Current Officers and Chairs

Roberta Villalón, President

Originally from Mar del Plata, Roberta Villalón was born during the last military regime in Argentina. With a genuine interest in the politics of social inequalities, Roberta has been committed to actively work for justice within and across geographical and social borders. Her background in political science and international relations, together with her expertise in Latin America and Latin American immigrants, has shaped her transnational feminist sociological perspective distinctively.

Her first authored book, Violence Against Latina Immigrants: Citizenship, Inequality and Community (2010, NYU Press), and the three-part special issue on “The Resurgence of Collective Memory, Truth and Justice Mobilizations” in Latin American Perspectives, with its related book, Memory, Truth and Justice in Contemporary Latin America (2017, Rowman & Littlefield), illustrate her global feminist politics. Journal articles like “Violence against Immigrants in a Context of Crisis: A Critical Migration Feminist of Color Analysis,” in the Journal of Social Distress and the Homeless, and “Neoliberalism, Corruption and Legacies of Contention: Argentina’s Social Movements, 1993-2006,” in Latin American Perspectives (2007, 34:2) also reflect how she has blended critical theory with transnational praxis. Roberta’s commitment to put sociology in action is evident as well in her recent edition of “Academic Activism in the Americas of the XXI Century” in Revista CS (2019).

A Fulbright Scholar and Professor of Sociology at St. John’s University, New York City, Roberta is also affiliated with the Committee in Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS), the Women’s, Gender and Sexualities Program, and the Global Development and Social Justice program at the university. Over the years, she has been an active member and has served in various capacities in the Latin American Studies Association (LASA), the International Sociological Association (ISA); and Sociologists for Women in Society (SWS).

Currently, Roberta is finalizing a transnational, interdisciplinary, and applied research project on Health Inequalities and Migration focusing on the Ecuadorean case. She will be publishing Inequalities, Migration and Health: Critical Activist Research across Ecuadorean Borders (2022, Bristol University Press), authored “Una aproximación sociológica crítica activista al estudio de salud y migración: El caso ecuatoriano” (A Critical Sociological Activist Approach to the study of Health and Migration: The Ecuadorean Case) in Revista CS (2019), and and co-authored with Sarah Kraft, “Migratory Stress, Health and Gender: An Intersectional Analysis of the Ecuadorean Case,” (Forthcoming in Research in the Sociology of Health Care, Vol. 39, edited by Jacobs Kronenfeld, J., Emerald Press). Moreover, Roberta in collaboration with Nancy López, Verónica Montes, and Erika Busse, is working on the formation of the Latinx Feminist Sociology Collective. Last, she is elaborating an edited volume proposal devoted to a transnational exploration of the relevance and needed transformations of feminist sociologies in the era of global pandemics.

---

Mary J. Osirim, Co-President-Elect

Mary Johnson Osirim is Professor of Sociology at Bryn Mawr College and Co-President Elect (with Melanie Heath) of Sociologists for Women in Society (SWS). At Bryn Mawr, she is the past Provost and has also served in the positions of Special Advisor to the Provost, Dean of Graduate Studies, Chair of the Sociology Department, Director of Africana Studies and Faculty Diversity Liaison. Over the past 37 years, she has also held many other positions at the College including Co-Director of the Center for International Studies and the Center for Ethnicities, Communities and Social Policy.

Her research has focused on women, entrepreneurship, the state and non-governmental organizations in the microenterprise sectors of Nigeria and Zimbabwe, the development of gender studies scholarship in Anglophone Sub-Saharan Africa as well as transnationalism and community development among African immigrants in the United States.  She is the author of Enterprising Women in Urban Zimbabwe:  Gender, Microbusiness and Globalization (2009), co-editor (with Ayumi Takenaka) of Global Philadelphia:  Immigrant Communities, Old and New (2010) as well as the author of dozens of articles and book chapters.  She is currently engaged in two research projects – the first investigates how African community organizations in Greater Philadelphia demonstrate a new Pan-Africanism; and the second explores how a Black community in southeast Queens, NY socialized a group of African American women in the 1960’s who became leaders in various professions and communities throughout the US. Mary is the recipient of several grants and fellowships including an NSF Research Initiation Grant, a Pew Faculty Fellowship in International Affairs, a Woodrow Wilson International Center Fellowship, and a Carter G. Woodson Fellowship at the University of Virginia.  In 2017, she received the Distinguished Feminist Lecturer Award from SWS.

