Sociology and Anthropology Newsletter 2023

SOCIOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLOGY

NEWS FROM THE DEPARTMENT

Hello from Lexington! 2023 Update

I hope you are all doing are all doing well as summer winds down. In this newsletter, you will find news about 2023 graduates and award winners, student-alumni interviews, a student conversation with Professor Pérez about his recent book, a brief update about the 50th anniversary of archaeology at the university and more!

The departmental community is as strong as ever and growing. As always, we have outstanding students doing great things, our alums continue to do excellent work in a variety of fields, and my colleagues offer inspiring classes and carry out illuminating research. We look forward to seeing students on campus this fall and alums whenever you might visit Lexington.

Best wishes,

Jon Eastwood (he/him) Professor of Sociology Department Head, Sociology and Anthropology

Professor Chin and students in her course on race and health last Halloween.

Alumni Class Notes

Lex McMillan ’72 recently published a book entitled “Golfing with Lewis and Clark: My Rediscovery of America” (Path Finder Books, 2022), an account of his cross-country trip retracing the Lewis and Clark Trail, playing golf at 16 courses near the trail, and interviewing people he met about their perspective on the state of the country.

Regina Mills ’09 is assistant professor of Latinx and U.S. multi-ethnic literature. at Texas A&M. Her first monograph, tentatively titled Invisibility and Influence: AfroLatinx Life Writing in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries is under contract with the University of Texas Press, with plans for publication in 2024.

Leah Gose ’15 graduated with her PhD in sociology from Harvard University. Her

dissertation is titled “Feeding the Need: Charitable Food-Providing Organizations and Gaps in the Social Safety Net.” This fall she’ll start as a Turpanjian Postdoctoral Fellow at the Equity Research Institute at the University of Southern California. In 2024 she’ll begin a two-year appointment as a Provost Postdoctoral Fellow at USC. Then in 2026 she’ll start as an assistant professor in the sociology department at USC.

Brittany Norwood ’16 has recently started work as Policy and International Affairs Librarian at the Princeton University Libraries.

Victoria Seymour ’21 recently completed the Teach for America program, got her elementary teaching certification from the University of Penn-

Faculty Research Updates

John Cataldi published his book, “Practical Symbolic Interactions in the Shrine of the South,” with Lexington Books, in January 2023.

Sascha Goluboff was chosen to participate in the Council of Inde-

pendent Colleges Senior Leadership Academy for 2023-24. The Academy is a yearlong program for administrators in higher education who aspire to cabinet-level positions in independent colleges or universities. Goluboff is also working on several pedagogical

Senior Graduates, 2023

Sixteen outstanding SOAN majors graduated from W&L this spring. Departmental faculty were very impressed with every member of this class, sorry to see them go, but excited about their futures. Departmental graduates are off to a variety of post-college opportunities, including three Fulbrighters!

We once again held our departmental graduation ceremony in the Dell Outdoor Classroom. Allie Stankewich gave excellent student remarks, and faculty spoke individually about each graduating senior.

Several students received departmental awards:

The e mory Kimbrough Jr. Prize for excellence in Sociology and anThroPology – Tanajia Moye-Green and Sydney Tune

The o. Kendall WhiTe Jr. Prize for excellence in Sociology and anThroPology – Meg Graham

The d avid n ovac K Prize for T he S T udy of g ender and Socie T y –Campbell White

The h arvey m ar K o W i T z aW ard – Kamryn Godsey; Kit Lombard; Masha Strotsava

SPecial achievemenT in archaeology

– Ben Harrington

sylvania, and land a new job as a third grade teacher in Philadelphia.

Grace Donahue ’23 is working at Goldman Sachs in the Consumer and Wealth Management division in Salt Lake City.

Meg Graham ’23 will be starting medical school at Wake Forest University.

Tanajia Moye-Green ’23 will be starting a Fulbright in the United Kingdom (Scotland).

Allie Stankewich ’23 will be starting a Fulbright in Uganda.

Campbell White ’23 is working as a development associate position at ForKids, a nonprofit organization that works to end the cycle of homelessness for children and families across Hampton Roads.

publications about her community-based learning courses. Last fall, she was chosen as a mentee for the AWP (Association of Writers & Writing Programs) Writer to Writer Program, in which she worked on a draft of her novel-in-progress.

We had two students graduate with honors in Sociology and Anthropology this year: Tanajia Moye-Green and Sydney Tune. To complete this they wrote and defended honors theses with the following titles:

Tanajia Moye-Green, “Investigating Group Threat’s Role in the Relationship Between Attitudes Towards Black People and State-Level Punitiveness.”

