Assistant Professor of Sociology Amanda Hernandez published “Intersections of Religion, Race, and Feminism With a Progressive Politic” with Tess Starman of Molloy University in Critical Research on Religion. This research asks if women who identify as Christian feminists have more “progressive” stances on social issues than Christian women who do not identify as feminist. Their analysis reveals the ways that specific Christian denomination and racial/ethnic identity shape the relationship between feminism and support for progressive issues. The article can be read here.

Professor of Anthropology Melissa Johnson presented “The Bonner Family History: Insights into Early Social Formations in Belize” for the Belize at 45 Conference, Belize Policy Research Institute, and the University of Belize, Belmopan from September 30-October 1. On October 3, Dr. Johnson was filmed for a documentary being produced by New York-based filmmaker Nyasha Laing about a key figure in mid 20th Century attempts to revitalize Belize’s mahogany industry.

Assistant Professor of Anthropology Naomi Reed published the article “The Changing Same of Race and Racism in Sugar Land, Texas: Memorializing The Sugar Land 95” in the Journal of Black Studies on September 8. A total of 95 Black men who were murdered during the convict lease era in Sugar Land, Texas were unearthed on a construction site for a new Fort Bend Independent School District (FBISD) school in 2018. These men would become known as the Sugar Land 95 (SL95). Memorializing the SL95, creating a cemetery, and searching for descendants became a point of conflict between FBISD and the local Black community who felt the school district’s efforts were subpar. After the murder of George Floyd in 2020, FBISD attempted to improve their efforts with minimal funding. This resulted in inaccuracies on historical markers, erroneous genealogical results, and burial ceremonies that excluded the descendant community. Sugar Land has had a long legacy of diluting Black history in order to redeem white subjectivity. This pattern has occurred in history curricula, local historical narrative, and cultural heritage projects like The SL95 Memorialization Project. Through the notion of racialized geography, silences in historical narrative, and the rejection of subjugated knowledges, Dr. Reed aims not only to demonstrate how the poor memorialization of the SL95 is a new manifestation of the same anti-Black racism that has existed in cultural heritage projects in the US, but also that Black resistance remains and continues to create new methods of preservation and memorialization. The article can be accessed here.

Assistant Professor of Sociology Amanda Hernandez presented research and served in several leadership roles at the American Sociological Association (ASA) and Association for the Sociology of Religion (ASR) conferences in New York City. At the ASA Annual Meeting, Hernandez served as discussant for the “Diverse Visions and Perspectives on the Sociology of Religion” panel and presented “White Epistemology, The Cultural Trauma of the Religious Right, and Feminist Sociology.” At the ASR conference, she presented “‘Is This What MomTok is About?’ The Performance of White Femininity in The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” with Tess Starman of Molloy University, and organized and convened an Author Meets Critic panel for the new edited volume LGBTQ Religious Activism: Rethinking Identity, Faith, and Social Change.

Assistant Professor of Sociology Adriana Ponce presented “Power Moves: Conceptualizing Informal Gendered Interactions within Formal Gender-Neutral Shared Parenting Arrangements” at the American Sociological Association Annual Meeting in New York City, held August 7–11.

Assistant Professor of Sociology Adriana Ponce published her research article, “‘An open mind and heart’: A queering analysis of emotions as empowerment during community engagement with families,” in the inaugural issue of Catalyst Journal. Using a feminist intersectional lens, the article finds that community engagement was an emotional oasis for young adults partnering with a local family resource center. More information is available here.

Assistant Professor of Philosophy Zinhle ka’Nobuhlaluse, kinesiology major Jayden Dawson ’27, and anthropology major Raven Waugh ’26 published their co-written essay, “Reflections on Mapping an A–Z Philosophy BlackList,” on the Blog of the American Philosophical Association. In the essay, the authors reflect on their work on the A–Z Philosophy BlackList, an expanding archive of Black intellectuals curated by ka’Nobuhlaluse and shared every year during Black History Month since her appointment in the Philosophy Department at SU. The project has received funding from the Mellon Publicly Engaged Humanities grant. The essay can be read here.

Assistant Professor of Sociology Amanda Hernandez and environmental studies graduate Sarah Ventimiglia ’25 published their faculty/student collaborative research in the peer-reviewed journal Symbolic Interaction. Their article, titled “Hashtag ChristianGirl: The White Commodified Self on TikTok,” argues that Christian influencers on TikTok use a version of the white commodified self to attempt to sell products, services, and ideologies that uphold Christian whiteness as an idealized form of womanhood. The article can be read here.

Professor of Sociology Maria Lowe and business and sociology alumna ThuyMi Phung ’23 presented their co-authored work, “White Grievance as a Predictor of Opposition to the Black Lives Matter Movement,” at the Southern Sociological Society annual meeting in Jacksonville, FL from April 8–11. The presentation, co-authored with art history and sociology alumna Katherine Holcomb ’23, extends their research examining the dimensions of white grievance, how it attempts to undermine racial justice efforts, and effective strategies for countering this ideology.

Business and international studies double major Cassidie Gomez ’26, Spanish and Latin America border studies double major Gerardo Ortiz ’27, biology major Adriana Salazar ’28, and sociology major Abigayle Stubby-Kern ’26 presented papers in Spanish at the Undergraduate Latin American and Latinx Studies Symposium at Rollins College in Winter Park, FL on March 27. Gomez, Ortiz, and Salazar presented a group project titled “De trabajadores a personas: la revindicación de la dignidad humana en la película mexicana La delgada línea amarilla” as part of the panel “Mexico: Community, Culture, and Development.” The group project was written for Associate Professor of Spanish María de los Ángeles Rodriguez Cadena’s course “Leisure and Play in Latin America” in Fall 2025. Stubby-Kern presented her paper “El lenguaje cinematográfico en la construcción de lo humano y el deterioro de las instituciones en la película argentina Un Hombre Mirando al Sureste” as part of the panel “Art, film, and identity in Latin America.” The paper was written for Dr. Rodriguez Cadena’s course “Conversation through Hispanic cinema” in Fall 2025. Dr. Rodriguez Cadena mentored her students during the process of research, writing, and presentation at the Symposium.

Anthropology majors and race and ethnicity studies minors Karim Clarke ’26 and Nia Cannon ’26 presented their capstone research at the Southwestern Anthropological Association annual conference in Claremont, CA on March 27. Karim presented “Between Constraint and Autonomy: The Labor of Black Care and the Practice of Self-Defined Belonging at a Predominantly White Institution” and Nia presented “Beyond Being ‘Diverse’: The Lived Experiences of Black Women at PWIs.” Their presentations were very well received with at least one audience member initially believing they were faculty members themselves. The research emerged out of coursework with both Assistant Professor of Anthropology Naomi Reed and Professor of Anthropology Melissa Johnson, as well as the SU Racial History Project, and Dr. Johnson’s current anthropology capstone course.

Anthropology graduate Zacharia Arifi ’24 recently published “Hors Place: Discursive Identities of the Modern Franco Kabyle” in The Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography, Volume 15, No. 1. His article is based on a project he worked on while at SU. Assistant Professor of Anthropology Naomi Reed oversaw its development in the anthropology capstone, and Professor of Anthropology Melissa Johnson assisted Zacharia in creating a journal article publication. The article is available here.

Several sociology faculty members and students attended the Eastern Sociological Society annual meeting in Washington, D.C. from March 5-8. Three sociology majors presented their capstone research: Rylan Hastings ’26 presented “One Nation, Many Teams: Americans’ Attitudes About Sport as a Unifier or Divider in Society,” Aris Morgan ’26 presented “The Perception of the West Under Threat: American Attitudes on China,” and Greta Nelson ’26 presented “They Don’t Belong Here: Understanding American Opposition to Undocumented Immigration.” Faculty and students also presented on their collaborative research projects: Assistant Professor of Sociology Amanda Hernandez, Morgan, and Nelson presented their 2025 SURF project “Stay Off Our TERF: Predictors of Anti-Trans Feminists Opposition to Trans Girls in K-12 Sports,” and Professor of Sociology Maria Lowe and Claire Adams ’27 presented “Suspicious Person Posts and Racial Profiling Anxiety in Neighborhoods.” In addition, Hernandez presented work from ongoing research, “But Is It Feminist? The Highlights, Challenges, and Opportunities of Creating a Sociological and Transdisciplinary Podcast.”