---

Melanie Heath, Co-President-Elect

Melanie Heath is Associate Professor of Sociology at McMaster University, Canada, and Co-President Elect (with Mary Johnson Osirim) of Sociologists for Women in Society (SWS). Her areas of expertise are in the fields of sexuality, gender, family, politics, and qualitative methods.

She has studied masculinities in religious conservative movements and marriage promotion in the United States, examining conservative politics that sought on the one hand to promote heterosexual marriage as a solution to poverty, and on the other hand to ban same-gender marriage as a threat to American civilization. She is author of One Marriage Under God: The Campaign to Promote Marriage in America (2012 New York University Press). Her forthcoming book, Forbidden Intimacies: Polygamies at the Limits of Tolerance (Stanford University Press, Series on Globalization in Everyday Life), investigates the transnational regulation of plural marriage in North America, France, and Mayotte. She is co-author of The How To of Qualitative Research (with Janice Aurini and Steph Howells; 2022 Sage, 2nd edition), and co-editor of Global Feminist Autoethnographies During COVID-19: Displacements and Disruptions (with Akosua Darkwah, Josephine Beoku-Betts, and Bandana Purkayastha; 2022 Routledge). She has received several grants to support her research from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). Melanie is President of the Research Council for Women, Gender, and Society (RC32) of the International Sociological Association.

---

Mignon R. Moore, Past-President

Mignon R. Moore is Professor of Sociology at Barnard College and Columbia University and chairs the sociology department at Barnard. She is President-Elect of the Sociologists for Women in Society (SWS). Her areas of expertise are in the fields of sexuality, race, gender, family, aging and qualitative research methods. She has received grants to support her research from the National Institutes of Health, the Ford Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the Russell Sage Foundation, where she held a Visiting Scholar position. Her first book, Invisible Families: Gay Identities, Relationships and Motherhood among Black Women (2011 University of California Press), is a study of same-sex parent families. It won the 2012 Distinguished Book Award from the ASA Sex & Gender section.

Professor Moore’s current work examines health and social support for sexual minority seniors to determine the ways community institutions can be of service to this population. She is using this research to write a book, tentatively titled In the Shadow of Sexuality: Social Histories of African American LGBT Elders, 1950-1979. Before joining Barnard in 2015, Moore was Associate Professor of Sociology at UCLA, where she co-directed the Resource Centers on Minority Aging Research at the David Geffen School of Medicine. She is past chair of the Race, Gender & Class Section of the American Sociological Association, is on the Executive Council of the Association of Black Sociologists and was Deputy Editor of Gender & Society.

---

Barret Katuna, Executive Officer

Barret Katuna became the full-time Executive Officer of Sociologists for Women in Society (SWS) in January 2017. Barret has been a member of SWS since 2008. Her initial SWS involvement began with the International Committee where she served as a lead United Nations delegate to the Economic and Social Council for SWS.

Prior to working for SWS, Barret was a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Connecticut from August 2014 – December 2016. Barret completed her Ph.D. in April 2014 from the University of Connecticut. The title of her dissertation is: Breaking the Glass Ceiling?: Gender and Leadership in Higher Education. While pursuing her Ph.D., Barret also earned certificates from the Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies Program and Human Rights Institute. Barret has published her research in Societies Without Borders and Social Movement Studies. Barret is the author of Degendering Leadership in Higher Education (2019) published by Emerald Publishing. Barret is originally from Northeastern Pennsylvania and received a Bachelor’s Degree (French and Political Science) and Master’s Degree (Political Science) from Lehigh University before pursuing her graduate studies in Connecticut. Barret currently resides in South Glastonbury, Connecticut.

---

Mary Virnoche , Vice President, Co-Chair of Committee on Committees

Mary Virnoche is Professor of Sociology at Humboldt State University.  Professor Virnoche is an applied sociologist translating anti-racist feminist theory to transform higher education policy, practices, and everyday experiences. That work has taken many forms ranging from developing major-based peer mentoring to collaborating with STEM colleagues on curriculum and program change. Most recently she turned her attention to research and action on inclusive shared governance. She teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on Gender, Race & Class, Contemporary Theory, and Qualitative Research Methods.

