Professor of Sociology Maria Lowe and two sociology students attended the Southern Sociological Society annual meeting in Myrtle Beach, SC. In addition, Angel Ferrales ’25 presented her capstone paper titled, “‘As long as everything is legal and consensual, there’s no problem’: Attitudes that help to predict efforts to ban online subscription sexual content websites,” ThuyMi Phung ’24 presented her capstone paper, “‘There are Always Going to be the Bad People who Access the Guns’: Predictors of Americans’ Perspectives on Gun Violence,” and Maria Lowe and ThuyMi Phung presented their faculty-student collaborative research project titled, “‘Because history has been whitewashed for decades:’ Predictors of Attitudes about Critical Race Theory” Katherine Holcomb ’24 was a co-author on this project.

ThuyMi Phung ’23 received the Southern Sociological Society’s 2023 Howard Odum Award for Best Undergraduate Paper for her capstone paper titled, “‘There are always going to be bad people who access guns’: Predictors of Americans’ Perspectives on Gun Violence.” Maria Lowe Professor of Sociology and Morenz Endowed Professor, supervised ThuyMi’s project during this year’s sociology capstone class.

Professor of Sociology Maria Lowe and former students Madeline Carrola ’19, Dakota Cortez ’19, and Mary Jalufka ’18 published a peer-reviewed article titled “‘I Live Here’: How Residents of Color Experience Racialized Surveillance and Diversity Ideology in a Liberal Predominantly White Neighborhood” in the journal Social Currents. In the article, they identify digital and in-person racialized surveillance as a key mechanism that enforces racialized boundaries in publicly accessible neighborhood spaces and highlight how Black and Latinx residents in particular navigate these practices.

Professor of Sociology and Morenz Endowed Professor Maria Lowe has been invited to serve a three-year term on the American Sociological Association’s Honors Program Advisory Panel (2022–2024) and a one-year term on the Southern Sociological Society’s Program Committee (2022). 

Professor of Sociology Maria Lowe, Associate Professor of Sociology Reggie Byron, and student coauthors Holly O’Hara ’17 and Dakota Cortez ’19 had a peer-reviewed article titled “Neutralized Hegemonic Banter: The Persistence of Sexist and Racist Joking among Undergraduate Students” accepted for publication in Sociological Inquiry. This is the fourth such coauthored campus climate–related study that Lowe and Byron have published.