B.A., UC Santa Barbara
Area: Ethnomethodology, Conversation Analysis, Social Organization, Morality, Race and Ethnicity, Inter-Species Interaction
Liz Munday is a third-year doctoral student in Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Liz holds an M.A. in Sociology from UC Santa Barbara, where she also completed her B.A. in Sociology summa cum laude with distinction in the major. Her research investigates how ordinary interactions make moral life visible, with a focus on the cues, categories, and conversational practices through which people account for actions that may be seen as biased, neglectful, or unjust. Drawing on ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (EMCA), Liz examines how moral accountability is organized not only in human talk, but also in interspecies interactions, particularly in the everyday care and casual disregard of small animals like pet fish.
Her master’s thesis re-specifies implicit bias as an interactional concern rather than a psychological trait. Through close analysis of interviews with individuals following their participation in an experiment, she shows how participants draw on public discourse about implicit bias—automaticity, unconsciousness, cultural conditioning—to navigate the moral implications of their actions in talk. This project foregrounds the sequential organization of moral reasoning and contributes to broader efforts within EMCA to rework psychological categories in sociological terms.
Her dissertation-in-progress extends this line of inquiry into the inter-species realm. Focusing on the treatment of aquatic animals like betta fish, the project investigates how people make morally consequential judgments about care, neglect, accountability, and responsibility in everyday scenarios. Through a mixed-method design—including a survey experiment structured to surface participants’ moral reasoning—Liz examines how ordinary practices like feeding, rescuing, tank set-up, and euthanizing become sites of moral accountability. Rather than assuming fixed ethical stances, the project analyzes the situated moral work through which care is made visible, minimized, or denied. This project examines what kinds of ethical orientations are sustained through everyday interactions, and how moral indifference becomes institutionalized through normalized patterns of neglect.
Her prior research includes her honors thesis on the social perception of race in ambiguous contexts, a quasi-experiment exploring how individuals rely on stereotypic cues to “see” race in the absence of explicit racial markers. She also conducted a comparative analysis of post–January 6 news coverage, examining the discursive strategies used by Rachel Maddow and Tucker Carlson to construct political and moral meaning. In addition, Liz is currently collaborating on a project that integrates five major databases to visualize the rise and seasonality of mass shootings in the United States, offering a more inclusive and longitudinal perspective on gun violence patterns. Her work has been supported by the UC Chancellor’s Fellowship, the Louis H. Towbes Graduate Fellowship, and the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Research.
A dedicated advocate for undergraduate students, Liz has served two years on the department’s Undergraduate Program Committee and regularly mentors students applying to graduate programs and honors tracks. She has worked as a teaching assistant for SOC 136C: Social Categories, SOC 185E: Introduction to Ethnomethodology, and SOC 108ST: Special Topics in Research Methods, and served as Associate Instructor for SOC 1 (Introduction to Sociology) in Summer 2025.