Sydney Tune, “OK Boomer: Testing Mannheim’s Theory of Generations 100 Years Later.”

Congratulations again to all of our graduates!

Faculty Spotlight

recreate the lives that they used to have. And the movement offered them a way to do that.

Graham: Do you think being from Argentina made your research more or less difficult?

Perez: It depends. It’s the whole issue of reflexivity and positionality of the researcher, you know. We are people studying people. We’re not like, scientists in a lab coat studying mice.

Donahue: What gave you the idea to write about the Unemployed Workers’ Movement?

Perez: Well, the movement became very important during the years in which I was finishing high school and starting college. Between 1998 and 2002, Argentina went through the deepest economic collapse of its history. So I was interested in the trajectory of this movement, especially after the economy began to recover after 2002. Eventually I decided to do a PhD to study it.

During my PhD, I began doing fieldwork with organizations in the movement, and I started to focus on the lives of people in the movement. I was trying to understand why some of them became deeply committed to their groups, despite facing many obstacles to participation. Eventually it dawned on me that this was not only a story about ideologies but also about practices and routines. These people were reconstructing a world that had been obliterated by deindustrialization. They were trying to

In terms of the advantages for my research, I am originally from the same general area as my respondents, and that helped a lot. But there were also challenges, because people in Argentina have strong opinions for and against the movement. So sometimes I struggled to get activists to actually open up to me about their lives instead of giving me a prepackaged speech.

Donahue: What was your day-today in the field?

Perez: Fieldwork can get incredibly demanding. It absorbs your life. You become obsessed with it and risk neglecting other aspects of your life. My wife had immense levels of patience with me. And the day-today experience, it can get exhausting. Utterly draining.

So I basically used the summers during grad school to fly to Argentina and spend as much time as I could doing research there. I did that for three summers, and then I got some funding that allowed me to spend a whole year.

Most of the time research implied waking up early in the morning, taking a bus or train somewhere (most days that took about two hours each way). Get to the field site, hang out with people at the organizations,

visit their homes, participate in events, do interviews. Then sometime in the afternoon, come back. So again, two hours travelling. Get home, open the computer, write fieldnotes. There is a rule of thumb that for each hour in the field you should write for an hour, and this leads easily into day after day of 16 to 18 hours of work. And that doesn’t count all the different things you also have to do. It utterly consumes your life, and that can become toxic, especially for graduate students who are just starting and are under pressure to graduate, publish, get a job.

But it is also extremely rewarding, because you end up learning a lot about people and experience how much people value your work. They share their stories because they want you to understand their lives. It’s the sheer joy of learning something new, of getting to know a fascinating side of an important collective experience. So on the one hand it is extremely exhilarating and exciting. On the other, it’s utterly exhausting. There’s a mix of things which are deeply enjoyable, but also extremely demanding and challenging at times.

Donahue: So for students looking to do something like this, do you have any advice?

I mean you do it because you like it, because you care about this. Because in the end, it’s very meaningful. My contribution is small, but it is part of an attempt to expand human knowledge and try to understand issues that are important. Why do people participate in causes bigger than themselves? What makes a person an engaged citizen? What are the implications of this for democracy around the world?

Prof. Marcos Pérez interviewed by Grace Donahue ’23 and Meg Graham ’23 about his book, Proletarian Lives (Cambridge University Press, 2022)

My advice would be, find something that really matters to you, that you really care about, because otherwise it’s going to be much more difficult to actually do it. It’s very easy to fall prey to cynicism, but it’s key, I think, to keep in mind that you are doing something important. I mean, in the end working extreme hours only is sustainable if you really feel it matters. Don’t lose sight of the of the sheer joy of human knowledge. Because that’s what’s going to sustain you through the difficult moments.

Also, try to take good care of yourself. Nothing is more important than your health, your well-being. It’s OK to push yourself, to try hard, but it’s not worth it if it hurts you. Surround yourself with people who support you and love you — and this can be colleagues, friends, partners, family — because they are the ones that, when you are an intolerable mess, completely stressed out, and cannot speak about anything else, they are the ones who are gonna listen.

Graham: Switching gears, what do you think we can learn from your book about the consequences of changes in labor markets in other countries?

We are trying to understand the effects of rising inequality and deindustrialization on democracy. There’s a lot of justifiable concern about democratic backsliding. So two things here.

First, democracies will be more resilient if people participate more. Yet civic and political participation are difficult, they take time and effort. Understanding what makes it possible for people to participate is thus very important, especially when dealing with communities threatened by socioeconomic decline.

