Projects

With Liss LaFleur, this interdisciplinary research project seeks to promote inclusion by researching and publicly sharing the birth experiences of queer (LGBTQ+) people in the United States. The structure of this project is based on a re-envisioning of feminist artist Judy Chicago’s Birth Project (1980-85) and includes: a new national survey, a collection of visual artworks for exhibition, and a series of scholarly publications. Original data collection will be paired with archival research at the Schlesinger Library at Harvard University and the National Museum of Women in the Arts.

​For more information, please check out The Queer Birth Project website or our Instagram page.

This project—the second collaborative initiative of the Urban Ethnography Lab—examines how politics are produced and contested in communities experiencing social change in Texas. I am currently conducting fieldwork on union participation in the Texas Panhandle.

Gender scholars have developed a significant body of scholarship on the reproduction of gender inequality in work organizations. However, the vast majority of that research has been conducted in non-profit organizations or in employer-owned businesses.

In collaboration with Dr. Christine Williams and Jessica Thomas at The University of Texas at Austin, this project examined how gender inequality is reproduced or reconfigured in worker-owned businesses. We published article reviewing the existing literature on gender in worker-owned businesses in Sociology Compass. I expanded on this research by drawing on original fieldwork to consider worker-owned businesses as gendered organizations. This article was published in a Special Section on Democracy 2.0, which was edited by Joyce Rothschild for The Sociological Quarterly.

As the inaugural project of the Urban Ethnography Lab at the University of Texas, the Other Side of Austin project was born as a collaborative, interdisciplinary effort to examine the lived experiences of social suffering in Austin, Texas. Drawing on ethnographic participant observation and life history interviews over time, each contributor researched and wrote a chapter for this collective enterprise in an effort to better understand the challenges of living in a city with a booming “creative class.” Our intention was to write a book that would not be limited to Austinites, but that could speak to the manifold ways in which inequality and social exclusion are lived and experienced in the United States.

After many years of reading, writing, revising, and endless meetings, the project evolved into a book, which was published by the University of Texas Press in 2015. To read more about the makings of the book, my co-authors Caitlyn Collins, Katherine Jensen, and Javier Auyero wrote a wonderful piece, “A Proposal for Public Sociology as Localized Intervention and Collective Enterprise,” which was published in Qualitative Sociology.