Graduate Students on the Job Market 

Joseph Conti - PhD Expected June 2008
Areas of Interest: Globalization; United States foreign policy; Sociology of Law; Research Methods; Political sociology; Research design and Qualitative methods.

Honors and Awards: 2007-2008 Social Science Research Fellow, NSF Center for Nanotechnology Society; Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy Dissertation Research Grant - John L. Stanley Award for Political Ethics; James D. Kline Fund for International Studies award; Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, Dissertation Fellowship; National Science Foundation, Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant.

Dissertation Title: “Power through Process: Dispute Settlement Outcomes in the World Trade Organization, 1995-2005.” This dissertation utilizes a mix-method research design to evaluate power and inequality in the practice of disputing at the World Trade Organization (WTO). Thirty in-depth interviews were conducted with well-placed actors in WTO dispute settlement. This data was used to operationalize theoretical variables tested in an event history analysis of 333 disputes initiated between January 1, 1995 and October 1, 2005. The findings indicate that institutional resources, legal capacity and litigation experience have significant impact on which cases are litigated. The dissertation concludes that formal rules of WTO disputing, designed to ‘level the playing field’ of international trade, reproduce international inequality through high costs and the significant expertise necessary for litigating complex and protracted trade disputes while at the same time constraining powerful nations who, at times, obey WTO law. This dissertation contributes to the growing literature that empirically analyzes the WTO while enhancing understanding the operation of power in the global economy and law-in-action in the public international law context.

Jessica Taft - PhD Expected June 2008
Areas of Interest: Social Movements, Girls' Studies, Youth Cultures, Globalization, Feminist Theory, Race/Class/Gender, Political Sociology, Qualitative and Participatory Research Methods.

Honors and Awards: National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship; UC-Santa Barbara Regents Fellowship; UC-Santa Barbara Humanities and Social Science Research Grant.

Dissertation Title: "Growing Up and Rising Up: Teenage Girl Activists and Social Movements in the Americas." This dissertation is a multi-site transnational ethnography based on in-depth interviews and participant observation with approximately 80 high-school-aged girl activists in five cities in North and South America. I explore how teenage girls collectively construct activist identities, rejecting and redefining girlhood and claiming political authority for youth in the process. I argue that, despite many differences in ideology, experience and context, girl activists share several common political tendencies, including a commitment to political education, an emphasis on participatory political communities, and a spirit of hopefulness. Faced with experiences of exclusion and tokenization and emerging as political actors in the context of an international upsurge in prefigurative and process-oriented social movements, teenage girl activists draw upon and contribute to this configuration of horizontal political practices in the Americas.

Philip McCarty - PhD September 2007
Areas of Interest: Political Sociology, Culture, Classical and Contemporary Sociological Theory, Qualitative and Quantitative Research Methods, Social Psychology, Criminology and Juvenile Delinquency.

Honors and Awards: 2007-08 Postgraduate Researcher, NSF Center for Nanotechnology in Society. 2000 Travis L. Dixon Service Award, UCSB Graduate Students Association. 1999 Outstanding Faculty Member Award, UCSB Office of Residential Life.

Dissertation Title: "Mapping the Culture War: Measuring Frames in Political Debate." This project develops an empirical approach to analyzing the number and frequency of frames used in the Democratic and Republican speeches and debates leading up to the 2004 Presidential election. Multidimensional scaling techniques are used to examine the differences in the ways the two parties framed their issues. The findings suggest that the Republican Party deployed more frames, used them more frequently, and used a higher proportion of their stronger frames. These findings indicate that Republican framings of the issues dominated the political discourse and were more central to the discourse of both parties.

Sylvanna Falcon - PhD September 2005
Areas of Interest: Transnational feminism, Latin America/Americas, Gender, Racism/Antiracism, Human rights, and Globalization

Honors and Awards: American Association of University Women Dissertation Writing Fellowship ($20K); Pacific Rim Research Mini Grant ($2K); UC MEXUS Dissertation Research Grant ($12K); Humanities and Social Science Research Grant ($2K); Graduate Research Mentorship Fellowship ($12K)

Dissertation Title: "'Where are the Women?' Transnational Feminist Interventions at the World Conference Against Racism"
Feminists viewed the 2001 World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa as an important opportunity to influence the discourse of racism and to confront their respective governments and the international community on their ineffectiveness in dealing with racism. My dissertation investigates how feminists who understand racism as transnational - as being particular to nation-states yet having global manifestations and impact - negotiate issues of racism at the U.N. The study shows how feminist understandings of racism have irretrievably changed the discourse at the U.N. level regarding race, racism, intolerance, and xenophobia.