Second, there is a frequent assumption that voters affected by job loss and rapid social change are likely to react by embracing extremism, xenophobia, and scapegoating. However, the idea that socioeconomic decline leads to political radicalization, division, and violence is not the entire story. When you look at Latin America, at least when you look at the case of the unemployed workers’ moment, you find people who react to the undermining of their traditional ways of life by joining progressive organizations.

Donahue: I did like in the book how you show all the different reasons people join and kind of the way that they express their participation.

Like any other aspect of people’s lives, activism is complex. It is important to not sanitize the people you want to study. People are going to be contradictory. Think of our lives, we are contradictory in many different ways. Many times in social movement research, sympathy for the case of study leads scholars to idealize their stories, portraying these people as much more consistent than they actually are. And I think that’s a disservice because you end up reinforcing this idea that if a person has a level of ambiguity, that’s not a “real” activist. Or that there is a “proper” kind of activism.

Within all social movements, even in the experiences of every individual participant, there’s going to be a lot of ambiguity, there’s going to be disagreements. And that does not negate the potential goodness of activism. The unemployed workers’ movement has a lot of contradictions. But overall, in my opinion, it has contributed to a fairer society and a stronger democracy.

Graham: What was the most surprising finding from your research?

The most surprising finding is I was expecting to find a movement in decline and I found a movement in consolidation. I started this project in 2009-2010. I was expecting to analyze a receding movement and what I found was, yes, they didn’t mobilize as many people as during the worst of the crisis, but they were still there and they were pretty active. They had more resources, they had more know-how. Most important, they had a lot of people who had joined due to desperation and who had developed a commitment to their organizations.

Graham: How do you think COVID affected these movements?

That’s a great question because these movements, like any grassroot initiative, serve democracy in two ways, bottom up and top down. Bottom up, these are groups that understand the needs of their communities. So they are a very good way to aggregate demands among the most disadvantaged segments of Argentinean society. And they express these demands in the public arena, visibilizing them.

Top down, these are like capillaries of the state, they serve as grassroots networks on which the authorities can rely to distribute resources at the local level. This generates all sorts of issues, but it’s undeniable that it offers the Argentinean state a way to reach poor neighborhoods because you have organizers of all different types, who live in their communities, know their neighborhoods, and can be used to distribute resources. This might have been in place during the pandemic. We still don’t know the effects of COVID on democracy, but my sense is that having these organizations helped a lot during the crisis and will

matter significantly for the long-term consequences of the pandemic.

Donahue: And then just to wrap it up, what do you think is the most important take away for sociological literature on social movements? Or how would you want to continue this conversation going forward?

It’s a small contribution to a rising literature which I really like. There are many possible implications. First of all, political participation is very diverse. It comes in different forms, not just between different societies and different movements but also within the life of one person. There is not one good, proper type of activism. Trying to impose unnecessary categorizations on concepts generates limitations. So that’s one thing.

Second, activists don’t distinguish between mobilization and other spheres of their lives, so neither should we. I mean, we should not consider activism as a social

experience essentially different from any other.

Third, practices are just as important as ideas. What people do in a social movement matters as much as what they think. I’m not saying that ideas don’t matter, far from it, but people’s practices and routines matter just as much.

And also the value of the ethnographic method. Getting close to people, listening to them, spending time with them. Hang out with those you want to understand. Empathize with their experiences. Talk to them, listen to them, do what they do. Don’t pretend you are an insider. Don’t pretend you suddenly became one of them. That’s not how it works. Just listen respectfully to people, try to understand them, you will be surprised how much they will try to explain their lives to you.

Graham: So you are working on another book, right?

I’m working on another book based on research in the northern province

of Jujuy. It is about the vulnerabilities of social mobilization to repression. Social movements are much easier to repress and dismantle than we like to think. I’ve published some preliminary findings, and together with a team of assistants we’ve analyzed thousands of newspaper articles. I will travel for the fifth time to the location this summer.

Grace: How much time are you going to spend there this summer? Since I have children now, I divide what would be a longer period of research into shorter periods over the years. I gather evidence on the archives, participate in events, interview activists, and meet with local scholars. The second book will benefit from the fact that I’ve been visiting Jujuy as a side project since 2014, and now I can devote all my energies to analyze the information and write my conclusions. It will take some time, but I am excited about it!

50 Years of Archaeology at W&L!

ThiS year marKS The 50Th anniversary of archaeology on campus and we are looking forward to celebrating. Watch the SOAN Department’s Facebook and Instagram pages for updates about plans for the anniversary!

