Associate Professor of Sociology Reggie Byron is reviewing more than 35 published articles (as the only invited reviewer from a liberal-arts university) for the prestigious Richard Scott Best Article Award through the Organizations, Occupations, and Work section of the American Sociological Association.

Associate Professor of Sociology Reggie Byron had a peer-reviewed article titled “Neighborhood Context, Race, and U.S. Newspaper Coverage of Home-Invasion Crime” accepted for publication in the Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture.

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.

Part-Time Assistant Professor of Anthropology Naomi Reed was interviewed by CBS News to contribute to a Web and television segment on a Texas textbook’s representations of slavery and Black people. The article reads in part, “CBS News is not the first to point out problems with The American Pageant. Dr. Naomi Reed is a sociocultural anthropologist and professor at Southwestern University in Texas. She looked at the 12th edition of the textbook in 2007 and the 15th edition in 2015, and said it consistently takes a white redemptive narrative of American history.” You can read the article here.

Sociology alumna Samantha Pentecost ’19 has had her capstone paper, “Gendering the Boy Scouts: Examining Hegemonic Masculinity at a Coed Backpacking Camp,” accepted for publication in the Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography(vol. 10, no. 2). In addition, sociology alumna Madeline Carrola ’19 received the best undergraduate paper award for her capstone paper, “Performing TheHandmaid’s Tale: The Use of Dystopian Literature at Political Protests,” at the October 2019 Mid-South Sociological Association meeting. Both capstone papers were written under the direction of Professor of Sociology Maria Lowe.

Professor of Anthropology Melissa Johnson’s article “Creole Becoming and the Commons: Black Freedom in Belize” has been published in Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space. It is the first article published as part of a special themed section titled The Commons, Commoning, and Co-Becoming, edited by Neera Singh, Ursula Lang, and Gustavo Garcia Lopez. It is available online here. 

Associate Professor of Sociology Reggie Byron presented a paper titled “Neighborhood Context, Race, and Newspaper Coverage of Home-Invasion Crime” at the Policy Studies Organization’s 2019 International Criminology Conference in Washington, DC, on October 31.

Professor of Anthropology Melissa Johnson gave a talk based on her book Becoming Creole: Nature and Race in Belize at the University of Kentucky (UK) on September 26, 2019. The talk was part of the UK’s Year of Equity series of events and was sponsored by the UK College of Arts and Sciences, Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program, and Anthropology Department.

Southwestern faculty and students attended the American Sociological Association’s (ASA) Annual Meeting, August 10–13. 

• Associate Professor of Sociology Reggie Byron gave a presentation titled “Workplace Discrimination and the Racialized Character of Organizations.” He also sat on an ASA panel of the Task Force on First-Generation and Working-Class Persons in Sociology for the second year in a row.
• Professor of Sociology Maria Lowe and Madeline Carrola ’19 gave a presentation titled “Racialized Surveillance of Parks and Pools in a Liberal, Predominantly White Neighborhood.” 
• Four sociology majors participated in the 2019 ASA’s Honors Program and presented their papers. Madeline Carrola ’19 and Molly McConnell ’20 presented their capstone and research-methods papers, which were the basis of their admission to the program. Samantha Pentecost 19 and Veronica Ciotti ’19 presented their capstone papers and were admitted by virtue of their second- and third-place wins in the annual Alpha Kappa Delta International Honor Society of Sociology undergraduate paper competition.
• In addition, Savannah Scott  ’19 received the ASA Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities 2019 Joe Feagin Distinguished Undergraduate Student Paper Award for her capstone project, “Medically Policing Black Female Bodies: Black Women’s Experiences with Birth Control in Austin, Texas.”