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 Anthropology Melissa Johnson presented “Feeling Climate Change in the Unruly Environment of Central Belize” for the roundtable “How Does Climate Change Feel? (Re)Thinking Cultural Embodied Responses To Environmental Precarity” at the 2022 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, held November 9-13 in Seattle, Washington.

Professor of Anthropology Melissa Johnson traveled with three students who worked with and were mentored by Assistant Professor of Anthropology Naomi Reed this summer through SCOPE to represent Southwestern at the Universities Studying Slavery Fall 2022 Conference, held September 28–October 1 in Charlottesville, Virginia. Southwestern’s panel was titled “Revealing Race and Exploring White Dominance at a Small Liberal Arts School: How Southwestern University Confronts (Ignores?) Its White Supremacist Foundations.” Johnson presented a paper coauthored with Reed titled “An Overview of the Southwestern University Racial History Project”; Maria (Cony) Cameron ’24 presented “Exploring Policy and Racial Climate”; Aspen Coriz-Romero ’24 presented “Building Communities of Care and Organizing Resistance at Southwestern University”; and Kellie Henderson ’23 presented “Early Life of Black Students and Faculty on Southwestern University Campus.” The panel was well attended, and attendees (primarily faculty) were very impressed with the students.

Professor of Sociology Sandi Nenga presented her paper “When Six Feet Feels Like Six Miles: Children’s Images of Their Lives During the Pandemic” at the Southern Sociological Society 85th Annual Meeting, held April 6–9 in Birmingham, Alabama. Hannah Mitchell ’22 also presented her capstone paper “Praise on the Stage and Criticism in Class: Understanding Relationships Between Students and Their Instructors in Competitive Irish Dance Studios.”

Professor of Sociology Sandi Nenga published a chapter titled “When Six Feet Feels Like Six Miles: Children’s Images of Their Lives during the COVID-19 Pandemic” in the book COVID-19 and Childhood Inequalityedited by Nazneen Kane (Routledge). Students in Nenga’s fall 2020 Childhood & Youth class collected the data for this chapter as part of a community-engaged learning project.

Professor of Anthropology Melissa Johnson’s review of Rajeshwari Dutt’s book Empire on Edge: The British Struggle for Order in Belize during Yucatán’s Caste War, 1847–1901 was recently published in The American Historical Review.

Professor of Anthropology Melissa Johnson was invited to join the editorial board of PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, the leading journal for political and legal anthropology. She will serve a three-year term.

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 Anthropology Melissa Johnson  organized and participated in a roundtable session cosponsored by the Society for Cultural Anthropology and the American Ethnology Society titled “Embodying Praxis: Everyday Work Toward a Liberatory Anthropology” at the 2021 American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting in Baltimore, Maryland, on November 20. One of the other roundtable participants was Cristina Alcalde, formerly of Southwestern, who now is vice president for institutional diversity and inclusion and professor of global and intercultural studies at Miami University in Ohio.

Assistant Professor of Anthropology Naomi Reed recently participated in WAIL, a community grief ritual performance commemorating the Sugar Land 95. She also presented on an invited panel discussion hosted by Diverse Works and the African American Library at the Gregory School titled “Unshackling History: Convict Leasing Camps in Sugar Land, TX.” Reed presented her research on the white redemptive ways in which the local school district, city, and county are responding to the discovery of the Sugar Land 95.

Southwestern University was well represented at the 11th Race, Ethnicity, and Place Conference, held October 20–23 in Baltimore, Maryland. The SU Racial History Project presented a panel featuring research from both 2020 and 2021 SCOPE projects. The panel included:

• Professor of Anthropology Melissa Johnson: “The Southwestern Racial History Project: An Overview”
• Kristine Velez ’22 (Anthropology): “McKenzie College: A Plantation on the Edge of Indigenous Territory”
• Saul Zuniga ’22 (History): “Soule University, Slavery, and the Confederacy”
• Juan Mojica ’22 (Anthropology): “Hispanics, Methodism, and the Reproduction of Whiteness”
• Rini Mannankara ’22 (Political Science and Anthropology): “The Presence and Representation of Blackness in the 1960s and 1970s at Southwestern University”

In addition, SU alumna Esther S. Ramos-Garcia ’19 (Latin American and Border Studies), who is currently a graduate student at the University of Texas in the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies program, presented “Accompanando Ninos Migrantes ‘No Accompanados’: A Feminist Geopolitical Perspective on Central American Unaccompanied Minors in U.S. Long-Term Foster Care (LTFC)” as part of a panel titled “Asylum in Crisis.”