During the 20-21 academic year, Professor Virnoche served as General Faculty President and Chair of the University Senate. She has also served in a range of other faculty leadership roles. She was a Faculty Associate in the Office of the Vice Provost coordinating the campus implementation of CSU system-wide changes in Math, English and general education. She was an Associate Dean Fellow leading on grant writing and new program development. She was a 19-20 California Education Policy Fellowship Program (EPFP) Fellow and an early career Women’s Research and Education Institute (WREI) Congressional Fellow working on federal policy related to gender, work, and housing. Professor Virnoche earned a Ph.D. at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

---

Kristy Y. Shih, Past-Treasurer

Dr. Kristy Y. Shih is Associate Professor of Human Development at California State University, Long Beach. She earned her B.A. in Psychology and Sociology from the University of Richmond, M.S. in Human Development and Family Studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and M.A. and Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Riverside. A critical race feminist sociologist, Dr. Shih specializes in Asian Americans, racial/ethnic minority families, immigrant and transnational families, family diversity, adult development and aging, intersectionality, feminist theories and methods, and qualitative interview methods.

Her current multi-site interview project examines the growing up experiences and ethnic identity development of adult former “parachute kids” from Taiwan who immigrated to the U.S./Canada alone for educational purposes during middle to high school years. This study also explores the return migration experiences of adult former “parachute kids” to their homeland, Taiwan. Dr. Shih also writes about the negative impacts of the model minority myth on Asian American individuals and families. Previous research engages a critical race feminist analysis of gender dynamics in Taiwanese, Taiwanese American, and Mexican American mother-in-law, son, and daughter-in-law relationships. Her publications have appeared in the Journal of Family Issues, Journal of Family Theory and Review, AFTA Springer Briefs in Family Therapy, Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Family Studies, Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology, and Handbook of Gender Research in Psychology.

Dr. Shih is currently Treasurer-Elect for Sociologists for Women in Society. She is an Associate Editor for the Journal of Family Issues. She also serves on the Inclusion and Diversity Committee of National Council on Family Relations and on the Committee on Committees for Pacific Sociological Association.

---

Jennifer Rogers-Brown, Treasurer

Jennifer Rogers-Brown is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Long Island University. She earned her PhD in Sociology with a doctoral emphasis in Feminist Studies from UC Santa Barbara. Her research and teaching overall focuses on food, technology, environmental sociology, gender, and social movements in Latin America and the United States. She is currently studying farmworker labor experiences in the US, with a particular focus on gender. Her research appears in the journals Environment & Society and Research in Social Problems and Public Policy, and in the edited volumes Feminisms and Ruralities and Cultural Politics and Resistance in the 21st Century, among others. She serves on two non-profit boards that represent her interest in food justice and rural communities—Rural and Migrant Ministries, based in New York, and Puente a la Salud Comunitaria in Oaxaca, Mexico. Puente works with rural Oaxacan women and farmers to improve family nutrition and economic sustainability. Rural and Migrant Ministries is a leading force for migrant farmworkers rights in New York. She is also a member of the SWS International Committee and serves as a representative to the United Nations Department of Global Communications

---

Rodica Lisnic, Treasurer-Elect

Rodica is a Sociologist with over 6 years of research and teaching experience. She is a Lecturer at the Department of Sociology and Criminology at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, and a Visiting Scholar with the ARC Network. Originally from Moldova, Rodica has found another home in Arkansas. Rodica received her bachelor’s in Law Studies from Romania, a master’s degree in Sociology and an interdisciplinary PhD degree in Public Policy from the University of Arkansas. Her research focus is on investigating gender and race inequality, institutional policies and their implementation, and practices in the context of higher education institutions, especially STEM fields. Currently, she is working on a project with the NSF ARC Network, focusing on the persistence strategies women of color faculty in STEM use to navigate academia. Rodica’s work appears in journals like Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, Sociological Spectrum, and Humanity and Society.

As a member of the SWS CEDAW subcommittee, Rodica is interested in the women’s rights aspect of CEDAW. Her education background in Law and Public Policy sparks her interest in CEDAW and how it can be used to address human rights issues like sex trafficking in Moldova. Her Emerald Literati Award winning research on sex trafficking is published in volume 26 of Advances in Gender Research.

