SOCIOLOGYsociology.illinois.edu

Fall 2012

Welcome Letter from the HeadAnna-Maria Marshall, PhD

Department of Sociology University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign3120 Lincoln Hall, MC-454702 South Wright StreetUrbana, IL 61801

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begun to offer on-line courses -- our on-line version of SOC 100 has been a major success. Finally, we have returned to Lincoln Hall. As we settle into our beautiful new offices overlooking the Quad and teach in our high-tech classrooms, we look forward to welcoming all of you for a visit! Stop by – we would love to show you around!

The Sociology Department has seen some enormous changes over the past 4 years. We have dramatically expanded our research agenda, introduced innovations in the classes we offer, and moved out and back into Lincoln Hall. In the pages of this newsletter, we will introduce you to our faculty, our students, and our alumni – and give you a glimpse of our newly renovated office space.

Our faculty has grown, enhancing our strengths in transnational studies, the sociology of race, and demography. We are also building new strengths in sociology of law and sociology of health. Our faculty members do research on some of the most pressing issues of the day – the Arab Spring and political and social changes in the Middle East, the impact of urban violence on mental health, access to the civil justice system, the experiences of immigrants in the United States and the global AIDS pandemic.  As always, we take great pride in our teaching, and we’ve been designing our curriculum with our students’ needs in mind. We’ve introduced courses to give our undergraduates background in law and health. We are joining with partners in our community to offer students internship opportunities. And we’ve

IssueIN THIS

1 WELCOME2 RETURn TO LInCOLn HALL3-5 MEET THE nEW FACULTY

6 UnDERGRADUATE SpOTLIGHT

7 UnDERGRADUATE InTERnSHIp pROFILE

8 ALUMnI SpOTLIGHT9-11 pHDS On THE MARkET

Our whole department is excited to be back in Lincoln Hall where we are enjoying a renovation that combines the best of the old and the new. The building boasts brand new classrooms and seminar rooms, outfitted with the latest technology, but the architects took great care to preserve the spirit of the landmark.  And best of all, the Lincoln Bust has been returned to its rightful place – in the alcove in front of the Theatre. (After being restored, Abe’s nose no longer shines. Sociology students will have to get to work!)

We celebrated the return to Lincoln Hall during Homecoming this year. The College hosted self-guided tours in Lincoln Hall, and we welcomed visitors in the Department. We had displays of faculty research, student research, and teaching innovations, and our students were on hand to show our visitors

the many features of our beautiful new offices. And after the football game, the Marching Illini returned to Lincoln Hall and performed on the Quad.

If you had to miss the Homecoming celebrations, please stop by for a visit!

We would love to show you around our new home!

Sociology Returns to Lincoln Hall

Homecoming 2012 “Celebrating a Gift for the Ages”

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Sociology undergraduate ilir Sulejmani rubS lincoln’S noSe for good luck before examS

Meet the new Faculty

Dr. Keera Allendorfph.D., Sociology, University of Wisconsin-Madison

keera Allendorf did her undergraduate degree at Carleton College in Minnesota, where she first discovered sociology and began her scholarly focus on gender issues in India and nepal. She later attended graduate school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she discovered a love

of demography and focused her research interests on women’s agency and maternal and child health in South Asia. Her dissertation research was based on fieldwork in India where she interviewed members of several families about the quality of family relationships, maternal and child health, and women’s agency.  After graduate school, Allendorf spent a year as a postdoctoral Fellow at the population Studies Center at the University of Michigan. At Michigan, she shifted her research agenda to incorporate a focus on the family, along with her emphasis on gender and health

in South Asia. After Michigan, she joined the Illinois Sociology Department in 2010. Right now, she is working on projects that examine changes in family behaviors over time, marital quality and formation, and links between family behaviors and women’s health in South Asia.  Allendorf teaches Introduction to Statistics, Demographic Methods, and a seminar on Family Change in a Changing World where students learn about how family behaviors have changed over time, why they changed, and the consequences of those changes for economic development and well-being.

