 Anthony M. Johnson is now Assistant Professor of Sociology at Ohio State University! He completed his Ph.D. in Sociology at Northwestern University in 2018. Anthony’s research is broadly at the intersection of inequality; education; science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM); and culture. His current book project, tentatively titled Becoming Study Buddies: How Inequalities Persist at Elite Colleges in an Era of Collaborative Learning, examines how undergraduate students form academic peer groups in ways that reproduce educational inequalities. Drawing on a qualitative case study of an engineering school at an elite private university, he shows that academic peer sorting is the result of the interaction between the diverse cultural, social, and economic resources students bring to college—based on social class, race/ethnicity, and gender—and the institutional practices and structures of the university. Anthony analyzes how institutionalized grading practices and the structure of extracurricular activities on campus can have the unintended consequence of concentrating learning opportunities that best align with the academic norms and expectations of the school firmly in the hands of students who already enjoy social group privilege. In the wake of the adoption of collaborative learning approaches designed to reduce persistent achievement gaps in America, Anthony’s research reveals how these innovative approaches, in fact, facilitate the reproduction of educational disparities and the reforms needed to reduce achievement gaps perpetuated through peer networks. Anthony’s research has been supported by fellowships from the National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation and the National Science Foundation.
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 Paige L. Sweet is now Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan! She completed her PhD in Sociology from the University of Illinois Chicago in 2018. Her research focuses on the politics of health, expert knowledge, inequalities around gender and sexuality, and social theory. Paige’s current research explores the medicalization of domestic violence and the effects of that shift on feminist politics and on domestic violence victims themselves. Drawing on archival research, interviews with domestic violence professionals, and life story interviews with domestic violence victims, Paige shows that in order to become “good survivors,” women must make themselves legible to therapeutic institutions by performing psychological wellness. Paige traces the production of what she calls the “politics of survivorhood” in the domestic violence field, revealing how anti-violence feminists made themselves into an expert field by constructing the figure of the battered woman as a psychologically suffering and recovering subject: a “survivor.” Paige then shows how women face pressure to tell narratives of psychological betterment in order to be credible survivors in court, support groups, child services, and therapy. Because performances of psychological wellness depend on material and symbolic resources, the politics of survivorhood operates to exacerbate racial, gender, and sexual inequalities in women’s experiences of help-seeking and surveillance after abuse. Paige also has ongoing interests in knowledge production, feminist and queer theory, violence against women, and science studies.
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