Benjamin Domingue, former pre-doctoral researcher Breanne Newell-Stamper, and Jason Boardman have a forthcoming paper in Journals of Gerontology: Social Sciences entitled “Genes Related to Education Predict Frailty Among Older Adults in the United States.” The paper is available online here.

Jill Harrison, Lori Hunter and Amanda Stevenson attended an Op-Ed workshop by the Scholars Strategy Network. Info

11/8/19

Jill Harrison gave an invited talk at Colorado State University this week on her new book, From the Inside Out: The Fight for Environmental Justice within Government Agencies (2019, MIT Press).

Rachel Rinaldo and Jeff Guhin's new article "How and Why Interviews Work: Ethnographic Interviews and Meso-level Public Culture" has been published online by Sociological Methods and Research Info

11/1/19

Kendra Clark and David Pyrooz published a paper in Sociological Methods & Research, titled “Method to the madness: Tracking and interviewing respondents in a longitudinal study of prisoner reentry.” This paper, coauthored with Chantal Fahmy, Meghan Mitchell, and Scott Decker, outlines the data collection procedures in the longitudinal component of the LoneStar Project Info

Jessica Austin and Leslie Irvine were accepted for publication for “’A Very Photogenic Cat’: Personhood, Social Status, and Online Cat Photo Sharing.” Forthcoming in Anthrozoös.

With a focus on their recently funded “tiny town” project, Lori Hunter and Catherine Talbot are noted in the College’s latest magazine. Info

Lori Hunter and Catherine Talbot are presenting their work in anonymization with demographic surveillance data at a conference on “Environmental Demography” at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  Lori is also presenting work on measuring “trapped populations” (collaborative with Fernando Riosmena), as well as acting as a discussant on a climate-migration panel. Info

Justin Vinneau and Rick Rogers were active at this year’s Southern Demographic Association annual meetings in New Orleans, Louisiana, October 23-25, 2019.

Justin Vinneau presented “The Immigrant Health Advantage: An Examination of African-Origin Black Immigrants in the United States” and “Diabetes and Cognitive Decline: The Role of Social and Genetic Factors.” The second paper was coauthored with CU colleagues Joshua Goode, Brooke Huibregtse, Ryan Milstead, Thomas Laidley, and Jason Boardman.

Rick Rogers presented “A Demographic Portrait of Early Life Mortality in the United States.”

Lori Peek gave the annual McDonald-Mehta Lecture on Friday at Texas Tech University. She spoke about the NSF-funded CONVERGE initiative located here at the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado Boulder.

10/31/19

Ryan Masters Talk! info 

10/18/19

Rick Rogers is now an Associate Editor of Population Health Metrics Info

On Friday, October 11, Prof. Mike Radelet gave a public lecture entitled Race, Ethnicity, and the Death Penalty in San Diego County: The Predictable Consequences of

Excessive Discretion at Columbia University Law School in New York.

Mike Radelet has a new publication: Michael L. Radelet & G. Ben Cohen, The Decline of the Judicial Override. ANNUAL REVIEW OF LAW AND SOCIAL SCIENCE 15 (2019): 539-557.

Don Grant has set up a competition for the campus called “Map the System”

Laurent Cilia's article, "“We don't know much about Bees!” Techno-Optimism, Techno-Scepticism, and Denial in the American large-scale Beekeeping Industry," was accepted for  publication in Sociological Ruralis.

10/14/19

Lori Peek’s recent $3 million National Science Foundation CONVERGE award was featured as part of this write up in Colorado Today, regarding the record amount of research funding generated by the University this year Info

Jill Harrison was featured on CU’s website in an article titled “Environmental Justice For All” Info

Skye Niles and Jill Harrison, along with their co-authors (including CU ENVD professor Shawhin Roudbari) have had an article accepted in the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction: “Bridging the Praxis of Hazards and Development with Resilience: A Case Study of an Engineering Education Program.” 

Leslie Irvine and Wisam H. Alshaibi (CU BA 2015). "Personal Trials and Social Fears: Examining Reflexivity in Captivity Narratives." NANO: New American Notes Online. Info

In the special issue "Captivity Narratives Then and Now: Gender, Race, and the Captive in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century American Literature and Culture."