Assistant Professor of Anthropology Naomi Reed and Head of Distinctive Collections and Archives Megan Firestone were both interviewed and featured in the documentary “Segregation on Trial: Integrating Georgetown Schools,” filmed and produced by City of Georgetown Communications Manager Keith Hutchinson. The film debuted and was screened at the Georgetown Public Library on February 26, where Naomi and Megan both sat on a panel to discuss the film’s creation and importance with the larger Georgetown community. The film can be viewed here. The panel discussion is available here.

Professor of Anthropology Melissa Johnson presented “Revising the Early Social History of Belize, 1730-1820” at the Third International Caribbean Studies Forum at the University of Belize, Belmopan, on February 18. The talk can be viewed here.

Professor of Sociology Maria Lowe has been awarded this year’s Distinguished Contribution to Teaching Award by the Southern Sociological Society in recognition of outstanding achievements. Dr. Lowe will be honored during the Society’s Presidential Honors and Convocation Plenary, held at their annual meeting in Jacksonville, FL in April.

Professor of Sociology Maria Lowe, along with sociology graduates ThuyMi Phung ’23 and Katherine (Kat) Holcomb ’22, have published a mixed methods paper titled “White Grievance as a Predictor of American Attitudes Toward Critical Race Theory” in the journal Sociological Forum. This article is based on a faculty-student collaborative research project and can be accessed here.

Professor of Anthropology Melissa Johnson organized a double panel for the American Anthropological Association in New Orleans on November 22, along with Dr. Patrick Gallagher of the University of Texas–San Antonio. The sessions were titled “Predatory Politics: The Wily Animal-Human Relationships of Hunting and Fishing” Part 1–Sea and Part 2–Land. Dr. Johnson presented “Tigah Camp: Unruly Multispecies assemblages, Race and Gender in a Belizean Trophy Jaguar Hunting Camp” in Part 2–Land.

Assistant Professor of Anthropology Naomi Reed presented her paper “A Healing African Diasporic Deconstruction of Ashkenormativity” at the American Anthropology Association Conference in New Orleans on November 20. The presentation was on the panel she also chaired, titled “Canonical Hauntings of the Body: On Harm and Healing—Knowledge Production and the Politics of Belonging.” Dr. Reed’s paper explores how the dismissal of whiteness by white presenting Ashkenazi Jewish Americans harms Jews of color and erases their experiences within the Jewish Diaspora. Through a critical inversion of the haunting paternalistic relationship between Jewish anthropologists and Blackness, she asks what Jewish Americans can learn from African Diaspora scholarship. She suggests that Jewish identity should be reconceptualized through African Diasporic notions of identity and race as a means to deconstruct Ashkenormativity and to fuel a healing critical recognition of Jewish diversity. Anthropology graduate Zacharia Arifi ’24 presented a paper on this same panel, titled “Bourdieu Awal and Me: Unraveling a Canon of Franco-Kabyle Ethnolography,” where they mediate the history of French ethnography with ethnographic fieldwork to posit how a legacy of disciplinal practice haunts ethnic identification among the French Kabyle. Particularly, they define how its corpus has codified and perpetuated hegemonic knowledge of belonging that supplant the diaspora’s autonomy in self-conceptualization. They consider, then, how its communities negotiate what it means to be Kabyle through living encounters with discursive expression. Professor of Anthropology Melissa Johnson served as the discussant for this panel. The conference program can be found here.

Assistant Professor of Sociology Amanda Hernandez presented a virtual book talk to women and gender studies students at California State University, Northridge on November 18. The focus of her talk was on feminist interview methodologies and the chapter “Wife – Mother – Girl Boss” from her 2024 book Intersectional Identities of Christian Women in the United States: Faith, Race, and Feminism.

Assistant Professor of Sociology Adriana Ponce was selected to participate in “Beyond Colonial Constraints: Cuir Feminist Praxis as Rupture and Healing across the Archipelago” at the NWSA annual conference in San Juan, Puerto Rico from November 12–16. The pre-conference opportunity was rooted in Boriken archipelago feminism to explore how gender and sexual minorities disrupt coloniality and embrace joy.

Professor of Anthropology Melissa Johnson and her Summer 2025 SURF students presented their findings at the 13th Race, Ethnicity and Place conference in Albuquerque, NM from November 5–7. Their panel was titled “Race, Gender, Slavery and Freedom in Everyday Life on the British coast of Central America, 1750-1830.” Dr. Johnson and three students presented their papers: anthropology and feminist studies double major Dina Gaxiola ’28 presented “The Case of Jane Trapp: Race, Gender, Slavery and Freedom in Early British Central America,” psychology and sociology double major Sophia Hernandez ’28 presented “From Enslavement to Influence; Gendered Agency, Racial Boundaries, and the Story of Ariadne Broaster,” Dr. Johnson presented “Living across lines of freedom in the early history of Belize: The origins of the Bonner family,” and biology and environmental studies double major Shae Whitney ’28 presented “Maria Middleton – Slave, Criminal, Transported Convict: Understanding Gender, Race and Freedom across the British Colonial World.” The students may have been the only undergraduates presenting papers at this conference. The papers were well received, with one audience member sharing that this was the most interesting panel they had attended.

Assistant Professor of Sociology Adriana Ponce published her critical literature review on U.S. stepfamilies in the Journal of Sociology Compass. The article, “A Literature Review of U.S. Stepfamilies: Directions Toward an Intersectional, Feminist Understanding of Lived Experiences Centered on Social Justice Praxis,” is part of a special issue centering on intersectionality, titled “Beyond Boundaries: Reviewing the Multifaceted Dimensions of Intersectionality,” and identifies a glaring gap and directions for new knowledge creation centered on community engagement. The article can be read here.

Assistant Professor of Sociology Amanda Hernandez served as an invited panelist on an “Author Meets Critics” panel at the Sociology for the Scientific Study of Religion annual meeting in Minneapolis on October 31. The book, “Faith & The Fragility of Justice: Responses to Gender-Based Violence in South Africa,” by Meredith Whitnah is an exploration of non-governmental organization responses to gender-based violence in post-apartheid South Africa. Amanda’s comments focused on the author’s call to use intersectional frameworks in the sociological study of religion and the use of creative and innovative methodologies to do this work.

Professor of Anthropology Melissa Johnson participated in the Kulcha 2025 symposium, hosted by the Heritage Education Network Belize, from October 29–31. She presented “Early Belizean Social History: The case of the Crawford family” on October 29. The presentation can be accessed here at 4:54 (4 hours, 54 minutes); the live Q and A starts about 30 minutes later.

Professor of Anthropology Melissa Johnson led a workshop on the “Early Social History of the Lower Belize River Valley” for undergraduate students at the University of Belize (UB) from October 17–18. Eight students and two professors from UB spent Friday working with archival documents and information that Dr. Johnson has collected to start to tell the story of a family of color who lived in British Central America starting in the mid 1700s. The president of the university and two deans joined the workshop for Dr. Johnson’s presentation. The following day, Dr. Johnson organized a field trip for the group to Belizean Creole villages in the lower Belize River Valley, where the group learned about history and culture first hand from elders of the communities. Dr. Johnson worked closely with Lecturer in History and Coordinator of the Intercultural Indigenous Language Institute Delmer Tzib and Assistant Professor of English Christopher De Shield to develop the workshop. The activities were all sponsored by funding from the Mellon Foundation’s Grant to SU, “Deepening the Heart of Texas: Public-Engaged Humanities for Social Justice.”

Assistant Professor of Anthropology Naomi Reed presented a talk, titled “Oral History as Liberation,” at the Universities Studying Slavery Consortium’s Fall Conference, “Second Foundings: Universities, Slavery, and Struggles for Justice in Texas and Beyond,” at Rice University in Houston on Saturday, October 11. She discussed the Southwestern University Racial History Project’s oral history collection and the critical methodology used to gather, preserve, and exhibit stories of alumni of color. Her talk featured an excerpt of the oral history of Eva Mendiola ’75 that was recorded by SCOPE 2022 student Kalista Esquivel ’26 as well as a clip of the forthcoming documentary that she created with Esquivel and SURF 2025 student Mia Santoscoy ’26 about Mendiola’s journey to founding women’s sports at SU. The conference program can be found here.

Sociology and feminist studies graduate Emily Dimiceli ’25 received an honorable mention for the prestigious Joe Feagin Undergraduate Paper Award for her fall 2025 sociology capstone project. This national award, presented by the Sociology of Racial and Ethnic Minorities section of the American Sociological Association (ASA), recognizes outstanding undergraduate scholarship. Emily accepted the honor at this year’s ASA meeting in Chicago. In its commendation, the award committee described Emily’s paper as “ambitious original research… well-grounded in racial theory, including conceptualizations of colorblind racism and historical racism.”