Asef Bayat is internationally recognized for his wide-ranging research and teaching on social, political and cultural life in the Islamic world. He has written many important books and articles analyzing social movements, the intersection of religion and politics, as well as the urban ecology of life in Middle Eastern cities.  Drawing on this expertise, Bayat gave public lectures all over campus and on WILL radio in 2011 and 2012. He also appeared several times on the Illinois home page, in the “Minute With” feature, describing, for example, the role of social media in the Arab Spring.

Bayat has developed several new courses for our undergraduate and graduate students, including

Collective Action and Revolution and Global Religion and politics. In addition, he participated in an innovative, interdisciplinary course on the Arab Spring, involving scholars from departments across campus.

Bayat received his ph.D. from the University of kent in 1984. Since then, he taught at the American University at Cairo for 17 years and most recently held the Chair of Society and Culture of the Modern Middle East at Leiden University in the netherlands, where he was also the Academic Director of the International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World. He joined the Illinois faculty in 2010 and was recently named the Catherine C. and Bruce A. Bastian professor in Global and Transnational Studies.

Dr. Asef Bayatph.D., Social Sciences-Sociology and politics, University of kent

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Meet the new Faculty

Dr. Monica McDermottph.D., Sociology, Harvard University

Monica McDermott joined the Sociology Department in 2011 as an Associate professor. She studies race and ethnic relations in the United States, especially white identity, racial attitudes, and race/class interactions.

She is the author of Working Class White: The Making and Unmaking of Race Relations, published by the University of California press in 2006. The book is based on her participant observation research on interracial interactions in Atlanta and Boston, where she worked as a convenience store clerk for

a year.

McDermott is a member of a working group on Cultural Contact and Immigration at The Sage Foundation. McDermott and other members of the working group are conducting research on the character of immigrant life in cities and towns and rural communities outside of traditional urban centers.  McDermott is a gifted teacher who teaches Social Theory, Race and Ethnic Relations, and Qualitative Research Methods.

Dr. Cynthia Buckleyph.D., Sociology, University of Michigan

Cynthia Buckley joins the Sociology faculty in fall of 2012 after working at The University of Texas at Austin and the Social Science Research Council. In addition to the Department of Sociology, she will be a faculty affiliate at the Center for Health and Disability and the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies at UIUC.

A social demographer, Buckley is the co-chair of the U.S./Russian Federation CSpp (Civil Society private partnerships) Committee on International Migration and serves as an ad hoc consultant for the U.S. Department of State, UnAIDS and several nGOs.

Her publications cover issues of rural development, population aging, maternal

and child health, reproductive health and HIV/AIDS. The lead editor of Migration, Homeland and Belonging in Eurasia (Johns Hopkins press), Buckley is presently completing a manuscript on the socio-cultural implications of male labor out-migration in the southern Caucasus. She serves as the primary Investigator on the nSF project, “people, power and Conflict in the Eurasian Migration System”, which examines the geopolitical implications of Russia’s emergence as an international migration destination state. Her teaching interests are in the areas of health, methodology, gender, and development and she looks forward to working with students seeking external fellowship funding, internships, and study abroad opportunities.

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Meet the new Faculty

Rebecca L. Sandefur joined the department in 2011. Her research and teaching focus on inequality, particularly as it relates to law. Her scholarship includes investigations of work and inequality in the legal profession and other professional occupations, and studies of people’s experiences with common problems that could bring them into contact with the civil justice system.

She has taught courses on work and occupations, social stratification and inequality, law and society, and access to justice,

as well as one of her favorite topics, introductory sociology.

In 2011, she received funding from the national Science Foundation (SES-1123507) and the American Bar Foundation for the Community needs and Services Study, a community-sited, multi-method study of ordinary people’s experiences with civil justice problems and the resources available to assist them in handling those problems.  Sandefur teaches Law and Society, Access to Justice, and Social Stratification.