Collaborating with Stef Mollborn and Paula Fomby (U of Michigan), Josh Goode, Aubrey Limburg, and Kim Truong-Vu have authored two new publications about kids' and teens' technology use in the mobile internet era compared to earlier cohorts.

Joshua A. Goode, Paula Fomby, Stefanie Mollborn, and Aubrey Limburg published online ahead of print. “Children’s Technology Time in Two U.S. Cohorts, 1997-2016.” Child Indicators Research. Accessible here

 

Fomby, Paula, Joshua A. Goode, Kim-Phuong Truong-Vu, and Stefanie Mollborn published online ahead of print. “Technology Use and Adolescent Health Lifestyles in Two US Cohorts.” Youth & Society. Accessible here

10/11/19

The Department of Sociology stands in solidarity with the BSA and we join the campus community in condemning the racist acts directed at African-American students on Oct 6. As sociologists, we acknowledge the long history of institutional and interpersonal discrimination and oppression against African-Americans, Native Americans, Latinxs, the poor, women, and others. Recognizing this history of exclusion and ongoing discrimination, we support the demands of the Black Student Alliance including the circulation of a statement regarding the explusion of the perpetrator from campus, widespread campus alerts on the situation, improved reporting, administrative accountability and a restructuring of campus policies that impact communities of protected classes.

10/10/19

Sociology Faculty Book Talks
Join us for talks from SOCY faculty who have recently published books! Info

10/9/19
Fall 2019 Speaker Series Info
November 11th 12:00pm-1pm in IBS 155A w/ light lunch provided at 11:45am.
​Dalton Conley is the Henry Putnam University Professor in Sociology at Princeton University and a faculty affiliate at the Office of Population Research and the Center for Health and Wellbeing. He is also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).
Title: Using Genetics for Non-Genetic Social Science
Abstract: The cost of genetic information has been dropping at a rate faster than of Moore's law in microcomputing.  As a result, the science of genetic prediction has improved by leaps and bounds in recent years and with it has emerged a novel field: sociogenomics.  Sociogenomics seeks to integrate genetic and environmental information to obtain a more robust, complete picture of the causes of human behavior as well as novel ways to answer old sociological questions. This talk will highlight some recent examples of sociogenomic research, touching upon issues such as adolescent peer effects, racial discrimination, assortative mating and fertility patterns.  The talk will conclude by discussing the social and policy implications of genetic prediction.   

10/8/19

Fall 2019 Colloquia Series Info

10/4/19 

New open access book edited by Leslie Irvine: We are Best Friends: Animals in Society.https://www.mdpi.com/books/pdfview/book/1594 This book is a printed edition of the special issue published in https://www.mdpi.com/journal/socsci Three Department of Sociology alums are among the contributors: Cameron Whitley (CU BA ’05); Jenny Vermilya (CU PhD ’15); and Devon Thacker Thomas (CU BA ’05, MA ’06, PhD ’13).

 

Lori Hunter is co-Investigator on a new $1.7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute on Aging (NIA) to build an interdisciplinary network of researchers focusing on rural population health and aging. The project is led by Penn State and also involves Syracuse University and the University of Mississippi. The newly established “Interdisciplinary Network on Rural Population Health and Aging” will identify gaps, stimulate new research, and develop and disseminate training materials as well as data and analytic resources to better understand rural health and aging trends and the factors affecting these trends.

 

Over the past year, the team at the Natural Hazards Center has been working to build out a global map and online listing of hazards and disaster focused research centers and institutions around the world! That map is now live, here: https://hazards.colorado.edu/resources/research-centers And this past week, Emma Hines (former graduate student in Geography), Mason Mathews (postdoc in the Natural Hazards Center), and Lori Peek had the following paper accepted for publication, which describes this new technical resource. 

Hines, Emmanuelle, Mason Mathews, and Lori Peek. “Global List and Interactive Web Map of University-Based Hazards and Disaster Research Centers.” Forthcoming in Natural Hazards Review.