Assistant Professor of Sociology Amanda Hernandez and environmental studies graduate Sarah Ventimiglia ’24 traveled to Chicago to present at the Association for the Sociology of Religion Annual Meeting. Sarah presented their faculty/student collaborative research “Hashtag ChristianGirl: The White Commodified Self on TikTok.” Amanda’s 2024 book, Intersectional Identities of Christian Women in the U.S.: Faith, Race, and Feminism, was the subject of an “Author Meets Critic” book panel.

Assistant Professor of Sociology Amanda Hernandez was interviewed on the “Classical Ideas” podcast about her 2024 book Intersectional Identities of Christian Women in the United States: Faith, Race, and Feminism. The episode can be streamed here. She also soft launched her forthcoming podcast “But Is It Feminist?,” which can be heard here.

Sociology and feminist studies double major and race and ethnicity studies minor Emily Dimiceli ’25 has been accepted into the 2025 American Sociological Association’s (ASA) Honors Program. As a part of the program, she will present her capstone research paper, titled “‘Obama was voted president by white people’: Predictors of Americans’ Perceptions of Racism,” at this year’s ASA annual meeting in Chicago, IL.

Sociology students and faculty members attended the Southern Sociological Society annual meeting in Charlotte, NC from April 9-12. Five sociology seniors presented their capstone research: Catherine Angell presented “Presidency or Penitentiary: Exploring Americans’ Attitudes Towards Felons’ Right to Vote;” Isabella Bahamon presented “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Choice: Predicting Americans’ Attitudes Towards Abortion Rights,” which won the 2025 Odum Award for Best Undergraduate Paper; Emily Dimiceli presented “‘Obama was voted president by white people’: Predictors of Americans’ Perceptions of Racism;” Mary Kate McAdams presented “‘It seems like the system has a few favorites’: Factors that Affect American Attitudes about Racial and Economic Bias in the Criminal Justice System;” and Chelsey Rocha presented “‘DEI is just racism against white people’: Americans Attitudes About Anti-DEI Bills in Higher Education.” In addition, faculty and students presented on their collaborative research projects. Assistant Professor of Sociology Amanda Hernandez and environmental studies major Sarah Ventimiglia ’25 presented their co-authored study titled, “Hashtag Blessed: Performances of White Femininity and Consumption on TikTok.” Professor of Sociology Maria Lowe presented her collaborative study (with co-authors Dr. Reginald Byron of the University of Denver, Brigit Reese ’24, and Carson Maxfield ’24) titled, “Residents of Color in non-Predominantly White Neighborhoods: Are They More Likely to Worry about Racialized Surveillance Than White Residents?”

Assistant Professor of Sociology Adriana Ponce and sociology major Chelsey Rocha ’25 presented “Intersectionality, Accessibility, and Fraudulent Behavior: Feminist, Qualitative Methodology and Emerging Virtual Recruitment” at the Southern Sociological Society (SSS) Annual Conference in Charlotte, NC. Dr. Ponce and Chelsey’s presentation wrestled with accessible recruitment practices for diverse stepfamilies while protecting the data from interested respondents misrepresenting their qualifications for the study.

Assistant Professor of Anthropology Naomi Reed organized and supported the submission, reception, and presentation of the panel “Salons, Skateboarding, and Tabletop Gaming: Stories of ‘Alternative’ Intersectional Gender Expression in Recreational Communities,” presented on April 4 at the 2025 Southwestern Anthropology Association Conference in Pomona, CA. During this panel, anthropology and classics double major Marley Sensenderfer ’25 chaired the session and presented the paper talk “Roll for Stereotypes: D&D and Gender Performativity Tabletop role-playing games,” anthropology major Emma French ’25 presented the paper talk “Gender and Skateboarding Culture,” and anthropology and environmental studies double major Rose Reed ’25 presented the paper talk “White Beauty Standards in a Hair and Nail Salon.” This panel was a collaboration of three student anthropology capstone research projects that deconstruct intersectional manifestations of gender in public space via insider (or native) ethnographic analysis. More information on the session and the conference can be found here.

Professor of Anthropology Melissa Johnson’s article “Tigah camp: unruly multispecies assemblages, race and gender in a Belizean trophy jaguar hunting camp” has just been published in the journal Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies. It can be read here.

Professor of Sociology Maria Lowe, sociology and business graduate ThuyMi Phung ’23, and sociology and art history graduate Katherine Holcomb ’23 presented their co-authored paper titled “The Interaction of Race and Racial Grievance: Predictors of American Attitudes about Critical Race Theory” at the Eastern Sociological Society annual meeting in Boston from March 6-9.

Assistant Professor of Sociology Amanda Hernandez was selected to be in the Sacred Writes Spring 2025 Carpenter Cohort. Sacred Writes provides support, resources, and networks for scholars of religion committed to translating the significance of their research to a broader audience. This spring cohort focuses on training scholars of religion, gender, and sexuality on translating their work into public scholarship. More about the program and her cohort can be found here.

Isabella Bahamon ’25 was selected for the Southern Sociological Society’s 2025 Howard Odum Award for Best Undergraduate Paper for her capstone project titled, “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Choice: American Attitudes about Abortion Rights in the United States.” Professor of Sociology Maria Lowe supervised Isabella’s project during this year’s sociology capstone class.

Assistant Professors of Sociology Adriana Ponce and Amanda Hernandez, Assistant Professor of Political Science Alexander Goodwin, Assistant Professor of History Bryan Kauma, and Assistant Professor of English Sonia Del Hierro published “Teaching with Color: Thematic Hires and the Politics of Teaching in Texas,” in the journal Sociology of Race and Ethnicity. This article joins a growing conversation in the humanities and humanistic social sciences on ways faculty of color shoulder the burden of thinking about our shared futures as racialized, intersectional, and collaborative. You can find the article here.

Sociology and business alumna ThuyMi Phung ’23 has published an article with Professor of Sociology Maria Lowe titled “The Armed Home and Support for Trump: Predictors of Americans’ Attitudes Toward Gun Violence” in the Journal of Integrated Social Sciences. This work represents ThuyMi’s first peer-reviewed publication and stems from her Fall 2022 capstone project. The article can be found here. ThuyMi continues her research on attitudes about gun violence at the University of Washington where she is completing her Master’s in Public Health.

Assistant Professor of Anthropology Naomi Reed organized a panel titled “Blackness and Whiteness in the Americas: Race Across Space and Time” for the American Anthropological Association’s 2024 annual meeting in Tampa, FL on November 21. Professor of Anthropology Melissa Johnson served as the chair for the panel. During this session, Dr. Reed presented the paper “Black Surrogacy and the Sugar Land 95: How White Officials in Sugar Land, Texas use Black Subjectivity to Fabricate a Social Justice Image,” Dr. Johnson presented the paper “Emerging Racial Categories and their Socio-ecological Context on the British Coast of Central America in the Late 1700s,” and undergraduate honors anthropology student Constanza Cameron ’24 presented the paper “Chilean Whiteness: Affective Dispositions Regarding Race and Class.” Alumnus Zacharia Arifi ’24 presented the poster presentation “1760 Hors Place: Discursive Identity Formation of the Franco-Kabyle Diaspora and the PostKabyle” as well. Abstracts of the panel, the papers, and the poster can be found here.

Assistant Professor of Sociology Adriana Ponce and sociology major Chelsey Rocha ’25 presented “Stepparents in America: Unearthing Distinct Practices and Processes” at the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) annual conference in Detroit, MI. Dr. Ponce and Chelsey’s presentation highlighted their community engaged project’s current progress and developments.

Assistant Professor of Sociology Amanda Hernandez presented preliminary insights from her project, “Teaching Christianity and Whiteness in Turbulent Times,” at the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion (SSSR) conference in Pittsburgh from October 17–20.

Professor of Anthropology Melissa Johnson was an invited participant in the Third Coast Central America Collaborative at Texas Christian University from October 17-18, where she presented “The Flowers’ Story: Emerging Racial Categories and their Socio-ecological context on the British Coast of Central America in the late 1700s.”

Assistant Professor of Sociology Amanda Hernandez published her first monograph, “Intersectional Identities of Christian Women in the United States: Faith, Race, and Feminism” (2024, Lexington Books). Based in content analysis, interviews, and survey data, Hernandez problematizes the view that Christianity and feminism are contradictory identities. More information is available here.