Dr. Rebecca Sandefurph.D., Sociology, University of Chicago

FaCUlTy pUblICaTIoNS

Asef Bayat. Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East. Stanford University press, 2010.  Asef Bayat (with Linda Herrera, co-editor). Being Young and Muslim: Cultural Politics in the Global South and North. Oxford University press, 2010.  Zsuzsa Gille (with Maria Todorova, co-editor). Post-Communist Nostalgia. Berghan Books, 2010.  Moon-kie Jung (with Joao Costa Vargas and Edward Bonilla-Silva, co-editors). State of White Supremacy: Racism, Governance, and the United States. Stanford University press, 2011.

bookS

Ilana Redstone Akresh. “Immigrants’ Religious participation in the United States” in Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2011.

Tim Liao, Gehui Zhang, and Libin Zhang. “Social Foundations of national Anthems: Theorizing for a Better Understanding of the Changing Fate of the national Anthem of China” in Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 2011. keera Allendorf. “Women’s Agency and the Quality of Family Relationships in India” in Population Research and Policy Review, 2012. Jeremiah Bohr and Brian Dill. “Who Benefits from Market-Based Carbon Mitigation?” in Perspectives on Global Development and Technology, 2011.  Rebecca Sandefur and Elizabeth Gorman. “‘Golden Age,’ Quiescence, and Revival: How

the Sociology of professions Became the Study of knowledge-Based Work” in Work and Occupations, 2011.  Markus Schulz. “Values and the Conditions of Global Communication” in Current Sociology, 2011.  Monica McDermott. “Racial Attitudes in City, neighborhood, and Situational Contexts” in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 2011.  Zsuzsa Gille. “The Hungarian Foie Gras Boycott: Struggles for Moral Sovereignty in postsocialist Europe” in East European Politics & Societies, 2011.  Assata Zerai. “An Assessment of Afro-centricism, Color-blind Ideology, and Intersectionality” in Race, Gender & Class, 2011.

joUrNal arTICleS

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Undergraduate Spotlight

UNDergraDUaTe awarDS 2012

StuDent enGAGeMent AWARDSAKinA tAyeBALiThe Student Engagement Award highlights a student in Sociology (usually a Junior or Senior) who has been active in the University of Illinois and/or Champaign-Urbana community. This student stands out for their activism and leadership within the community.  HiGHeSt GPA foR A SoCioLoGy SenioRRyAn DouGLAS GRiLLAeRtThis award acknowledges the Senior in Sociology who has attained the Highest Overall Grade point Average.  BeSt unDeRGRADuAte StuDent PAPeR AWARD in SoCioLoGyJeReMy MARSAn “The nature of Maps in Web 2.0: A Case Study of Occupy Wall Street’s ‘User Map’” The Best Undergraduate Student paper Award recognizes outstanding achievement in a Sociology student’s research and writing abilities.  outStAnDinG SenioR in SoCioLoGy HoLLy Monet CuRiAThis award is given to a senior who demonstrates involvement with the community, leadership achievements, academic success, and a dedication to sociology.

The Sociology Department at the University of Illinois currently serves approximately 300 undergraduate majors and minors. In recent years, the Sociology Advising Office has begun offering more avenues for student involvement in the department including re-instituting our chapter of Alpha kappa Delta (AkD) (the Sociology International Honors Society), facilitating the development of a Sociology Club, promoting student research projects with faculty, and helping students to gain valuable internship experience. We

now host an internship fair on an annual basis which allows students to connect with local organizations looking for student interns.

The Sociology Club meets regularly to welcome new students into the major. The club discusses courses, debates social issues and participates in community service in Champaign-Urbana. With new leadership each year, the club takes on a new personality and sets its own agenda.

In the Fall semester, the Sociology Department

A Message from Advising

inducts new members into our Honors Society, AkD. parents are invited to share in their student’s accomplishments alongside the faculty. As a student organization, our chapter of AkD has been involved in activities such as community service in the Champaign-Urbana area. We plan to continue our tradition of honoring our best and brightest students.

nicole Holtzclaw-Stone and Sociology undergraduateS at tHe Sociology internSHip fair, 2010

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Ruby Mendenhall Wins Leadership Award

This summer, Ruby Mendenhall won the Outstanding Faculty Mentor Award from the Mcnair Scholars Summer Research Institute. Her student, Artesha Williams, won the Outstanding Scholar Award in the Mcnair program for her research on Black males’ sense of belonging on a predominantly white campus.