Alumni Spotlight

Haleigh Tomlin ’22, Data Analyst, the Data Center Interviewed by Trip Wright ’25

summer after my sophomore year, I started doing research with Professor Eastwood and two other wonderful students, Sydney Tune and Tanajia Moye-Green. We learned about concentrated disadvantage and how it may have different correlates between rural and urban areas. Being a part of this research team influenced a lot about where I am today, and I still feel very connected to these people. The work we did together in this group turned into an independent study during my junior year, and then developed into my Honor’s Thesis my senior year.

What is the The Data Center?

dynamics we discussed in class, so it got my wheels turning about rural versus urban processes. All the way back then, I chose to do my final project for this class on New Orleans neighborhoods. I looked at the demographics of census tracts which had people moving into them in the years following Hurricane Katrina.

Tell us about yourself.

I’m a data analyst at a New Orleans nonprofit called The Data Center. I moved here from Virginia in August, 2022, and I absolutely adore living here. I live in a beautiful neighborhood called Mid City with my dog Hank, and we can basically always be found in the yard with some other neighborhood dog owners, or sitting outside one of the local coffee shops! I am also in a local running group that meets twice a week. I still go cycling occasionally, and while the cycling looks much different than it did in beautiful Rockbridge County, there is plenty to see here riding by Lake Pontchartrain or through the French Quarter.

What did your involvement look like on campus as a student at W&L?

When I was a student, I consistently spent time with the triathlon group, often running and cycling with students, professors, and other community members. I was an RA my sophomore year, and during the

The Data Center of Southeast Louisiana is a nonprofit that brings together data from multiple sources (such as the Census Bureau, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Louisiana Department of Health, etc.) and makes it easily accessible at helpful geographies. We are considered a “data intermediary,” which means that we help other organizations and people gain access to data that we have already processed and aggregated. The Data Center is part of the National Neighborhood Indicator Partnership in collaboration with the Urban Institute, which connects organizations across over 30 cities to increase access of data and information in neighborhoods.

What about your background made you want to get involved with The Data Center?

When I was a sophomore, I took Professor Eastwood’s class Neighborhoods, Culture, and Poverty. I still rave about this class – it is by far the most interesting class I have ever taken! I grew up in rural Virginia lacking the types of neighborhood

Now I am living in a neighborhood (in New Orleans!) for the first time, updating the neighborhood data on our website, which is exactly the type of data I was curious about as a sophomore doing my Neighborhoods final project on New Orleans… Yeah, that’s pretty cool, and sophomore Haleigh would be shocked if I could tell her what I am doing now.

I also really like how The Data Center focuses on one specific geography very deeply, rather than specializing in state – or national – level analyses. The questions we discuss are specific to the New Orleans metro area, and I think that it is really valuable to focus on the context of New Orleans specifically as a city and be able to have focused conversations about the city as a result.

What does your work at The Data Center entail?

I do a lot of pulling, manipulating, visualizing, and describing data. These are things I did a lot in undergrad. I still draw on experience from classes and projects which taught me how to pull and manipulate complex data. Since starting at The Data Center, I have also learned the value in becoming an expert in how variables are created and understanding margins of error.

What is your favorite part about working at The Data Center?

I am given opportunities to learn how to do new things and learn about different types of data that I never considered when I was a sociology major. Specifically, I have been able to work with my coworkers on a framework for measuring the equity of Louisiana’s Climate Action Plan. During this process, I also got to dive into various environmental data. Diving into flood insurance and pollutants data has allowed me to learn more about completely different fields and has broadened types of data

I have experience working with that I NEVER considered looking at until I moved here.

I am also given opportunities to expand on topics I was interested in when I was still in college. Most of our work is about the New Orleans metro area, but I did a lot of research about rural poverty at W&L. So, I am now working on a project helping to create a data intermediary in rural Florida counties recovering from Hurricane Michael in 2018. For this project, my responsibility so far has been to research different data sources that would provide measures of equity in

these areas as well as disaster recovery. I am also working on projects involving statistical analyses, such as Bayesian multi-level modelling and post-stratification, so I am getting a chance to grow my knowledge of statistics here too, which has always been a priority of mine.

Overall, though, I work with a pretty congenial group of 10 people, so I feel really good with my coworkers. We are all really invested in our own and each other’s work. That makes for a productive and exciting work environment. The culture certainly makes a difference, y’all!

Can you tell me a little bit about your upbringing and why you chose to study at W&L?

Ultimately, I choose to go to W&L because it was the best academic school that I was recruited to for lacrosse. I was the oldest in my family, first to go through the modern application and athletic recruitment process, and so we all went in a little

bit blind. I actually had received a “letter of interest” or equivalent from W&L my freshman year of high school and we threw it out because I had never heard of the school. Ultimately attending was a great decision, but quite honestly, I got lucky.