Mary Ingram-Waters - PhD Expected June 2007
Areas of Interest: Science, Technology and Culture; Women's Studies; Global Studies; Race, Class, and Gender; Sociology of Knowledge; Organizations; Qualitative Methods; Pedagogy

Honors and Awards: 2006-07 Research Fellow, NSF Center for Nanotechnology in Society, UCSB; 2004-05 Research Fellow, Institute for the Advanced Studies on Science, Technology, and Society, Graz, Austria; 2004-05 Ernst Mach Stipend. Austrian Cultural Exchange; 2002-03 Walter H. Capps Dissertation Fellowship, Capps Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life, UCSB: 2002 Dissertation Proposal Writing Fellowship, Graduate Division, UCSB; 2000-06 Travel & Research Grants, Dept of Sociology, UCSB; 1998-99 Regents Fellowship, UCSB

Dissertation Title: "Fictions of new Biological Sciences: Exploring Different Sites of Knowledge Production"
This research looks at three different areanas of fiction to uncover hidden histories and alternative experts of new biological and genetic technologies: 1970s lesbian science fiction, the 2002 Raelians' cloning hoax, and an online amateur fiction community dedicated to the phenomenon of male pregnancy.

Craig M. Rawlings - PhD Expected March 2007
Areas of Interest: Organizations and Institutions; Social Inequality, Culture and Cognition; Economic Sociology; Social Network Analysis

Honors and Awards: 2005 GRADUATE DIVISION, UCSB, Dissertation Grant; 2004-2005 NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION, Dissertation Improvement Grant; 2003-2004 SSRC-SLOAN FOUNDATION FELLOW, Program on “the Corporation as a Social Institution” Dissertation Fellowship and Grant; 2001  CLIFFORD C. CLOGG MEMORIAL FELLOW, University of Michigan-ICPSR summer fellowship for methods training; 2000-2001 REGENTS’ FELLOW, University of California , Santa Barbara; 1999 HIGHEST HONORS, Master of Arts, Rutgers University; 1995 DEPARTMENTAL HONORS, University of Oregon ; 1995 GOLDEN KEY HONOR SOCIETY, University of Oregon ; 1994 JUNIOR SCHOLAR AWARD, University of Oregon

Dissertation Title: "Organizational Status Dynamics in American Higher Education: Emulation, Imitation, and Implications for Social Inequality"
This dissertation clarifies and tests an important claim within Bourdieu’s model of social reproduction – namely, that organizational status dynamics govern the structural and symbolic differentiation of academic fields.  Theoretical and methodological insights are drawn from research on organizational dynamics in producers’ markets to further elaborate this largely implicit – yet essential – aspect of Bourdieu’s framework.  Hypotheses are tested through analyses of organizational change in the innovation, adoption, and termination of credentials in two contrasting fields – business and engineering – over a period of rapid institutional transformation in American higher education.

Eve Shapiro - PhD Received December 2005
Areas of Interest: Gender, Sexuality, and Social Movements with extensive training in sociological and feminist theory and qualitative methodologies

Honors and Awards: Graduate Associate Editor for the Encyclopedia of Gender and Society for SAGE press; awarded two University of California Graduate Division dissertation awards; “Drag Kinging and the Transformation of Gender Identities,”(submitted to Gender & Society), awarded the ASA Sexualities section Graduate Paper Award; Honorable Mention for the 2004 ASA Sexualities section Martin Levine Dissertation Fellowship

Dissertation Title: "Performing Politics: Gender, Sexuality, Political Consciousness and the Transformation of Identity"
An in-depth case study of a self-titled feminist collective drag troupe located in Santa Barbara, California. This extended case study adds to the growing body of research on gender and social movements that treats identity as an interactional and ongoing process and suggests that oppositional communities both draw on and inform the gender, sexual, and political identities of participants. Based on my findings that performing gender in a politicized feminist context influenced the gender, sexual and political identities of participants in fundamental and varied ways, I argue that oppositional communities are central venues for individual-level identity work. In addition, my dissertation examines empirically the understudied argument by queer theorists that gender is performative.