Current Research in Sociology

Professor Amy Chasteen Miller was on leave from teaching in spring 2009 to further her ethnographic research in Forrest General Hospital's Labor and Delivery unit. During that semester, she spent more than 250 hours in the unit, observing 55 births and interviewing mothers post-partum. She plans to use the data collected as the basis for a book on hospital birth culture and women's experiences with it.

During summer 2009, sociology professor Marie des Neiges Leonard conducted field research in Paris and its suburbs. She is exploring the current state of affairs in the suburbs four years after the "Ethnic Riots," interviewing members of the French government and local officials, and talking with individuals who witnessed the riots.

Julie Reid is currently working with colleagues on a study of how college students explain and interpret men and women’s behavior in relation to causal hook-up and formal dating situations.  The research in interested in how respondents interpret and explain men’s and women’s behavior in the context of modern sexual-romantic encounters and whether these fall in line with traditional stereotypes about gender and sexuality. Dr. Reid is also continuing work on her larger research project that explores how Bolivian teachers engaged with a government reform that mandated cultural and gender equality within education.  Her study, which are based on a year of field work in Bolivia, explores the particular ways by which large-scale progressive initiatives aimed at valorizing cultural diversity and improving the status of women can actually end up reinforcing the very stereotypes and social inequality that they were originally designed to fight.