Mendenhall is well-known for including

undergraduates in her fascinating research agenda that includes studies of the earned income tax credit, housing policy, and the impact of violence on the mental health of urban residents.

ruby mendenHall meetS witH mcnair ScHolarS in Summer 2012.

sponsored “TnT Tutoring” a tutoring program on Tues-days and Thursdays.

After this 6 week summer school experience, we started working in the Dis-trict Office. Here, we focused more on policy issues. We dealt with big picture ideas like parent engagement, transition programs, and also things like how to run summer school better for next year. In fact, the Sum-mer VISTAs have interviewed almost 70 different people (including students, staff, teachers, administrators, Federal programs staff and the Superintendent) and gave a presentation on what changes can be made to Summer School next year based on all the responses.

My time at University of Illinois prepared me for this internship. It has been my many interactions with professors, advisers and ad-ministration that prepared me to have the positive interactions I did with the

Superintendent, the Head of Federal programs, the Adviser from Washington and other people in power. It has been the work ethic I developed at Illinois that has allowed me to excel at this internship. The University of Illinois has allowed me to grow and has pushed me to complete the (what seems like unimaginable) work during the school year, and now in a professional setting I am able to find success. I have three more semesters left at the University (I’m en-rolled in a Master’s program at the University) and can already say that attending the University has taught me so much more than sociological frameworks. It has instilled in me a work ethic, an appetite for success and a desire to stand out in any field.  Esteban is a rising Senior at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he is studying Sociology. He is a part of the Civic Leadership Program, where he will receive a Masters of Political Science in May 2014.

As an AmeriCorps VISTA intern, I am part of the na-tional AmeriCorps program. This summer, I applied and was accepted to the Lincoln, nebraska program and worked in the Lincoln public Schools Youth Development Team. This group of people grew out of a Federal Grant to help at-risk students and help advance the District’s goal of “Cultural proficiency.” In the district, almost 50% of students receive free/reduced lunch so the work of the Youth Development Team is both necessary and urgent.

In my role, I worked with students who fall into our demographic (minor-ity, low-income, homeless and juvenile delinquents) during the 6 week summer school. I sat in classrooms and assisted the teachers. I pulled students out of class to prepare one-on-one for a speech, a test, or a project. Every morning I walked around the school and called home if students were not in class. As the Summer VISTAs, we developed pro-grams to recognize students who were excelling, and also

eSteban gaSt and dr. deila Steiner, Head of federal programS for lincoln, ne public ScHoolS

Do you have internship opportunities for Sociology undergraduates?Sociology students possess several skills your organization may be looking for in an intern: written and

oral communication skills, computer/ technical skills, leadership, teamwork, global competency, diversity awareness, and research/statistics. If your business or organization has potential internship opportunities,

please let us know. If you cannot attend our Internship Fair, we can promote your opportunity on our website. please email: soc-advising@illinois.edu with your opportunity or any questions you may have

about the program.

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esteban Gast with AmeriCorps ViStA in Lincoln, neSummer 2012

Undergraduate Intern profile

Alumni Spotlight

Derek CazeauExecutive DirectorBolingbrook Hospital FoundationClass of 1993, B.A. Sociology

After graduating in 1993 with a BA in Sociology, Derek first worked as a Subsidy Specialist for Child Care Initiatives of Illinois. Over the years, Derek took on increasing responsibilities and managerial positions at Illinois Action for Children. He moved into the position of HR Manager for Adventist Hinsdale Hospital, a position from which he was recruited to serve in his current role. “I embrace changes in society and am fully aware of my contributions”, he notes. Derek enjoys teaching people about the “joy of philanthropy/ giving back” as well as promoting awareness about Bolingbrook Hospital to residents of the area. In the nearly 5 years since the Bolingbrook Hospital Foundation’s inception, nearly $1 million in gifts have been accumulated under Derek’s leadership, according to a recent institutional newsletter (The Lake Union Herald, July 2012:20).

He is personally involved in his community as a Rotarian and gives to several charities. Derek calls his wife, Christine and two children, Serena and Ben, “the driving power behind everything I do.”