Assistant Professor of Sociology Amanda Hernandez served as an invited panelist for “Where There Is Oppression: Doing Sociology in Challenging Times and Places,” at the American Sociological Association Annual Meeting in Montreal.

Assistant Professor of Sociology Amanda Hernandez, Assistant Professor of Sociology Adriana Ponce, Assistant Professor of Political Science Alexander Goodwin, Assistant Professor of History Bryan Kauma, and Assistant Professor of English Sonia Del Hierro had their abstract “Teaching With Color: Thematic Hires and the Politics of Teaching in Texas” accepted as a special feature for the 10 Year Reflection Special Issue on pedagogy and hope in the Journal for the Sociology of Race & Ethnicity. The article will be both a pedagogical reflection on hope in the classroom and on thematic hires. The issue will be available in early 2025.

Professor of Anthropology Melissa Johnson presented “Lucy’s Story: The Surprising Tale of an Enslaved Black Woman in British Central America in the 1770s” as the inaugural webinar for the Government of Belize’s Institute of Social and Cultural Research-National Institute of Culture and History Research Lab Series 2.0 on July 24. It was well attended and is posted on the ISCR-NICH YouTube channel, available here.

Assistant Professor of Sociology Amanda Hernandez published a feature article in the Summer edition of the magazine Conscience,  titled “Are There Christian Feminists? How White Supremacy Impacts Our Assumptions About Identity.” In the article, Hernandez highlights the role that white supremacy plays in the common assumption that feminism and faith are at odds.

Professor of Anthropology Melissa Johnson has just published “Lucy’s Story: The Surprising Tale of an Enslaved Black Woman in British Central America in the 1770s” in Anthropology Now. The article can be read here.

Assistant Professor of Anthropology Naomi Reed (panel organizer) and Professor of Anthropology Melissa Johnson (panel chair), along with two SCOPE undergraduate students, Rose Reed ’25 and Kalista Esquivel ’26, presented their panel “Unsilencing the Past: How Oral Histories Give Voice to Black and Latinx Students at Southwestern University” on April 18 at the Southwestern Social Science Association Conference in New Orleans, LA. Dr. Johnson discussed the foundational history of the University and the founding of The SU Racial History Project. Dr. Reed discussed the liberatory potential of oral histories and why this particular method is key to unsilencing the voices of the oppressed at a predominantly white institution. Rose presented the oral history of Lynette Philips, a Black woman who attended Southwestern University between 1980-1984, played basketball for the university, and was very active on campus. Kalista presented the oral history of Eva Mendiola, a Mexican-American woman who attended Southwestern University from 1972-1975 and founded the volleyball team, which was the first women’s sports team on campus. Future plans include submitting these student papers to a special issue of an oral history journal. The conference program can be viewed here.

Sociology major Elena Clark ’24 was selected as the first place winner in the prestigious Alpha Kappa Delta national undergraduate paper competition for her capstone project titled “‘Freedom of the streets’ or ‘Barriers to success?’ Factors that Predict Attitudes About Homelessness In The United States.” Elena competed against sociology majors from R1s, liberal arts universities, and other schools across the country. Her award comes with a cash prize and travel money to the August 2024 American Sociological Association (ASA) meeting in Montreal, Quebec, where she will participate in the ASA Honors Program, present her paper, and receive her award at the AKD Awards Ceremony. Professor of Sociology Maria Lowe served as Elena’s faculty mentor for this project.

Professor of Sociology Maria Lowe and four sociology seniors attended the Southern Sociological Society annual meeting in New Orleans, LA from April 3-6. Each student also presented their capstone research. Elena Clark ’24 presented her paper titled, “‘Freedom of the streets’ or ‘Barriers to success?’ Factors that Predict Attitudes About Homelessness In The United States.” Liana Collins ’24 presented her paper titled, “Americans’ Attitudes About Second Language Learning in the U.S.” Carson Maxfield ’24 presented his paper titled, “Who is More Likely to Support Conspiracy Theories? Examining the Connections between Education, Gender, and Beliefs in Conspiracy Theory.” Brigit Reese ’24 presented her paper titled, “Hope, Nope, or Cope: Americans’ Perceptions about Climate Change in the 2020s.” In addition, Lowe, Reese, and Maxfield presented the preliminary findings from their faculty-student collaborative project titled, “Racialized Fears in White Spaces: The Frequency with Which Residents Worry About Being Perceived As Suspicious in Their Neighborhood.”

Professor of Anthropology Melissa Johnson presented the paper “The Crawford Family Line: Subaltern Socio-Ecological Formations on the British Coast of Central America in the 1700s” at the Political Ecology Society/Society for Applied Anthropology 84th Annual Meeting on March 27 in Santa Fe, NM.

Assistant Professor of Anthropology Naomi Reed and investigative journalist Brittney Martin received a 2024 Gracie Award for Best Investigative Feature [Radio ‐ Nationally Syndicated Non‐Commercial] for their podcast series “Sugar Land.” The Gracie Awards celebrate women in media. More info can be found here.

Assistant Professor of Anthropology Naomi Reed was invited to present at the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration Historical Studies of Texas Symposium on February 9th and 10th in Austin, Texas. On the roundtable “Community-Based Scholarship,” she explored who gets to be “community” when decisions are being made about forgotten Black cemeteries such as The Bullhead Camp Cemetery (the current resting place of the Sugar Land 95). She discussed how the Texas Antiquities Code requires community input when remains are discovered and how the broader Black descendant community of the 95 has been ignored, thus resulting in subpar memorialization efforts by the local school district that owns the land the bodies are buried on.

Professor of Anthropology Melissa Johnson’s work on Belize was featured in the January 19, 202, JSTOR Daily.

Assistant Professor of Sociology Adriana Ponce participated in the Sociologist for Women in Society (SWS) 2024 winter meeting in Santa Ana Pueblo, New Mexico, from January 25 to 28. She presented her project, “The Intersectional Landscape of Stepparents in the U.S.: What’s Next?,” which advocates for an intersectional, feminist approach to stepparenting research, in preparation for a Faculty-Student Project (FSP).

Assistant Professor of Anthropology Naomi Reed presented her poster presentation, “From Convicts to Ancestors: Resurrecting the Humanity of the Sugar Land 95,” at The American Anthropological Association Conference in Toronto, CA on November 16, 2023, where she explored the impact of white redemptive narratives–in media, archaeology reports, history curriculum, and cemetery signage–of Black history on the memorialization efforts of the Sugar Land 95 in Fort Bend County, TX.

Assistant Professor of Sociology Amanda Hernandez presented “‘My Last Evangelical Hold Out’: Pro-Life, Pro-Choice, and Everything in Between” at the American Academy of Religion Conference in San Antonio, TX.

Professor of Anthropology Melissa Johnson was part of a collaborative team of nearly 50 social scientists whose publication “Governance and Conservation Effectiveness in Protected Areas and Indigenous and Locally Managed Areas” Annual Review of Environment and Resources.48: 559-588 has just come out. It is available here.

This past weekend (Oct 19-22), Assistant Professor of Sociology Amanda Hernandez attended the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion and convened a session entitled “Feminist Approaches to the Sociology of Religion.” Additionally, she presented her paper “The Sacred & The Secular: Examining the Intersection of Feminist Christian Identification and Progressive Social Issues” with collaborator Tess Starman of Howard University and served as a guest panelist for “Religion And…How to Bring the Study of Religion into Conversation Across Disciplines.”

Professor of Anthropology Melissa Johnson was an invited speaker for the 26th Meeting of the United Kingdom-Belize Association (UKBA) at University College London on October 13, 2023. She presented a revised and longer version of her paper “Lucy’s Story: A Window into the Shore and the Bay in the late 1700s” via Zoom, and it was very well received.

Assistant Professor of Anthropology Naomi Reed was invited to discuss her podcast “Sugar Land” on the panel “Can you hear us now? Storytelling in podcasting” at the 2023 Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference hosted by The University of North Texas in Dallas, Texas, this past weekend October 13-14th. (https://www.themayborn.com/schedule). Dr. Reed and her co-host, investigative journalist Brittney Martin discussed their process of writing and editing “Sugar Land” and the benefit of interdisciplinary collaboration in storytelling and producing public scholarship.

Professor of Sociology Maria Lowe, Luis Romero (2018-19 SU Mellon Teaching Fellow), and Madeline Carrola ’19 published an article titled “‘Racism Masked as Safety Concerns’: The Experiences of Residents of Color With Racialized Coveillance in a Predominantly White Neighborhood” in the journal Sociology of Race and Ethnicity. In their article, the authors coin the term racialized coveillance and discuss ways that residents of color navigate and are negatively impacted by such resident-initiated monitoring practices.