 

SOCY was represented at this week’s meeting of the Interdisciplinary Association of Population Health Science in Seattle.  Presentations included:

Daniel H. Simon and Ryan Masters:  The Opioid Epidemic and Suicide Mortality Trends among White Americans

Andrea M. Tilstra and Ryan Masters:  Race/Ethnic Trends in Cesarean Deliveries, Induced Labors, and U.S. Birth Weight

Aubrey Limburg and Stef Mollborn and Bethany Everett (CU SOCY Alum): Sexual Orientation and Race/Ethnic Disparities in Birth Weight

 

Lori Peek will be delivering a short Ted style talk at the upcoming Research and Innovation Office (RIO) Faculty Fellows event on Tuesday, October 15 at 5:30 p.m. All are welcome and registration info is below!

RIO Faculty Fellows TED-Style Talks

•             Gordon Gamm Theater, Dairy Arts Center, 2590 Walnut Street, Boulder, CO 80302 

•             This event is free and open to the public. RSVP

The Research & Innovation Office (RIO) Faculty Fellows will present short TED-style talks in the Gordon Gamm Theater, located at the Dairy Arts Center. Catch a glimpse of the leading edge of research, scholarship and creative works from some of CU Boulder's most influential leaders, representing disciplines across the spectrum—from ethnic studies to engineering, computer science to cinema studies, biochemistry to sociology and more.

 

9/27/19

Melissa Villarreal was interviewed by the Boulder Daily Camera about her research about disparity in disaster response by gender.

Kendra Clark was the sole awardee of the Student Paper Award from the American Society of Criminology’s (ASC) Division of Corrections and Sentencing, which is based on her third-year paper and master’s thesis, Rethinking Prisonization: A Longitudinal Investigation of Adherence to the Convict Code across Stages of Incarceration. Kendra will receive the award at the annual meeting of the ASC in San Francisco in November.

David Pyrooz was elected to the Executive Board of the American Society of Criminology’s (ASC) Division of Corrections and Sentencing.

Kyle Thomas had a new paper published in Criminology (w/ Matt Vogel), titled “Testing a Rational Choice Model of ‘Desistance:’ Decomposing Changing Expectations and Changing Utilities.” Info

Mathieu Desan gave an invited talk on his book project at the University of California, Berkeley’s Department of Sociology

9/21/19

Jason Boardman was awarded this year’s CU Boulder Outstanding Postdoc due to being an uncommonly generous scholar…giving of time and attention, charitable with resources and connections, and where due, always happy to share credit for intellectual contributions.

9/5/19

The University of Colorado sociology Department welcomes YOU! Stop by Ketchum 1B40 for some free pizza on September 11th at 5:30PM. Info

6/18/19

Check out this NYT article to see Mike Radelet’s work getting linked to all over the place! (see research finding hyperlinks) Info

6/17/19

Congratulations to David Pyrooz and Rachel Rinado, now officially Associate Professors with tenure!
Departmental affiliate and past graduate student (PhD 2009) Emmanuel David has also been promoted. Info

4/18/19

Professor Claire Decoteau of the University of Illinois - Spring 2019 Speaker Series. More Info

4/2/19

Professor Ellis Monk of Harvard University- Spring 2019 Speaker Series. More Info

3/6/19

Professor Mara Loveman of the University of California- Berkeley- Spring 2019 Speaker Series. More Info

1/18/19 

Professor Tim Bartley of Washington University in St. Louis - Spring 2019 Speaker Series. More info 

9/27/18

Professor Kelsy Burke of the University of Nebraska, Lincoln - Fall 2018 Speaker Series. More info

7/20/18

CU Boulder Today features a focus on the new Animals and Society Certificate. Take a look. 

4/24/18 

Barry Eidlin of McGill University - Spring 2018 Speaker Series. More info

3/20/18 

Pilar Goñalons-Pons of the University of Pennsylvania - Spring 2018 Speaker Series. More info

3/6/18 

Corey Fields of Georgetown University - Spring 2018 Speaker Series. More info 

 

 

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