---

hara bastas, Secretary

---

Chloe Bird, Parliamentarian

---

Alexis Grant-Panting, Student Representative

Alexis Grant-Panting is a current PhD student in the department of Sociology at Texas Woman’s University in Denton, TX. She defines herself as scholar-activist with a passion for helping young people who come from marginal backgrounds. Her work draws on her experiences as a black woman, first generation student, and a mother. Her research interest focuses on rural communities, education, teaching and pedagogy, and public sociology with a particular focus on the experiences of people of color, mothers in the academy, and inequality. Alexis’s most current examines the role of Public Intellectuals/Sociologist as they organize for racial equity within the Black Lives Matter Movement in rural communities. She is also a mother of 2 who may join her regularly in meetings and presentations. Alexis also serves on the Graduate Student Council for the Association of Black Sociologist.

---

MaryAnn Vega, Student Representative-Elect

---

Maria Cecilia Hwang, Awards Committee Chair

Maria Cecilia Hwang is an Assistant Professor in the Department of East Asian Studies and the Institute for Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies at McGill University. She is currently working on a book manuscript that examines how borders are experienced and embodied in the everyday lives of migrants. Her research interests include international migration, globalization and transnationalism, gender, sexualities, and Asia and Asian America. She has published in Gender & Society, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, WSQ, International Migration Review, and Global Networks.

---

Kris De Welde, Social Action Committee Co-Chair

Kris De Welde, Ph.D., is Director and Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and Professor of Sociology at the College of Charleston in SC. She earned her Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of Colorado, Boulder and has been an active member of SWS since her graduate school days (going on 25 years now), as well as an active member of SWS-South in which she served as President. She specializes in the study of intersectional inequalities in higher education and organizational change for academic justice as well as liberation-focused pedagogies. De Welde has been invited to deliver numerous conference keynote addresses, interactive workshops and formal lectures at campuses across the country on concerns about equity and inclusion, social justice leadership, and gender. She was awarded the 2016-2017 Sociologists for Women in Society Feminist Activism Award for her sustained commitments to social justice within and beyond the academy.

---

Heather Hlavka, Social Action Committee Co-Chair

Heather R. Hlavka (she/her/they) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Sciences at Marquette University. A feminist sociologist and interdisciplinary scholar, her research on gender violence and intersectionality began as a first-gen college student and activist at the University of Minnesota. Her work on interpersonal and state trauma, young people’s experiences of sexual violence, science and technology, and feminist embodied research methods and ethics have been published in journals such as Gender & Society, Violence Against Women, Men & Masculinities, Law and Social Inquiry, Law & Society Review, The Gender Policy Report, and popular media and on public radio. She has two decades of sexual violence advocacy including crisis-line response, group facilitation and education, campus services, and policy/practice review. Her most recent books include Bodies in Evidence: Race, Gender, and Science in Sexual Assault Adjudication (NYU Press, 2021, with Sameena Mulla) and Researching Gender-Based Violence: Embodied and Intersectional Approaches (NYU Press, 2022, with April Petillo). Her current collaborative, community and survivor-led participatory action research focuses on embodied gender trauma, exercise/movement, and empowerment. She has been a member of SWS since graduate school and is excited to expand her role and support the work of the organization.

---

Tracy Ore, Co-Chair for Committee on Discrimination

Tracy E. Ore is a professor of Sociology at St. Cloud State University. She received her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Michigan, is an active member of the American Sociological Association and the Southern Sociological Society and is Past-President of the Sociologists for Women in Society. Dr. Ore does research in the areas of poverty, food insecurity, food apartheid, and food justice. Her most recent text is The Social Construction of Difference and Inequality: Race, Class, Gender and Sexuality (Seventh edition), published by Oxford University Press in 2019. In addition to this work, Dr. Ore is a long-time activist and community organizer, from ACT-UP in the ‘80s to her current work around food justice. The connections between her scholarly work and activism are made real in the SCSU Community Garden, which she established in 2005.

---

Marisela Martinez-Cola, Co-Chair for Committee on Discrimination 

Marisela Martinez-Cola is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Utah State University.  She is an intersectional scholar with a research focus on comparative critical race studies.  Her teaching focus is on race & ethnicity, social movements, and qualitative methods. She has been published in Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, Latino Studies, Understanding and Dismantling Privilege, Law & Society, and Teaching Sociology.  Her forthcoming book, The Bricks Before Brown v. Board of Education, will be published in The University of Georgia’s Race and Ethnicity Series. It is an intersectional, comparative, and interdisciplinary study of Mexican American, Native American, and Chinese American school desegregation cases that came before the famed 1954 case that dismantled the “separate but equal” doctrine. She earned her bachelors at The University of Michigan (African American Studies), her law degree at Loyola University Chicago School of Law, and her doctorate at Emory University.  She has been a member of SWS since 2016 and served as co-chair for Travel Arrangements for the 2017 Winter Meeting in Atlanta, GA.