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.

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.”

Professor of Anthropology Melissa Johnson  gave two invited talks on her book Becoming Creole: Nature and Race in Belize . The first was given to a group of graduate students from the University of South Florida and members of the community of Placencia, at the Placencia Community Center in Belize on June 12; the second was given to one of the communities that the book is about, Crooked Tree Village, at the Crooked Tree Museum and Cultural Center on June 22. The American Association of Geographers Review of Books  shared the first review of the book, available here .

Associate Professor of Sociology Reggie Byron gave a presentation titled “The Uneven Effects of Legal Representation on Employment Discrimination Charge Outcomes” on June 1 at the Annual Meetings of the Law and Society Association in Washington, DC.

Associate Professor of Anthropology Brenda Sendejo collaborated with University of Texas at Austin’s Center for Mexican American Studies on the “Chicana Movidas: New Narratives of Activism and Feminism in the Movement Era” panel presentation at the Emma S. Barrientos Mexican American Cultural Center in Austin. Sendejo was among the contributors to the anthology who presented at that event, made possible by a recent grant from the Summerlee Foundation to the Latina History Project (LHP), which Sendejo directs. Sendejo was also invited to present on her research at the University of Texas–Rio Grande Valley campuses in Brownsville and McAllen and at the The Esperanza Peace and Justice Center in San Antonio, which was cosponsored by Trinity University and the University of Texas–San Antonio. The recent Summerlee grant will allow Sendejo to continue the work of the LHP, documenting Chicana/Latina activism and feminism in Texas since the movement era and incorporating this research into the development and implementation of  inclusive pedagogies and methodologies. Forthcoming activities include a collaboration between Sendejo’s classes and those of Dr. Norma Cantú at Trinity University and research with SU students on the history of Chicana feminism and activism in San Antonio and Central Texas since the 1960s.

Professor of Anthropology Melissa Johnson  was interviewed by Dr. Alejandra Bronfman about her new book Becoming Creole: Nature and Race in Belize  for the New Books Network’s podcast series. The interview was posted on April 26, 2019, in their Caribbean Studies section.

Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow of Sociology Luis Romero and  Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow of Feminist Studies Sequoia Maner were invited to be featured speakers at the University of Texas at Austin. Sponsored by the College of Liberal Arts under a grant provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Romero and Maner presented “Professional-Life Experiences and Postgrad Transitions” to underrepresented graduate students of color. They discussed a variety of aspects concerning the management of career and personal development in graduate school, including pedagogical approaches to studying race, gender, and class in the classroom; navigating microaggressions from students, colleagues, and administration; and juggling home and work lives. Romero and Maner also talked about how to prepare for the job market as an emerging scholar, how to maximize  professional conference opportunities, and how to position oneself for tenure-track positions.

Sociology majors Samantha Pentecost ’19 and Veronica Ciotti ’19 were awarded Best Paper awards for their capstone projects by Alpha Kappa Delta, sociology’s national honors society. Pentecost’s paper, “Gendering the Boy Scouts: Examining Hegemonic Masculinity at a Coed Backpacking Camp,” was selected as the second-place winner, and Ciotti’s paper, “The Classroom Is Sacred: Academic Masculinity as a Response to the Campus Carry Law in Texas,” was selected as the third-place winner. Both capstone papers were written under the direction of Professor of Sociology Maria Lowe.

Sociology majors Zac White ’20 and Hannah Bills ’20 were selected as two of the eight students participating in the 2019 Summer Research Experience for Undergraduates Program focusing on research in race, ethnicity, and the demography of U.S. families at the University of Texas at Austin’s Population Research Center. White and Bills were assisted by Professor of Sociology Maria Lowe and Associate Professor of Sociology Reggie Byron.

Sociology majors Madeline Carrola ’19 and Molly McConnell ’20 were accepted into the 2019 American Sociological Association’s Honors Program. Carrola was admitted based on her capstone paper, “Performing the Handmaid’s Tale: The Use of Dystopian Literature at Political Protests,” which was written under the direction of Professor of Sociology Maria Lowe. McConnell was admitted based on her research methods paper, “Skin Tone, Colorism, and Colorblind Racism in the Age of Trump,” which was written under the direction of Associate Professor of Sociology Reggie Byron.

Professor of Sociology Maria Lowe, Mellon Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow Luis Romero,and seven sociology majors attended the annual meeting of the Southern Sociological Society in Atlanta, GA, April 10–13.

• Lowe and Madeline Carrola ’19 presented “Outsiders Within: The Effects of Online and in-Person Surveillance on Residents of Color in a Predominantly White Neighborhood.” This research is funded by a Southwestern  Faculty–Student Project Award and a Sam Taylor Award.
• Romero presented “‘Paying the ‘Detention Bill’: The Economics and Hidden Costs of Immigrant Detention for Families.”
• Carrola also presented “The Handmaid’s Tale and Performance Activism.”
• Veronica Ciotti  ’19 presented “‘The Classroom is Sacred:’ The Perceived Effects of Campus Carry among Texas Male Faculty Members.”
• Carmen Hernandez  ’19 presented “How a Piece of Paper Defines One’s Experience in the U.S.: The Experiences of Documented Siblings of DACA Recipients.”
• Samantha Pentecost  ’19 presented “Girls in the Boy Scouts: Exploring Dilemmas of Gender-Integrated Spaces and Hybrid Masculinity at a Coed Backpacking Camp.”
• Brielle Read  ’20 presented “Letting the Teachers Speak: Teachers’ Perspectives on the Special Education Identification Process in Public Texas Elementary Schools.”
• Savannah Scott  ’19 presented “Medically Policing Black Female Bodies: Black Women’s Experiences with Birth Control.”
• Marta Zuzeviciute  ’19 presented “‘Why Can’t I Be Both?’: Experiences of Having an Arabic Ethnic Identity in French Society.”

Professor of Sociology Sandi Nenga delivered two presentations at the Pacific Sociological Association meetings in Oakland, CA. The first was “Doctor Who in the Gender Classroom” and was part of a panel titled  “What is this Lady Doctor Doing in MY TARDIS? Gender and the Regeneration of Doctor Who.” The second presentation was titled “Ten Respeto and Being Respectful: Shifting Meanings of Respect in a College Readiness Program for First-Generation Latinx Students.”

Professor of Anthropology Melissa Johnson  presented an overview of her book Becoming Creole: Nature and Race in Belize  at the Second Belize National Research Conference in Belmopan, Belize, on April 3.

Professor of Anthropology Melissa Johnson  gave an invited talk titled “Becoming Creole: Nature and Race in Belize” at the University of Texas at San Antonio, on Friday, March 22.

Associate Professor of Sociology Reggie Byron had a peer-reviewed article titled “Bureaucracy, Discrimination, and the Racialized Character of Organizational Life” accepted for publication in Research in the Sociology of Organizations with Vincent Roscigno at The Ohio State University. The paper will appear in the forthcoming volume on Race, Organizations, and the Organizing Process.

Professor of Anthropology Melissa Johnson’s article “Gender, Race and Ecotourism Assemblages in Rural Creole Belize” has been published as part of a special section (“Gendered Environments: Ecotourism, Space and Politics in Latin America,” eds. Eveline Durr and Saskia Walther) of the Bulletin of Latin American Research in the Journal of the Society for Latin American Studies.