“Sociology influences all aspects of my daily work...

personally it has groomed my interactions in a context that allows

me to relate to people within the community at a deeper level.”

alUmNI pUblICaTIoNS

Chloe E. Bird and patricia p. Reiker. Gender and Health: The Effects of Constrained Choices and Social Policies. Cambridge University press, 2008.

keith Guzik. Arresting Abuse: Mandatory Legal Interventions, Power, and Intimate Abusers. northern Illinois University press, 2009.

Zakia Salime. Between Feminism and Islam: Human Rights and Sharia Law in Morocco. University of Minnesota press, 2011.

bookSDouglas Grbic, Hiromi Ishizawa, and Charles Crothers. “Ethnic Residential Segregation in new Zealand, 1991-2006” in Social Science Research, 2010.

Alin M. Ceobanu, and Xavier Escandell. “paths to Citizenship? public Views on the Extension of Rights to Legal and Second Generation Immigrants in Europe” in British Journal of Sociology, 2011. kareem Muhammad. “pearly Whites: Minstrelsy’s Connection to Contemporary Rap Music” in Race, Gender and Class, 2012.

joUrNal arTICleS

The University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign has a proud tradition of training successful scholars with an impressive collection of publications to their credit.

 we love to hear about your accomplishments! please let us know about your next publication!

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ph.D.s on the MarketJeremiah BohrIn a context of increasing global demand for cheap energy, an emerging body of evidence supports concern over fossil fuel use and the adverse effects of climate change on vulnerable populations. While research documents that the U.S. is both a major contributor to global greenhouse gases and a particularly laggard nation when it comes to energy innovation, it provides little understanding of why US energy policy has been so resistant to reforms. Entitled The Politics of Qualifying Carbon: Markets, Ideology, and the Natural Contradictions of Fossil Fuels, my dissertation explores the tensions amongst powerful political actors who nevertheless agree that markets are the appropriate institutional setting for energy policy. I investigate how the recent extraction of lower-quality hydrocarbons structure differing economic and political interests, supporting the stalemate responsible for US inaction. Rather than reducing debates to science vs. anti-science, as has much past research, I explore the differing material interests of energy producers situated in transnational vs. domestic market settings, as well as conservative vs. progressive ideological preferences for public/private institutional boundaries. This project builds on my earlier work, which examined inequalities in the global South in access to carbon markets (Perspectives on Global Development and Technology 2011).  Currently, I am also involved in projects exploring climate change skepticism, the intersection of environmental and economic sociology, and access to community legal services. While at the University of Illinois, I have created courses in social stratification and in the sociology internships program. Students rated me as an excellent teacher for both courses. My teaching interests also include social theory, environmental sociology, and political sociology.

Courtney CuthbertsonMy work explores connections between mental health and illness and social, political, and economic structures in global perspective. My dissertation, Transforming Subjectivities: Global Mental Health, Biopolitics, and Depression in Chile, investigates the relationship between global psychiatric knowledge of depression and lay understandings of the disorder in Chile through the lens of biopolitics, or the structuring of life as biological statuses of populations, to political and economic ends.  I explore the construction of depression at global, national, and individual levels by examining whether biopolitically-oriented discourses of depression promulgated by a global mental health project “trickled down” to individuals’ understandings of personal experiences with depression.  Drawing on six months of ethnographic data collection in two psychiatric wards in Santiago as well as discourse analysis of global and national texts, I find that while global constructions of depression contain highly biological language, people - whether diagnosed with depression or not - hold hybrid definitions of depression that are both biological and social. Many Chileans see depression “as a way of life” beginning during violent and repressive pinochet dictatorship. A report from this work, “Misery in Modern Times: Depression in post-Dictatorial Chile”, is forthcoming in Transgressive Culture.

My teaching interests include medical sociology, mental health, globalization, and quantitative and qualitative methods. I am on the University-wide list of Instructors Ranked Excellent.

