Our 2012 newsletter
is now available

Kudos

Ke-hsien Huang was awarded a one-year Academia Sinica Fellowship for Doctoral Candidate in the Humanities and Social Sciences by the Institute of Sociology, Academia Sinica.

In addition, Ke-hsien is a recipient of a Dissertation Fellowship of Chiang Ching Kuo Foundation.

Ke-hsien's dissertation is on the development and transformation of Pentecostal Christianity in contemporary China, an issue he manages to relate to political situation, rural-urban-interaction, and cultural imagination of the rapidly changing society.

HIV/AIDS Study

by Celeste Watkins-Hayes

When the AIDS epidemic began in the late 1970s and early 1980s, it was seen as a death sentence for individuals who contracted it. Two decades later, the disease is still incurable, but it has become a manageable illness. Modern medicine has played a large role in this. But what role do social and economic factors play in guaranteeing a long life in spite of the disease?
   For years, Celeste Watkins-Hayes, African American studies and sociology, has been studying women living with HIV/AIDS in the Chicago-area to discover their economic strategies. Now her work is available to the public through a web site called Health, Hardship, and Renewal.
    The study and accompanying web site are aimed at increasing awareness of the successes and obstacles of women living with HIV/AIDS, illuminating how social and economic inequalities affect the AIDS epidemic, and pointing to strategies that help women take care of their economic resources and their health.

Provided by Northwestern Research Newsletter March 2012

Post Doc at Harvard then on to Wisconsin

Robert Vargas has received a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in Health Policy Research fellowship at Harvard Unversity. After his postdoc at Harvard, he will take a position as Assistant Professor of Sociology at Wisconsin.  Bobby is a fellow of the Multi-Disciplinary Program in Education Scienes, and is completing a mixed-methods study of how the state perpetuates neighborhoood violence. Focusing on a Chicago neighbor-hood, his dissertation titled, The State and Neighborhood Violence, is basd on ethno-graphic observation, police crime data, and a neighborhood survey. His work has appeared in Social Psychology Quarterly and he has received funding from the NSF, Institute for Education Sciences and Northwestern University.

Excerpts from SEC Spotlight on Northwestern.

New Professor - University of Iowa

Marina Zaloznaya (PhD in the Sociology Department and a Fellow in Socio-Legal Studies at Northwestern University)She is a recipient of the NSF, Law & Society Assoc., and Open Society Institute grants for her dissertation work on bureaucratic corruption in higher education in Eastern Europe. Marina carried out a mixed-methods comparative-historical study of Ukrainian and Belarusian universities that determines political and economic roots of differences in their informal economies. She traces the development of higher educational sector in the two countries and identifies the reasons for the prevalence of corruption in some universities and its absence in others. Marina’s research also includes provocative work on human rights abuses by the totalitarian government of Belarus, which will be published by Oxford University Press in an edited volume, entitled Governance by Indicators: Global Power through Quantification, and a piece on the professional marginalization of public interest lawyers in the US, forthcoming in Law & Social Inquiry. She has accepted a position as an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Iowa.

Awards, Prizes, Fellowships . . .

John N. Robinson III was awarded a 3-year Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship. John studies how poor people use legal forums and institutions to negotiate social policy outcomes.

Lisa-Jo van den Scott was awarded a 2 year Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Doctoral Fellowship. Lisa-Jo researches the Inuit experience of the intersection of technology and sedentism in Canada's central Arctic region.

Cristian Ziliberberg, PhD Candicate, received a 4-year fellowship from the Open Society Foundations Doctoral Fellows Program. He is in a joint degree program in the Kellogg School of Management and the Department of Sociology.

Rebecca M. Orr was awarded a Princeton in Asia (PiA) fellowship to Singapore for 2012-2013. Rebecca is a Communications Studies Major in the School of Communications. Sociology is her 2nd Major, and she is minoring in Film & Media Studies. She will be travelling to Singapore in September to begin teaching at Ngee Ann Polytechnic University through Princeton in Asia. Rebecca will be teaching public speaking and a writing course through the Film and Media Studies Department at Ngee Ann. "I am very excited to begin my career as a teacher through this opportunity with PiA.

Lisa-Jo van den Scott was awarded a 2011-12 Canadian Studies Doctoral Student Research Award Program Grant from the Canadian Embassy. Lisa-Jo's research with the Canadian Inuit explores their experience with sedentism and the cultural consequences of the introduction of permanent walls.

Jess Koski was awarded a National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant, from the NSF Science, Technology, and Society Program (2012).  Jess's dissertation project is titled Human Rights and the Warming World: Investigating the Use and Impact of Social Knowledge Claims in the Climate Debate.

Alok Hadig has won a Fall 2011 Northwestern Undergraduate Research Grant for his project Legal Implications of Gendered Conceptions of Homosexuality in India in the Past Ten Years.