Eleven Southwestern University faculty members have won Sam Taylor Fellowship grants to support their research, with award amounts ranging from $1,000 to $1,600. Sam Taylor Fellowships are selected through a competitive application process and are provided by the General Board of Higher Education and Ministry of the United Methodist Church. This year’s recipients are

• Professor of Physics Steven Alexander, “Generating Energy from Hot Sidewalks” (awarded $1,200)
• Assistant Professor of Communication Studies Lamiyah Bahrainwala, “The Politics of Stealth Halal: Re-Presenting the Islamic Origins of U.S. Meat Products” (awarded $1,600)
• Associate Professor of German Erika Berroth , “Nature Education in the German Classroom: Possibilities for Integration and Inclusion?” (awarded $1,400)
• Professor of Biology Romi Burks, “Unravelling the Mystery: Genetic Differentiation of Chinese and Japanese Mysterysnails Using 16S” (awarded $1,400)
• Assistant Professor of History Jethro Hernandez Berrones, “With Indigenist Spirit: Doctors on Spiritual Practices in Post-Revolutionary Mexico” (awarded $1,500)
• Professor of Anthropology Melissa Johnson, “Human–Jaguar Becomings and Racial Capitalism in Belize” (awarded $1,000)
• Associate Professor of French Francis Mathieu, “Research on Claire de Duras’s Avant-Garde Novella, Ourika” (awarded $1,400)
• Associate Professor of French Aaron Prevots, “Gestures toward the Sacred: Guillevic, Vargaftig, Tellermann, Michel” (awarded $1,400)
• Associate Professor of Communication Studies Valerie Renegar, “Contemporary Modes of Parenting: Disrupting the Representation of Stepmothers in Popular Culture” (awarded $1,500)
• Associate Professor of Spanish Maria De Los Angeles Rodriguez Cadena, “Cultural Memory and Historical Fiction: Women of the Past on Television and Film by Four Contemporary Mexican Women Directors” (awarded $1,400)
• Assistant Professor of Political Science Emily Sydnor, “Researching Attachments to American Political Institutions” (awarded $1,600)

Professor Emeritus of Sociology and University Scholar Edward L. Kain is the lead editor of Conducting Effective Program Reviews: A Training Manual for the ASA Department Resources Group.This manual, published in November by the American Sociology Association (ASA) in Washington, DC, is used by members of the ASA’s Department Resources Group, a national group of consultants who serve as external program reviewers across the country. Kain served as the external program reviewer for the Anthropology and Sociology Program at Governors State University in Chicago, Nov. 6–7, 2018.

Professor of Anthropology Melissa Johnson presented a paper, “Becoming Creole: Racial Capitalism and Human Being Otherwise,” for the panel “In and Against Racial Capitalism” and served as a discussant for the panel “The Plantation and the Planet, Part 1” at the American Anthropological Association 118th Meeting, in San Jose, CA, Nov. 15–18, 2018.

Associate Professor of Anthropology Brenda Sendejo presented a paper titled “Spaces of Resistance: Chicana and Chicano Activism and Feminism in Austin since the Movement Era” in a special session organized by Associate Professor of Environmental Studies Joshua Long at the Race, Ethnicity, and Place Conference, Oct. 23–26, in Austin. Sendejo also presented at the Texas Book Festival on Nov. 4 on her essay “The Space in Between: Exploring the Development of Chicana Feminist Thought in Central Texas,” which was recently published in Chicana Movidas: New Narratives of Feminism and Activism in the Movement Era (UT Press). Sendejo and fellow contributor Martha P. Cotera spoke about their essays, putting them into historical and contemporary contexts.

Associate Professor of Anthropology Brenda Sendejo presented a paper, “Towards a Mujerista Ethnographic Approach: Embodied Knowledge and Feminist Anthropology in the Borderlands,” for the panel “Critical Chicana and Latinx Ethnography: Reflections from the Field,” which she cochaired at the American Anthropological Association’s 118th Meeting, in San Jose, CA, Nov. 15–18, 2018. Sendejo also served as an invited panelist at the American Studies Association Annual Meeting in Atlanta, GA, on Nov. 8, 2018, where she presented “The Space in Between: Exploring the Development of Chicana Feminist Thought in Central Texas.”

Professor of Anthropology Melissa Johnson’s book Becoming Creole: Nature and Race in Belize was published by Rutgers University Press on Nov. 1 in their Critical Caribbean Studiesseries. Use code 02AAAA17 for a 30% discount here. You can also find it on Amazon.

Associate Professor of Sociology Reggie Byron gave an invited presentation of his research in a graduate-level course titled “Educational Research and Design” at the University of Texas at Austin in October. In addition, on Oct. 24, he presented a paper titled “Colorblindness, Race, and Public Accommodations Discrimination” at the Race, Ethnicity, and Place Conference in Austin.

Professor of Sociology Maria Lowe presented a paper titled “Do They Belong Here? Race and Contested Public Spaces in an East Austin Neighborhood” in a special session organized by Associate Professor of Environmental Studies Joshua Long at the Race, Ethnicity, and Place Conference, Oct. 23–26. Her paper’s coauthors include sociology and feminist studies major Madeline Carrola, class of 2019; anthropology major Dakota Cortez, class of 2019; and sociology major Mary Jalufka ’18.

Professor of Anthropology Melissa Johnson presented a paper titled “Human–Jaguar Becomings and Racial Capitalism in Belize” at the Race, Ethnicity, and Place IX Engaged Scholarship: Fostering Human and Civil Rights, in Austin, TX, Oct. 23–26.

Associate Professor of Environmental Studies Joshua Long coorganized three special sessions on Austin with Eliot Tretter (University of Calgary) for the Race, Ethnicity, and Place Conference. Associate Professor of Sociology Reggie Byron, Professor of Sociology Maria Lowe, Associate Professor of Anthropology Brenda Sendejo, and Simone Yoxall, class of 2019, presented in these sessions. Long also presented a paper in this session titled “Austin in the Era of Climate Urbanism.”

Associate Professor of Anthropology Brenda Sendejo published “‘The Space in Between’: Exploring the Development of Chicana Feminist Thought in Central Texas” in Chicana Movidas: New Narratives of Activism and Feminism in the Movement Era (UT Press 2018).

Associate Professor of Sociology Reggie Byron presented a paper titled “Race and Public Accommodations Discrimination in an Era of Colorblindness” at the Annual Meetings of the American Sociological Association (ASA) on Aug. 11. He also presided over undergraduate student presentations for the ASA Honors Program, served on an ASA panel for first generation faculty of color, and served as a faculty member on a focus group for Pearson Textbooks.

Latin American and Border Studies senior and Mellon Undergraduate Fellow Esther Ramos ’19 presented “The Shadow Beast Within: La Quinceañera as a Means of Cultural Resistance” on a panel titled “Cultural Expressions, Cultural Resistance” at the 2018 meeting of “El Mundo Zurdo,” hosted by the Society for the Study of Gloria Anzaldúa at Trinity University on May 18, 2018. Associate Professor of Anthropology Brenda Sendejo served as moderator for the panel and presented a paper on her own research at the conference as well. Her paper was titled “Cultural Politics in the Borderlands: Exploring the Embodiment of Religion and Spiritual Activism as Resistance.”

Associate Professor of Anthropology Brenda Sendejo published “The Space In Between: Exploring the Emergence of Chicana Feminist Thought in Central Texas” in Chicana Movidas: New Narratives of Activism and Feminism in the Movement Era (UT Press 2018). Through archival and ethnographic research, Sendejo traced the emergence of Chicana feminism to the Chicana Research and Learning Center, The University of Texas at Austin, and Gloria E. Anzaldúa, uncovering a previously unknown feminist intellectual legacy.

Associate Professor of Sociology Reggie Byron, Professor of Sociology Maria Lowe, Professor of Sociology Sandi Nenga, and five students attended the annual meeting of the Southern Sociological Society in New Orleans, La., April 4–7.  

• Madeline Carrola, class of 2019, presented “’We’re Not Wasting Coffee Grounds’: How College Students Respond to Peers’ Resource Consumption and Waste Disposal by Social Class.”
• Sophia Galewsky, class of 2018, presented “Abortion Provision as High Risk Activism: What Motivates Providers?”
• Mary Jalufka, class of 2018, presented “White Female Elementary School Teachers and Campus Safety in the Wake of Sandy Hook.”
• Esteffany Luna, class of 2018, presented “Am I Still Latino Enough? The Construction of a Latino Identity among Hispanics who do not Speak Spanish.” Luna’s paper was also the recipient of the 2018 Odum Undergraduate Paper Award. This marks the 9th time in 13 years that a Southwestern sociology senior has won this award.
• Dr. Byron co-organized a panel titled “Innovative Uses of Data in the Study of Workplace Discrimination” and presented a co-authored paper titled “Bureaucratic Legitimation, Discrimination, and the Racialized Character of Organizational Life.”
• Dr. Nenga served as a presider for multiple sessions at the meeting.
• Dr. Lowe and Dakota Cortez,class of 2019, presented “Race and Contested Public Spaces in a Liberal Predominantly White Planned Urban Community.”

Professor of Anthropology Melissa Johnson presented a paper, “Human Being otherwise: Commoning, Blackness and Freedom in Belize,” for the panel series “The Commons, Commoning and Co-Becoming” at the American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting in New Orleans, La., April 13, 2018.