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Faculty and Tas ranked excellent or outstanding by their StudentsSpring 2012

FacultyIlana Redstone AkreshBrian DillZsuzsa GilleAnna-Maria MarshallMonica McDermottRebecca Sandefurnoreen Sugrue InstructorsGrant Shoffstall

Teaching assistantsnicholas CragoeAshley FeelyCarlie Fieselerparthiban MuniandyJoanna perezMichelle SchmidtSoo-Yeon Yoon

lincoln Hall courtyard

Rebecca Gresh

My research lies at the intersection of environmental sociology and sociology of consumption. I study two sides of contemporary struggles over the issues of global climate change, consumerism, and access to food, investigating the strategies of global food retail corporations as they aim to organize food consumers and supply chains across distant spaces, and the organization of alternative food movements as potential sites for contentious politics around these larger issues.

My dissertation project, Food Deserts, Alternative Food Practices, and Supermarkets, examines the practice of locating global supermarkets in underserved communities, known as “food deserts,” as a solution to systemic problems of poverty that are framed in terms of hunger and health. My research demonstrates that it is not a lack of supermarkets that create food deserts, but rather that social policies and the supermarket industry create spaces of abundance on the one hand, and spaces of deprivation on the other. Using archival data to situate the social and environmental forces at play in the making of food deserts, and interviews of the contemporary alternative food movement in San Diego, this dissertation demonstrates a necessity for politics at multiple scales in the transformation to a more sustainable global food system.

In 2010, I published a “Global Review of Sustainable Consumption policies” for our campus Center for Global Studies, and published several California case studies in the edited volume Building Clean-Energy Industries and Green Jobs: Policy Innovations at the State and Local Government Level, by David J. Hess. Building on my dissertation work, my current projects include investigating the role of finance in escalating global food prices, and strategies of global retail capital and social movements in altering landscapes and imaginations of food production and consumption. A current manuscript in progress is titled, “Supermarkets, Space, and power.”

My teaching interests include transnational sociology, environmental sociology, sociology of consumption, and the sociology of food and agriculture. At the University of Illinois, I have taught Introduction to Sociology and Social Research Methods, and have teaching experience in Social Stratification and Impacts of Globalization.

Ravi GhadgeA central question in the field of global studies concerns how the development planning of emerging societies addresses social inequality. Taking Mumbai—India’s “global city”— as a case, my dissertation explores competing claims of urban development among diverse stakeholders in the city (including planners, business associations, civic organizations, activists, and poor peoples’ movements) in the context of the recent national growth strategy in India that gives primacy to cities. I analyze the genealogies of emerging local (urban) development imaginaries, modeled after “successful” Asian cities, particularly Shanghai. In doing this, I focus on the processes, actors, visions, and practices that constitute and contest these urbanization strategies. This theoretically informed study is based on twelve months of field work (archival research, interviews, and non-participant observation) in Mumbai. This research is described in my dissertation, Shanghaization of Mumbai: Visions, Displacements, Contestations, which I defended in June 2012.

My research and teaching interests include globalization, urban sociology, development, social theory, qualitative methods, South Asia, and India. I have taught both undergraduate and graduate courses at the University of pune, Georgia State University, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

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graDUaTe awarDS 2012

tHe BeSLoW GRADuAte PAPeR PRize AnDReA WiLBon HARtMAn“The Evolution of Erykah Badu: From Musician to Third Wave Feminist.” tHe znAnieCKi PuBLiSHeD PAPeR PRize BRyAnnA MAntiLLA “The Invisible plagues: A Conceptual Model of the neglect of neglected Tropical Diseases,” in Social Medicine, 2011