---

LaTonya J. Trotter, Committee on Academic Justice Co-Chair

LaTonya J. Trotter is a sociologist whose work explores the relationship between changes in the organization of medical work and the reproduction of racial, economic, and gender inequality. Her first book, More Than Medicine: Nurse Practitioners and the Problems They Solve for Patients, Health Care Organizations, and the State (Cornell University Press 2020), questions the common view of the NP as physician stand-in, illustrating how NPs are creating new possibilities for what the medical encounter could be, while showing the depth of the crisis of care that we face.

Dr. Trotter’s publications have received awards sponsored by the American Public Health Association, the Society for the Study of Social Problems, and the American Sociological Association. She is on the editorial board of the journals Gender & Society and Contemporary Sociology, and holds elected positions within the Organizations, Occupations and Work section of the American Sociological Association. She is also on the Steering Committee of the Carework Network, an international organization of researchers, policymakers, and advocates involved in various domains of care work.

---

Andrea N. Hunt, Committee on Academic Justice Co-Chair

Dr. Andrea N. Hunt is an Associate Professor of Sociology, Director of the Mitchell-West Center for Social Inclusion, and Special Assistant to the Vice President for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at the University of North Alabama. Her teaching, research, and community work cover a range of interrelated topics including gender, youth and families, trauma, identity development, mentoring, and inclusive practices. She is a court appointed special advocate, and on the Board of Directors for OnePlace of the Shoals and Riverbend Center for Mental Health.

Dr. Hunt has served as the awards Chair for SWS-S, the Chair of the Lyman Book Award Committee for the Mid-South Sociological Association and served on the Gender Student Paper Committee for the Society for the Study of Social Problems. She is currently the Chair for the Committee on the Profession for the Mid-South Sociological Association, Chair for the Committee on Sociological Practice for the Southern Sociological Society, and Co-Chair for the SWS Academic Justice Committee.

---

Esther Hernández-Medina, Sister to Sister Committee Co-Chair

Esther Hernández-Medina is a feminist academic, public policy expert and activist from the Dominican Republic, with a particular interest in how historically marginalized groups such as women, racial, ethnic and sexual minorities are able (if at all) to change and influence public policy in their favor. She has done research on this topic in Mexico, Brazil and her own country by looking at citizen participation in urban policies in São Paulo and Mexico City, the history of and recent achievements by the Dominican feminist movement, and the participatory budgeting model in the Dominican Republic and São Paulo. Her academic work has been published in International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Caribbean Studies, Berkeley Journal of Sociology, Ethnic and Racial Studies,andEstudios Sociales.

As an activist, she is the co-founder of the Tertulia Feminista Magaly Pineda, along with Yildalina Tatem Brache in the Dominican Republic. Named after the most important contemporary feminist leader in the country and one of the most renown ones in Latin America and the Caribbean, the Tertulia aims to provide a safe space for women of all ages, backgrounds, and sexual orientations to debate and learn about both historical and contemporary issues from a feminist perspective. More recently, young feminists have created similar spaces following the Tertulia model in different parts of the country: Tertulia Feminista del Sur in Barahona, Tertulia Feminista Petronila Gómez in Santiago, and Aquelarre RD in Bonao.

In her role as a public policy expert, she has recently worked as a consultant for the National Migration Institute, the Association of Municipal Districts, the Women’s Ministry, and the National Procurement Office in the Dominican Republic. In the last two of these projects, she used her gender and development expertise to elaborate the chapter on women’s economic autonomy of the National Plan for Gender Equity 2019-2030, and to identify the best practices associated with the process of increasing women’s participation in the Dominican procurement system along with fellow feminist economist Consuelo Cruz Almánzar.