Associate Professor of Sociology Reggie Byron and Southwestern University alumni Will Molidor ’12 and Andy Cantu ’13 had a co-authored paper titled “U.S. Newspapers’ Portrayals of Home Invasion Crimes” accepted for publication at The Howard Journal of Crime and Justice. The paper is the first study in existence to quantitatively analyze newspaper portrayals of these crimes. The co-authors read and content-coded over 3,000 newspaper articles from 15 U.S. cities before running a model to determine the predictors of enhanced home invasion crime news coverage.

Southwestern University, along with two other ACS institutions, Millsaps College and Hendrix College, was the recipient of a recently-funded ACS Diversity Grant to support an initiative known as FOCUS (Faculty of Color Uniting for Success). The project’s overall objectives are to enhance recruitment, success, and the retention of faculty of color at our three institutions and in all ACS consortia schools. It aims to raise awareness of the challenges that faculty of color face through sustained advocacy, summer workshops, and regular surveys of participants on campus climate. In conjunction with ACS’s Director of Diversity and Inclusion, Anita Davis, the initiative will also provide materials and webinars to help educate institutional leadership about ways to better support faculty of color. This year, the FOCUS project will host its summer workshop at Southwestern June 10–15. This workshop was designed to bring together faculty of color from ACS member colleges for a week-long summer retreat focusing on scholarship, networking, self-care, professional advancement, navigating service demands, and the challenges that faculty of color face on their path to professional success in the academy. It will include faculty participants from Hendrix, Millsaps, and Southwestern. Associate Professor of Education Alicia Moore serves as the FOCUS Program Director. Director of Teaching, Learning and Scholarship Julie Sievers, Senior Director of Foundation Relations Larkin Tom, and Associate Professor of Anthropology Brenda Sendejo serves on the FOCUS steering committee and will serve as facilitators for the 2018 FOCUS summer retreat.

Associate Professor of Sociology Reggie Byron had a teaching exercise titled “Teaching about Police Violence with Open Source Police Shootings Data and Census Data” published in TRAILS, The American Sociological Association’s Teaching Resources And Innovations Library for Sociology. He has also accepted an invitation to serve as a reviewer for the National Science Foundation. 

Associate Professor of Anthropology Brenda Sendejo presented “’Claiming Space’: Chicana Knowledge Production and Feminist Praxis as Critical Interventions in Belonging” at the American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 30. The paper was part of an invited panel titled “Critical Anthropology of Informal Educational Processes in Latinx Communities.”

Professor of Anthropology Melissa Johnson presented her paper “Everyday Politics of Whiteness in Belize” as part of the panel “Everyday Calculations of Whiteness in Latin America” and served as Discussant for the panel “Water Matters: Anthropologists on Climate, Contamination and Vulnerable Embodiment, Part 1” at the 116th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Washington, D.C., Nov. 29–Dec. 3, 2017.

Associate Professor of Anthropology Brenda Sendejo was invited to present as a part of a panel at the 2017 American Library Association Annual Meeting in Chicago, Ill. This panel, titled “Giving Voice to Diverse Collections Through Digitization,” included other professionals from Amherst College, Washington University, the University of Minnesota, and Washington State University. The panel focused on ways that digitization of material in archives and special collections can help to give voice to underrepresented groups in the historical narrative. Sendejo presented on the Latina History Project, a collaborative project between Sendejo, Professor of Feminist Studies Alison Kafer, and Southwestern’s Special Collections. Over 100 librarians and archivists were in attendance. The panel was organized and planned by Director of Special Collections & Archives Jason W. Dean.

Associate Professor of Sociology Reggie Byron presented a paper titled “Employment Discrimination Activism and Intergenerational Change” at the CERES Conference at the University of Edinburgh on June 16, 2017. This paper compares race-based employment discrimination claims across the U.S. and U.K.

Associate Professor of Anthropology Brenda Sendejo presented “The Face of God Has Changed: Mujerista Ethnography and the Politics of Spirituality in the Borderlands” at the Inter University Program for Latino Research (IUPLR) conference in San Antonio on May 18. She was invited to present on a panel titled “Cultural Anthropology in the U.S.-Mexican Borderlands: A Texas Perspective.” Sendejo spoke on her current book project and a forthcoming publication on the emergence of Chicana feminist thought in Texas, which she connected to Southwestern’s Latina History Project.

Associate Professor of Sociology Reggie Byron gave an invited lecture titled “Implicit Bias, Microaggressions, and the March Toward More Inclusive Pedagogies” at SUNY Geneseo on April 27, 2017. He spent April 28 meeting with Geneseo students and their Special Diversity Commission to talk about campus climate issues and retention efforts.   

Professor of Sociology Maria Lowe, Professor of Sociology Sandi Nenga, and eight students presented papers at the annual meeting of the Southern Sociological Society in Greenville, S.C., March 30–April 1.

• Deidra McCall, Class of 2018, presented “Racialized Politics and the Confederate Flag: Why Society Can Never Be Color-Blind.”

• Melanie Theriault, Class of 2017, presented “Should we say something about her sister? Family roles and the siblings of people with disabilities.”

• Samantha Pentecost, Class of 2019, presented “’We’re Not All the Same’: Levels of Conservatism and Assimilation as Predictors for Latino Partisan Choice.”

• Cadie Pullig, Class of 2017, presented “Talking about Campaign Advertisements: How College Students Discuss the Appearance of Political Candidates.”

• Kelly McKeon, Class of 2017, presented “Catching Up: Overcoming a Deficit in Cultural Capital as a First Generation College Student.”

• Sarah Surgeoner, Class of 2017, presented “Femvertising: Commodification and Critical Consumption of Feminism in Advertising.”

• Holly O’Hara, Class of 2017, and Dakota Cortez, Class of 2019, presented a paper titled “Sexual Assault, Zero Tolerance Policies, and the Gender Climate at a Liberal Arts University.” This paper was co-authored with Associate Professor of Sociology Reginald Byron and Lowe.

• Holly O’Hara, Class of 2017, presented “Searching for a Genuine Sorority Woman: Greek Recruitment Practices at Public and Private Universities.”

• Nenga presented “How Teenage Latinas Respond to and Resist Gender Surveillance in a College Readiness Program.”

• Lowe also served on the program committee for the conference.

Associate Professor of Anthropology Brenda Sendejo presented a paper titled “Spiritual Activist Pedagogies and Methodologies: Oral History as Recovery, Healing, and Resistance” at the Mujeres Activas En Letras Y Cambio Social (MALCS) Conference in Laramie, Wyoming on Aug. 6, 2016. Sendejo also presented her work with students in the Latina History Project at the National Chicana Studies Conference April 6–9, 2016 in Denver, Colo.

Associate Professor of Anthropology Brenda Sendejo and alumna Tori Vasquez ’15 co-authored an article titled “‘Unboxing the Buried Seeds of My Belonging’: Latina/o History, Decolonized Pedagogies and the Politics of Inclusion” for the American Anthropological Association’s Anthropology News Column. The article is about their work on the Latina History Project at Southwestern. Project contributors include current students Stephanie Garcia, Class of 2018, Denise Ovalle, Class of 2017, alumna Adriana Romero ’16, and project co-director Professor of Feminist Studies Alison Kafer.

Multiple Southwestern students, faculty and alumni presented papers at the August 2016 American Sociological Association (ASA) annual meeting in Seattle, Wash.

• Kelly McKeon, Class of 2017, presented a research paper titled “Finding a Deficit in the Deficit Model: A Study of the Social and Academic Integration of First-Generation College Students.”
• Associate Professor of Sociology Reggie Byron and Professor of Sociology Maria Lowe presented a paper titled “The Paradox of Colorblindness: Undergraduate Students’ Selective Perceptions about Race and Racial Diversity.” Nathan Tuttle ’14 and Brianna Billingsley ’14 are co-authors on the paper. Byron also served on the ASA Honors Program Advisory Council and Lowe served on the 2016 Outstanding Graduate Student Paper Award Committee for the ASA Race, Gender, and Class section.
• Guillermo Alvarado ’15 presented a paper titled “‘That Gay Gangsta Shit’: Identity Construction and Community Membership in Queer Rappers’ Musical Careers.” Alvarado’s paper also received first place in the 2016 national Alpha Kappa Delta (AKD) undergraduate paper competition. For his achievement, Guillermo was honored at the AKD Distinguished Lecture.

Professor Emeritus of Sociology Edward L. Kain’s article “Does the Center Hold? Reflections on a Sociological Core” was published in the July 2016 issue of Teaching Sociology.

