Contributors

Monica Radu is a sociologist, educator, and fan of turning real life into teachable moments. She currently teaches a variety of sociology courses at Southern New Hampshire University, along with classes designed to help students develop the skills they need to thrive academically and beyond. Monica holds a PhD in sociology from North Carolina State University, as well as a BA and MA in sociology from North Carolina Central University.

Lisa A. Smith is a Faculty Member in the Department of Sociology and Coordinator of the Menstrual Cycle Research Group at Douglas College. She likes to explore sociology through everyday things, from the mundane to the extraordinary. Lisa enjoys bringing sociology to life through community-based and collaborative research, activism, and advocacy, and of course publishing in a range of venues—from the Everyday Sociology Blog to zines to books and more!

Karen Sternheimer is the lead writer and editor of the Everyday Sociology Blog. She teaches in the sociology department at the University of Southern California. Her research focuses primarily on moral panics, youth and popular culture. She is also editor of the Everyday Sociology Reader (W.W. Norton, 2020) and Childhood in American Society: A Reader (Allyn & Bacon, 2009), and the author of The Social Scientist’s Soapbox: Adventures in Writing Public Sociology (Routledge, 2018), Pop Culture Panics: How Moral Crusaders Construct Meanings of Deviance and Delinquency (Routledge, 2015), Celebrity Culture and the American Dream: Stardom and Social Mobility, Second Edition (Routledge, 2015), Connecting Social Problems and Popular Culture: Why Media is not the Answer (Routledge, 2013), Kids These Days: Facts and Fictions about Today’s Youth (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006) and It’s Not the Media: The Truth about Pop Culture’s Influence on Children (Westview, 2003).

Stacy Torres is an Assistant Professor of Sociology in the School of Nursing at the University of California, San Francisco and the author of At Home in the City: Growing Old in Urban America. Her research and teaching interests include gender, aging and the life course, physical and mental health, social relationships, qualitative research methods, and urban communities. An avid public sociologist, her writing for broader audiences has appeared in outlets such as The Guardian, The New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and San Francisco Chronicle. For more information about her work and writing, please visit: https://stacymtorres.wordpress.com/

Past Contributors

Teresa Irene Gonzales A native of Mexican-Chicago, an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Knox College. She received her Ph.D. from U.C. Berkeley and her B.A. from Smith College. Her research centers on the intersection of organizational ecology, urban studies, and community development within the United States. In other words, she studies why things are built where and who gets to decide on it. She believes in community-engaged pedagogy and scholarship, and strives towards a practice of reciprocity in research. She is still surprised that people pay her to read and write.

Angelique Harris is Founding Director of the Center for Gender and Sexualities Studies and the Gender and Sexualities Studies Program. Her research examines social problems and issues within marginalized communities, primarily focusing on the experiences of women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ communities. Her research and teaching interests include the sociology of health and illness, race and ethnicity, gender and sexualities, sociology of religion, urban studies, media studies, and social movements. Along with dozens of articles and book chapters, Dr. Harris has authored and co-authored several books on LGBTQ+ communities of color, including AIDS, Sexuality, and the Black Church: Making the Wounded Whole and the Intersection of Race and Sexuality book series.

Peter Kaufman (1967-2018) taught sociology at the State University of New York (SUNY) New Paltz since 1999. He received his Ph.D. from Stony Brook University and his B.A. from Earlham College. He regularly taught introduction to sociology, sociological theory, education and society, social interaction, social change, and sociology of sport. He was the co-author of Teaching with Compassion: An Educator’s Oath to Teach from the Heart.

C.N. Le teaches in the Sociology Department and Director of the Asian & Asian American Studies Certificate Program at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.  He received his B.A. in Political Science from the University of California, Irvine and his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University at Albany, SUNY.  His research focuses generally on race/ethnicity and immigration and specifically on analyzing socioeconomic measures of assimilation among Asian Americans. Most of the time, he strives to find a sense of balance between competing forces —liberal vs. conservative, objective vs. subjective, etc. He also lives by the credo: “I don’t know what the key to success is, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.”

Colby King teaches and studies urban sociology, social stratification and inequality, social class, work, and strategies for supporting working-class and first-generation college students. Dr. King has published research on DIY place branding in deindustrialized cities, adapting AudaCity (an urban board game which he co-created) as an active-learning exercise, and efforts to support development of students’ social and cultural capital, as well as TRAILS teaching resources. In 2014, Dr. King organized Class Beyond the Classroom, an organization of BSU faculty and staff who support working-class and first-generation college students at BSU. He has served as a member of the Steering Committee for the Working-Class Studies Association and the American Sociological Association’s Task Force on First-Generation and Working-Class People in Sociology, and he is a co-PI for the SEISMIC grant program at BSU, funded by the National Science Foundation’s S-STEM program. With Dr. Randy Hohle, he is working on revisions for the next edition of The New Urban Sociology, and his current research includes an examination of the geography and demographics of the working class and shifts in occupational structures in post-industrial metropolitan regions.

Janis Prince Inniss, Ph.D., M.M.F.T, is on the faculty of Saint Leo University. Her work appears in The Politics of Black Women’s Hair and the Everyday Sociology Reader. She is lead author of Serving Everyone at the Table: Strategies for Enhancing the Availability of Culturally Competent Mental Health Services. Dr. Prince Inniss is tickled that she found a way to turn her childhood penchant for asking “why” into a legitimate means of employment. She is interested in the ways that people communicate, love in families, global ideas about race and ethnicity, and in seeing the underdog thrive.

Sally Raskoff has been employed as a sociologist since the mid 1980s and is currently a Professor of Sociology and Ethnic Studies at Los Angeles Valley College. She has always been a technology nerd, but she has taken up weaving to balance her experiences and truly understand what the Luddites were talking about. Her broad interests in sociology and in life include sex/gender, race/ethnicity, social class, statistics, theory, methods, consumerism, and civic engagement.

Todd Schoepflin is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at Niagara University.  He received his Ph.D. in Sociology from Stony Brook University in 2004.  His research and teaching interests include qualitative methods, race and ethnicity, social psychology, media, and the scholarship of teaching sociology.  His main loves in life are family, baseball, and sociology.  His favorite albums are Revolver (The Beatles) and Kind of Blue (Miles Davis).

Myron T. Strong graduated with his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of North Texas in 2014. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the Community College of Baltimore County in Baltimore, Maryland. His current research focuses on Afrofuturism and explores race, gender, and other social factors in modern comics. Life-long learner and traveler, lots of his stories come from experiences in other countries. He fully embraces the quote by Ibn Buttuta, “Traveling—it leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller.” Bradley Wright is an professor at the University of Connecticut, where he teaches social psychology and religion. He is a Christian, a husband, and a father, and he adores goofing around. His hobbies include photography, hang gliding, landscaping, and eating ice cream (listed in roughly ascending order of competence).

Jonathan Wynn works at the intersection of urban and cultural sociology, and is a Professor at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. He wrote The Tour Guide: Walking and Talking New York,(2011, University of Chicago Press) and his second book is called Music City: Festivals and Culture in Great American Cities (University of Chicago Press). His work has been published in City & Community, Qualitative Sociology, Sociological Forum, Contexts Magazine, and Ethnography. Jonathan Wynn is also the co-editor of the ASA Culture Section Newsletter.