What sparked your interest in studying sociology?

I took Intro to Sociology Sophomore fall. I honestly don’t know if it was a requirement, or if I had read the description and thought it was interesting, or if I thought it would be easy, but I ended up taking the class with Professor Eastwood. I loved every moment of the class. It was interesting, sparked discussion, the way it was taught was inspiring in that you could be creative in your thoughts and there was no wrong answer if you could defend it. I think at the end of the day it aligned with the way my brain worked. I like to dig a little deeper. Typically, I don’t accept the status quo and I often view things in a slightly different way.

I really leaned into the idea of mechanisms. I felt that it was an idea that I could latch onto and extrapolate to all my other areas of study within business. Plus, if I was going to take a bunch of extra credits might as well be working towards a second major.

At Washington and Lee, you studied sociology and accounting. What inspired you to choose the combination of these two majors? I’m unsure how it works now, but back in the day you were either pure business, or business and accounting. The decision to take business and accounting was driven because I only needed six or so targeted classes to get the accounting designation, so why not? Those also were probably the classes I ended up getting the worst grades in…but then sociology was so interesting to me and aligned with my thought processes that I decided that I could make the most out of my electives by choosing classes that would apply to both majors. Organizational Behavior counted towards sociology out of the business school and

Riley Wilson ’17, Manager in Regulatory Compliance and Strategy, PwC

Interviewed by Porter Neubauer ’25

Consumer Cultures out of the SOAN department counted towards my business degree, so I ended up with an interesting blend of coursework, applying both majors to most of my classes. Taking two capstones senior year was no joke, though.

Could you talk a bit about your classroom experience in the SOAN Department?

If I had to sum it up, I felt most like a sociology major in my business/ accounting classes and I felt most like a business/accounting major in my sociology classes. The type of student that majored in those two areas were typically very different so I usually would have an opposing opinion on the topic of the day. SOAN was fun because it really lends itself to different opinions and mindsets when addressing a question. As soon as I was out of the intro classes and into the 200 / 300 level classes, the classroom discussion got incredibly interesting. Rarely did that type of academic curiosity come through in my other major (save the entrepreneurship capstone with Professor Jeff Shay). Overall, I really enjoyed it.

What were your favorite classes in the department while at W&L? Favorite in terms of what I enjoyed

Intro to Sociology will always have a special place for me and the social network spring term class with Professor Eastwood I probably enjoyed the most. Then I took a series of heavier data analytics classes like neighborhoods, methods, and the capstone where I will say I learned the most “hard skills.” Or at

least became knowledgeable enough to be dangerous.

How did your study of sociology translate to the workplace as a consultant at PwC?

I’ve always latched onto three key takeaways from studying sociology. First is the soft skills of how to write and communicate ideas. You are writing essays, short answers or presentations to demonstrate what you’ve learned in sociology. Words are primary and numbers support (I only say that because it is flipped for accounting). I think communication skills are necessary in any job but especially as a consultant.

Second is still about soft skills, but I’d say that are a “harder” soft skill of learning how to think or how to solve problems. Consulting is all about distilling down a problem into its root assumptions. Thinking sociologically about mechanisms offered a prudent framework for thinking through any question and I honed my ability to break down the question into mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive factors.

The third “hardest” skills of database management, sample analysis, statistics, data analysis are all required to round out your capstone. The only way to become comfortable with those topics are by doing them yourself and they become marketable skills that you can easily signal in a job market.

What aspects of your understanding of the social world set you apart from other business professionals? Network analysis is always an interesting application. Understanding

bridging capital or triadic closure can help with forming relationships in the corporate world.

Aside from that, the tools you gain from SOAN classes at Washington and Lee really give you a different lens or framework to view problems or questions within the business world.

I’ve been especially interested in the study of social networks recently.

Do you see value in investigating social networks around you to improve efficiency and communication within the workplace?

I still think that SNA has applications in the business world that have not been fully developed. I’ve been interested in applying the analysis to brick and mortar locations for chain establishments to determine the best possible location, weighting the ties and nodes by population size by some X factor that is a combination of ability and desire to purchase goods.

For the idea of increasing efficiency and communication, it is complicated. I’ve been on one client for a long time and I realized that the frequency of social network formation is, I’ll say, more intense than I would have expected. Sure, it’s easy to say that X needs to get info to A and the shorted connection between them is Node 1 so connect them and communication will occur faster. But in reality, the pathway will most likely break sooner rather than later because it is a reality that people get new jobs often. I think that employee retention is vastly underrated and SNA may be an ideal tool to prove that hypothesis.