ph.D.s on the Market

Grant ShoffstallI am a historical sociologist of postwar science and technological innovation, with research and teaching interests situated at the crossroads of sociological theory, the sociology of science, knowledge, and technology, and the sociology of culture and morality. My long-term research agenda critically examines instances of Euro-American technological utopianism during and subsequent to WWII, through the height of the cold war space race to the present. My dissertation, Failed Futures, Broken Promises, and the ‘Prospect’ of Cybernetic Immortality: Towards a Historical Sociology of Cryonic Suspension, 1958-1979 (henceforth Failed Futures), analyzes cryonic suspension (“cryonics”), the strange practice of freezing human corpses in the hope that scientists will at some future point achieve the necessary kinds and levels of technology to facilitate “reanimation.” I have spoken to the sociological significance of cryonic suspension in my article “Freeze, Wait, Reanimate,” which was published in The Bulletin of Science, Technology, and Society in 2010. Failed Futures builds upon this article while moving beyond it in significant ways. I approach cryonics as a practice that in the early 1960s carried meaning and utopian orientation for a small group of lay-scientific social actors, whose historically situated imaginings and activities I analyze through the methodological strategy of employment: who, when, what, where, how, and why? Facilitating this analysis is a host of historical materials ranging in date from the early 1960s to the present, most all of which are quite obscure and difficult to access, and have never before been utilized for historical sociological inquiry. Recounting the episodes of catastrophic failure and controversy that punctuate the practice’s history, I use cryonic suspension as an empirical conduit through which to achieve analytical entrée into those aspects of the broader sociocultural contexts of the American postwar period that conspired in producing the utopian desire to overcome death and aging by way of ultra-high technological means (e.g. nASA’s cyborg spaceflight program, cybernetics and the cyborg sciences).

Jongtae kim. The Discourse of Seonjinguk: South Korea’s Constructions of the ‘West and the Rest’ keun-Young park. An Analysis of Distributors’ Roles in the Film Market: Revisiting the Second Renaissance of the Korean Film Industry Based on Sociological Perspectives Francisco Vivoni. Contesting Public Space: Skateboarding and the Politics of Play

Erica Hill. Bearing the Mark, Bearing the Costs: The Consumption and Productions of Slave Memories and Social Identities in Coastal Tanzania, 1922-2006 Libin Zhang. Assessing the Effects of Socioeconomic Disparities and Income Inequality: A Multilevel Study of Obesity among Chinese Adults

reCeNT DISSerTaTIoNS

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one of many Scenic panelS reStored on tHe facade of lincoln Hall.

ph.D.s on the Market

Support Illinois Sociology!

The Department of Sociology, at UIUC welcomes donations and contributions to the Sociology Department Annual Fund. These funds are earmarked for helping the department carry out its mission of enhancing undergraduate and graduate education; granting awards and scholarships to students; facilitating the

recruitment of outstanding scholars; putting on conferences of note; and extending the breadth and reach of our outreach programs and projects.

If you or someone you know are interested in contributing to our broad range of activities, please contact us at (217) 333-1950 or at seaton@illinois.edu. Or, donate online at: sociology.illinois.edu/gift where you can also

download a printable pDF form to mail in your donation if you prefer.

we want to hear from you! mail us your contact information,

or enter it online at bit.ly/T3jeby

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yaejoon Kwon wins the Minority fellowship Award from ASA

the discipline. MFp seeks to attract talented doctoral students to ensure a diverse and highly trained workforce is available to assume leadership roles in research that is relevant to today’s global society. This year, Ms. kwon was one of four recipients of the MFp award.

Ms. kwon grew up in St. paul, Mn, and received a BA from northwestern University. Currently, she is a doctoral student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where she serves as chair of the Asian pacific American Graduate Students Organization. Her research and teaching interests include U.S.

state-formation, race, gender, and violence.

Her dissertation will examine the post-1945 U.S. military empire, specifically analyzing the implementation of law and how transnational race and gender formations impacted occupational policies and practices of the U.S. military occupation in Southern korea.

Ms. kwon has also received the Asian American Studies program’s Jeffrey S. Tanaka grant, the Bastian summer dissertation fellowship, and the Center for East Asian and pacific Studies’ Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship.

Through its Minority Fellowship program (MFp), the American Sociological Association (ASA) supports the development and training of sociologists of color in any sub-area or specialty in

Graduate Spotlight

please mail to: Department of Sociology, 3120 Lincoln Hall MC454, 702 S. Wright St, MC 454, Urbana, Il 61801name_______________________________________ Year graduated________ Degree granted ___________Email address ______________________________ phone number___________________________________physical address_____________________________________________________________________________Current position______________________________ Organization/institution__________________________Milestones/accomplishments__________________________________________________________________Comments________________________________________________________________________________