OUR PHD CANDIDATES ON THE JOB MARKET
FALL 2008 (C.V.'S ARE .PDF FORMAT)
COURTNEY MUSE
DISSERTATION TITLE/TOPIC: "Elephant in the Room: Organizational Framing and Personal and Collective
Identity Conflict Resolution Among Log Cabin Republicans"
This dissertation focuses on a largely unexplored area of social movement research - the relationship between organizational framing and personal and collective identity conflict resolution among social movement participants. The Log Cabin Republicans (LCR) offers a rich environment for studying the processes involved in resolving conflicts between personal and collective identities. Examination of this movement group allowed me to better understand the relationships between organizational framing, individual-level identity management processes and movement participation. Based on in-depth interviews with LCR members, I show that LCR framing plays a critical role in reducing its constituents' identity conflicts. In the end, I demonstrate that the success of organizational framing efforts is reflected in the degree to which these frames are emphasized by individual members in order to reduce identity conflicts and thus to continue their participation in the LCR. This dissertation contributes to the renewed interest in individual-level processes occurring in social movements and thus informs the social movements literature by bridging the discussions of organizational framing and identity..
DISSERTATION ADVISOR: Holly McCammon
RESEARCH INTERESTS: Social Movements; Social Psychology; Personal and Collective Identity Conflict Negotiation; Gender, Sexuality, and Sexual Identity; Sociology of Mental Health; Research Methods
E-MAIL: courtney.e.muse@vanderbilt.edu
CourtneyMuseCV.pdf
HARMONY NEWMAN
DISSERTATION TITLE/TOPIC: "Constructions of Risk: Strategic Framing in Breastfeeding Discourses"
The author uses breastfeeding advocacy arguments and interpretations of those arguments to investigate the power dynamics between medical and governmental discourses and individual agency. Building on theories of public health movements, discursive power, and gender, this research examines the ways in which medical and governmental institutions and organizations construct or "frame" formula feeding as risky behavior and how mothers interpret, and possibly resisit, these arguments.
DISSERTATION ADVISOR: Laura Carpenter
RESEARCH INTERESTS: Sociology of Gender; Health; Social Movements; Motherhood; Qualitative Methods
E-MAIL: harmony.d.newman@vanderbilt.edu
HarmonyNewmanCV.pdf
DAMIAN WILLIAMS
DISSERTATION TITLE/TOPIC: "Down and Out in Music City: The Moral and Political Economy of Homelessness in Nashville"
My dissertation situates ethnographic observation within a broader analysis of urban restructuring in the first decade of the 21st century. I demonstrate both the practical processes by which a new institutional and spatial environment emerged that manages the survival activity of Nashville’s male homeless population, and the survival strategies homeless men use as they navigate and co-produce the social order of this milieu. This “institutional ghetto” located in the Lafayette district on the southern fringe of Nashville’s downtown is comprised of a rescue mission, a drop-in center, a free clinic, and three day labor agencies which together serve as the city’s principal homeless subsistence niche. The locale evinces both divergence from and continuity with Nashville’s erstwhile Skid Row on Lower Broadway, each understood as embedded moral traditions as well as physical places. I refer to the reproduction of homeless management across spatial and historical contexts as the “rolling inertia of skid row.” This conceptual point and my unit of analysis – the historically specific landscape of homeless management – distinguish my dissertation from previous ethnographies of homelessness, which focus on either a single homeless service facility or small group of unhoused individuals.
DISSERTATION ADVISOR: Richard Lloyd
RESEARCH INTERESTS: Contemporary Social Theory; Homelessness; Human Service Organizations; Qualitative Methodology; Social Movements; Poverty Studies; Urban Sociology; Work and Occupations
E-MAIL: damian.t.williams@vanderbilt.edu
DamianWilliamsCV.pdf