Associate Professor of Sociology Reggie Byron accepted a special invitation to present an overview of his employment discrimination research to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (E.E.O.C.) in Washington, D.C. from June 15-17. The title of his presentation was “Quantitative and Qualitative Analyses of Employment Discrimination Charge Data.” As a result of the conference, he has been invited to serve in a future position on the editorial board for the quarterly sociological magazine Contexts, a publication of the American Sociological Association.

Professor of Sociology Maria Lowe has been invited to join the Editorial Board of the Journal of Undergraduate Ethnography. She has also been invited to serve on the Southern Sociological Society program committee for its 2017 conference.

Professor of Sociology Maria Lowe’s co-authored article, “Who Looks Suspicious? Racialized Surveillance in a Predominantly White Neighborhood,” has been accepted for publication in the sociology journal, Social Currents. This paper is co-authored with Angela Stroud ’03, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Social Justice at Northland College, and Alice Nguyen ’14. It served as the foundation for Professor Lowe’s Paideia Connections lecture.

Assistant Professor of Anthropology Brenda Sendejo presented a paper titled ‘The Space in Between’: Exploring the Development of Chicana Feminist Thought in Central Texas at the National Association of Chicana and Chicano Studies Conference in Denver on April 7. Dr. Sendejo was also on a panel that consisted of contributors to the forthcoming anthology, ¡Chicana! New Narratives of Chicana Activism and Feminism in the Chicano Movement.

Professor of Sociology Maria Lowe attended the annual American Sociological Association (ASA) meeting in Chicago, where she presented a paper co-authored with Associate Professor of Sociology Reggie Byron titled “The Specter of Gendered Aggression: Predicting Students’ Level of Comfort at Weekend Campus Parties.” She was also a presider at two sessions and has agreed to serve on the graduate student paper award committee for the Race, Gender and Class section during the 2015–16 academic year.

Professor of Anthropology, Environmental Studies, and Race & Ethnicity Studies Melissa Johnson presented a paper “Becoming Creole: Race and Nature in Belize” on March 30 at the Political Ecology Society/Society for Applied Anthropology 76th Annual Meeting in Vancouver, Canada. She also served as a discussant for the panel “More-than-Human, Part I: Interspecies Intersections: Reframing Conflict and Co-existence.”

Associate Professor of Sociology Reggie Byron was awarded an external grant from the Fund for Advancing the Discipline (FAD) of the American Sociological Association. His project is titled “Discriminatory Race and Gender Termination from Low Wage Work”. He will work with sociology majors, Deidra McCall, Class of 2018, and Madeline Carrola, Class of 2018, over two summers to complete this project

Associate Professor of Sociology Reggie Byron, Professor of Sociology Maria Lowe and Southwestern graduates Brianna Billingsley ’14 and Nathan Tuttle ’14 had a paper titled “Performativity Double Standards and the Sexual Orientation Climate at a Southern Liberal Arts University” accepted for publication in the Journal of Homosexuality.

Associate Professor of Sociology Sandi Nenga published a co-edited book (with Allison Hurst of Oregon State University).  The book titled Working in Class: Recognizing How Social Class Shapes Our Academic Work and was published in January 2016 by Rowman & Littlefield.

Assistant Professor of Anthropology Brenda Sendejo presented a paper titled, “On Embodied Knowledge and Religious Transformations: Liminality and Nepantla in the Texas-Mexico Borderlands” at the 2015 American Anthropological Association annual meeting in Denver, Colorado in December. Her presentation was part of an invited session titled, “Diaspora, Dreams, And Embodiment: Reflections on Latina/o Migrations, Methods, and the Making of Familiar Roads of Survival” sponsored by the Association of Latina and Latino Anthropologists and The Society of Humanist Anthropology.

Professor of Sociology Maria Lowe attended the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association (ASA) meeting in Chicago, where she presented a paper co-authored with Associate Professor of Sociology Reggie Byron titled “The Specter of Gendered Aggression: Predicting Students’ Level of Comfort at Weekend Campus Parties.” She was also a presider at two sessions and has agreed to serve on the graduate student paper award committee for the Race, Gender and Class section during the 2015-2016 academic year. 

Professor of Sociology Maria Lowe attended the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association (ASA) meeting in Chicago, where she presented a paper she co-authored with Associate Professor of Sociology Reggie Byron, titled “The Specter of Gendered Aggression: Predicting Students’ Level of Comfort at Weekend Campus Parties.” She was also a presider at two sessions and has agreed to serve on the graduate student paper award committee for the Race, Gender and Class section during the 2015-2016 academic year. 

Associate Professor of Sociology Reggie Byron had a teaching exercise titled “Teaching the Sociological Imagination with SAT Data” published in TRAILS, The American Sociological Association’s Teaching Resources And Innovations Library for Sociology and had a co-authored methodological paper titled “Patterns of Local Segregation: Do They Matter for Crime?” accepted for publication at the journal “Social Science Research.” Additionally, Reggie has been invited to serve on the editorial boards for the journals “Work and Occupations” (a leading international sociological journal) and “Social Currents” (a new journal affiliated with the Southern Sociological Society). Finally, he recently gave a presentation titled “From Boston to Belfast: The Rhetoric of Racism in Employment Discrimination Cases in the U.S. and the U.K.” at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and two presentations at the Annual Meetings of the American Sociological Association in Chicago. One was an invited paper titled “Organizational Legitimation of Sex Discrimination” and one was a paper co-authored with Maria Lowe titled “The Specter of Gendered Aggression: Predicting Students’ Level of Comfort at Weekend Campus Parties.”

Associate Professor of Sociology Sandi Nenga published a book chapter with students Guillermo A. Alvarado ’15 and Claire S. Blyth ’16. The chapter, titled “I Kind of Found My People: Latina/O College Students’ Search for Social Integration on Campus,” was published in “College Students’ Experiences of Power and Marginality: Sharing Spaces and Negotiating Differences.” 

Associate Professor of Sociology Sandi Nenga presented a paper titled “Defining Effective Teaching at Two Private Liberal Arts Colleges” at the annual meetings of the Southern Sociological Society in New Orleans on March 26. The paper was co-authored with Kathryn G. Hadley of Hanover College.

Professor of Sociology Maria Lowe was the invited keynote speaker at Texas State University’s symposium titled “Democracy’s Promise: Deisolating Gender Experiences,” on March 27. She discussed her current research on the surveillance of African American men in a liberal predominantly white neighborhood. 

Professor of Anthropology Melissa Johnson’s article, “Creolized Conservation: A Belizean Creole Community Encounters a Wildlife Sanctuary,” has been published in “Anthropological Quarterly.”

Professor of Sociology Maria Lowe, Assistant Professor of Sociology Reggie Byron and Sue Mennicke, associate dean for international programs at Franklin and Marshall College published an article titled, “The Racialized Impact of Study Abroad on U.S. Students’ Subsequent Interracial Interactions,” in “Education Research International,” (Dec. 2014), doi:10.1155/2014/232687. This project was carried out with funds from Associated Colleges of the South Faculty Mellon Grant awarded to Lowe, Byron and Mennicke.

Assistant Professor of Anthropology Brenda Sendejo was invited to do a reading of her recent publication, “Methodologies of the Spirit: Reclaiming Our Lady of Guadalupe and Discovering Tonantzin Within and Beyond the Nepantla of Academia” published in the anthology, “Fleshing the Spirit: Spirituality and Activism in Chicana, Latina, and Indigenous Women’s Lives.” The reading took place on Nov. 22 at 2 p.m. at Alma de Mujer Center for Social Change in Austin.

Reginald Byron, assistant professor of sociology, and Maria Lowe, professor of sociology, presented a paper titled “Performativity Double Standards and the Sexual Orientation Climate at a Southern Liberal Arts University” at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association in San Francisco Aug. 16-19. Recent graduates Brianna Billingsley and Nathan Tuttle were co-authors of the paper. Lowe and Angela Stroud, a 2003 graduate who is now an assistant professor of sociology and social justice at Northland College, also presented a paper titled “‘Suspicious Person or Neighbor?’: Heightened Surveillance of Black Men on a Predominantly White Neighborhood Listserv.” Recent graduate Alice Nguyen was a co-author of the paper. Billingsley participated in the ASA Honors Program and presented a paper from her 2013 sociology capstone research that won first place in the undergraduate paper competition sponsored by Alpha Kappa Delta, the sociology honor society. Billingsley received a $500 cash award for winning the national paper prize, along with $1,000 in travel funds to present her research at the meeting, and an opportunity to submit her research for publication in the peer-reviewed journal Sociological Inquiry.