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). 

Assistant Professor Sociology Erika Grajeda published an article titled “Worker Centres and Coming Out Politics in Migrant Struggles” in the journal Citizenship Studies.

Assistant Professor of Anthropology Naomi Reed was invited to present her research findings on the Sugar Land 95 at the virtual Sugar Land and African American History: Convict Leasing and its Legacies in Current Scholarship, Education, and Activism Conference held September 10–11. Reed presented on the relationship between white racial identity formation in Fort Bend County and the ways in which the city and local school district have made invisible the historical injuries suffered by the 94 Black men and one woman who worked the sugar plantations that provided the economic foundation of what is today Sugar Land, Texas.

Katherine Holcomb  ’23 participated in the American Sociological Association’s 2021 Undergraduate Honors Program (held online) on August 7. She presented the paper “Fear of Crime as a Gendered Experience: Gender and Risk Perception in Public Spaces,” which was originally written for the fall 2020 sociology research methods class.

Professor of Sociology Reggie Byron served on a “Teaching in the Liberal Arts” remote panel for the sociology department at the Ohio State University on July 28, 2021. He also presented a paper remotely at the Annual Meetings of the American Sociological Association on August 7, 2021. The paper, titled “‘Get Rid of That Ghetto Element’: Race, Gender, Work Sector, and Employers’ Ideal Worker Pursuits” reflected key findings from chapter 2 of his forthcoming Rose Series in Sociologybook on employment discrimination across the U.S.

Are antibias diversity trainings effective? Associate Professor of Sociology Reggie Byron and others weigh in on the efficacy of these widely used trainings and some of their limitations in this recent Acorns–CNBC Grownews article.

Megan Piel  ’20 presented her sociology capstone paper titled “Watching Horror Films: A Qualitative Sociological Study of Fear” at the Southern Sociological Society on April 8.  The conference was held online.

Madeline Yu Carrola (’19) had a peer-reviewed article titled “Activists in Red Capes: Women’s Use of The Handmaid’s Taleto Fight for Reproductive Justice” published in The Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography. The article is based on her 2018 sociology capstone project.

Professor of Sociology Sandi Nenga  has been appointed to a three-year term on the editorial board of Sociological Studies of Children and Youth  (UK: Emerald).

Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology Naomi Reed was invited to submit an article produced from her research on the Sugar Land 95 to the food edition of Anthropology News. The piece, titled “The Darker the History, the Sweeter the Truth: How a White-Identified City Struggles to Commemorate the Black Lives and Deaths That Produced Its Sugar and Built Its Wealth,” can be found here.

Associate Professor of Sociology Reggie Byron was invited to offer feedback on an equal employment opportunity policy memo written by the leadership at the Center for Employment Equity after being solicited by incoming U.S. President Biden and his campaign. Byron’s name (and Southwestern’s) is listed in the acknowledgments along with those of seven other scholars from research universities who are noted for having a “deep knowledge of the enforcement process and EEOC [Equal Employment Opportunity Commission] data quality.”

Associate Professor of Sociology Reggie Byron published a review of the book Should Schools be Colorblind? by Laurie Cooper Stoll in the sociology journal Social Forces.  The review can be found here .

Associate Professor of Sociology Reggie Byron published a peer-reviewed teaching exercise titled “Teaching Criminology during a Pandemic” in the American Sociological Association’s Teaching Resources and Innovations Library for Sociology (TRAILS). The resource can be found here.

Professor of Anthropology Mel Johnson, Associate Professor of Education Alicia Moore , and Professor of Philosophy Phil Hopkins  were panelists for the Georgetown Public Library event “Confronting Racism: A Community Conversation.” The event offered three sessions centered around three selected texts aimed at children, young adults, and adults. Moore participated in the panel discussing New Kid by Jerry Craft, a graphic novel about the struggle to fit in with a world that doesn’t look like you. Hopkins participated in the panel discussing The Hate U Give  by Angie Thomas, which details the impact of police violence on communities of color. Johnson participated in the panel on Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist,  a best-selling book on how to fight racism and inequality.

Professor of Sociology Sandi Nenga presented her paper “Processes of Cultural Capital in a College Readiness Program Aimed at Latinx, First-Generation Students” at the 2020 American Sociological Association meetings on August 8 (held online).

Megan Piel  ’20 participated in the American Sociological Association’s 2020 Undergraduate Honors Program (held online) on August 8. She presented her paper “Religion, Gender, and Attitudes towards the LGBTQ+ Community,” which was originally written for the Research Methods class in sociology.

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.