Julia AdamsSex and gender are core dimensions of just about all social phenomena. My own research has highlighted the gender-specific aspects of large-scale political transformation, and I have focused on both pre-modern and contemporary societies. The changing historical formations of masculinity are especially interesting to me, in part because they remain a relatively understudied and ill-understood area of social structure and social psychology. I also teach and write on the relationship between gender as a conceptual lens and social theory.
Rene Almeling
My research and teaching interests are at the intersection of gender, economics, and medicine. Specifically, I am interested in understanding how gendered inequalities are produced through and reflected in market processes in medical settings. My dissertation, "Selling Genes, Selling Gender: Egg Agencies, Sperm Banks and the Medical Market in Genetic Material," compares how these sexed bodily cells, and the women and men who produce them, are culturally and economically valued. I have also participated in research on media portrayals of obesity science and on the prevalence of abortion training in obstetrics and gynecology residency programs. Beginning in August 2008, I will be studying how gendered ideas about bodies shape genetic knowledge as a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in Health Policy Research at the University of California, Berkeley. I will join the Sociology Department at Yale University as an Assistant Professor in January 2010.
Hannah Brückner
I work on a wide range of topics related to the life course, inequality, health, and sexuality. A series of co-authored papers on adolescent sexuality speaks to the debate on abstinence-only sex education. I have published a book (“Gender Inequality in the Life Course”) and numerous chapters and articles about gender inequality in the labor force and in retirement, and the integration of women in academic workplaces. This work informs my activities to promote gender equity at Yale as a member of the steering committee of the Women Faculty Forum.
Averil Clarke
Averil Y. Clarke (Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania, 2002) is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Yale University. There she does research and teaches courses in race and ethnicity and marriage and the family. She is completing a book manuscript entitled, Child Sacrifice: The Social Infertility of College-Educated Black Women. The book describes the findings from her study of why these women have fewer children than less educated blacks and than white and Hispanic women with a college education. It uses data from interviews with black women and analyses of national data comparing the sexual and reproductive behavior of black, white, and Hispanic women to argue that college educated black women have few opportunities to marry and that they resist nonmarital childbearing because of a cultural meaning system that interprets and negatively evaluates black women’s sexuality and the reproductive activity of poor women. Clarke is also beginning a new research project exploring the AIDS/HIV risk and preventative behaviors of religious individuals as well as religious organizations’ beliefs, programming, and education activities in the areas of sexuality and sexual health.
Deborah Davis
Since my dissertation I have placed questions about variation and inequalities by generation and gender at the core of my research. Initially gender functioned primarily as a control variable, but over time it has became a pivot for construction of meaning and explaining larger societal cleavages. Similarly issues of gender equity have been central to me as an administrator and currently guide me in my work as co-chair of Yale's Women Faculty Forum.
Vida Maralani
My research focuses on the role that educational attainment plays in producing or shaping inequality both within and across generations. These questions are particularly interesting as they relate to women’s schooling. Increases in women’s schooling represent one of the most fundamental and wide-reaching socioeconomic changes of recent decades. In both developing and developed countries, policy makers promote increases in women’s schooling as a way to improve the lives of women and children and upgrade the educational distribution of future generations. I examine the connections between women’s education and demographic processes such as marriage, fertility, and mortality and study the intergenerational effects of increasing women’s schooling. I combine traditional approaches to social mobility research with formal demographic approaches for population projection and show how intergenerational effects of increasing women’s schooling differ across cohorts, countries, and race/ethnic groups. More broadly, I am also interested in gender and schooling both within and across cohorts and gender and health.
Alondra Nelson
My research applies interdisciplinary social science approaches, including ethnography, historical analysis, and theory, to the examination of how science, technology and medicine shape identity, politics and culture. My interests include the historical and socio-cultural studies of science, technology, and medicine; racial formation processes in biomedicine and technoculture; social movements; and social and cultural theory. My current research involves an ethnographic study of men’s and women’s traditional and genetic “root-seeking” practices and the implications of these practices for contemporary understandings of race and ethnicity, diaspora, gender, kinship, and memory.