---

Pallavi Banerjee, Sister to Sister Committee Co-Chair

Pallavi Banerjee is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Calgary since 2015.  Before this she was a postdoctoral fellow at the sociology department at Vanderbilt University.  She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Illinois, Chicago in December of 2012. Her research interests are situated at the intersections of sociology of immigration, gender, unpaid and paid labour, intersectionality, transnationalism, minority families and the Global South. Her forthcoming book entitled, Dismantling Dependence:  Gendered Migrations, Indian High-Skilled Immigrant Families and the Visa Regime forthcoming, NYU Press. explores how the immigration and visa regimes of United States affect men-led and women led immigrant families of Indian professional workers in the U.S.  Pallavi is currently working on a new book manuscript and several research papers from her new Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada funded project on refugee resettlement of Yazidis, Rohingyas and Syrians in the U.S. and Canada. She has been a member of SWS since 2007.

---

Victoria Reyes, Publications Committee Co-Chair

Victoria Reyes is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Riverside. She is a feminist scholar who studies culture, borders and empire. She is the author of Global Borderlands: Fantasy, Violence and Empire in Subic Bay, Philippines (2019, Stanford University Press). Her scholarly work is published in Social Forces, Ethnography, Theory and Society, City & Community, Sociological Methods & Research, Poetics and International Journal of Comparative Sociology, among other outlets and her public work appears in The Conversation, Inside Higher Ed, Monkey Cage at Washington Post, and Made by History at Washington Post.

---

Manisha Desai, Publications Committee Co-Chair

---

Heather Laube, Career Development Committee Co-Chair and Committee on Committees Co-Chair

Heather is an associate professor of sociology and core faculty in the Women’s and Gender Studies program at the University of Michigan-Flint. She is the 2021 recipient of the SWS Feminist Mentoring Award. Heather has long been interested in how feminist academics find ways to remain true to their feminist ideals while also attending to the reality and goals of their professional lives. Her work explores how scholars’ feminist and sociological identities intersect with their institutional locations to offer opportunities to transform the academy. She has explored how innovative faculty mentoring programs might contribute to institutional change in higher education. Heather has served in a number of leadership roles in SWS. The organization and its members have been central to her development as a feminist sociologist, teacher, scholar, and colleague.

---

Mindy Fried, Career Development Committee Co-Chair

Mindy Fried, M.S.W., Ph.D. is an applied sociologist with over 25 years of experience conducting rigorous qualitative research studies. As Co-Principal of Arbor Consulting Partners Mindy works collaboratively with nonprofit organizations and foundations, evaluation research as a tool to help them build their capacity and strengthen their programs and policies. Mindy has evaluated hundreds of programs/policies, including early childhood policies/programs, residency programs for urban teachers, professional development training programs, public health initiatives, STEM programs, energy efficiency initiatives, workplace policies/programs, leadership development programs and more.  Some of her larger studies have included a national study on flexible work policies in six large corporations, an evaluation of a statewide wage theft campaign organized by a coalition of immigrant worker centers and labor activists, and a study of workplace climate at a large federal regulatory agency.  In addition to her research, Dr. Fried is also a skilled facilitator and trainer and has initiated and implemented large-scale community-based participatory research projects.

---

Erin Baker, Media Relations Committee Chair

Erin Baker is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Minot State University. She earned her PhD in Sociology from Wayne State University. Her research focuses on the areas of motherhood, mental health, and family. She is currently studying homeschooling and its impact on families. Specifically, she is interested in the many ways that the added labor of homeschooling impacts the mental health and well-being of homeschooling mothers.  One of the things that Erin appreciates about SWS is the ability to connect with other feminist scholars, so please reach out to her at Erin.bakergiese@minotstateu.edu if you want to know more about her involvement in SWS, the Media Relations Committee, her research, or you just want to chat with another feminist scholar.

---

Fumilayo Showers, International Committee Chair

Fumilayo Showers is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies at the University of Connecticut, where she is also a faculty affiliate of the Institute of Collaboration on Health Intervention and Policy (InCHIP) and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS).  Her research interests center on gender and international migration, immigrant integration, immigrant labor and entrepreneurship, African immigrants in the US, and the social organization of health and long-term care in the US. Her book, Migrants Who Care: West Africans at the Frontlines of US Health Care, (under contract with Rutgers University press), chronicles the lived experiences of West African immigrants as health care workers and labor market brokers/entrepreneurs in health care provision in the U.S.

She completed her PhD and master’s degrees in Sociology at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University, and a bachelor’s degree in International Relations from Agnes Scott College in Decatur, GA.

---

Natasha Santana, Assistant to the Executive Officer

Natasha Santana is Assistant to Executive Officer. She graduated from the University of Connecticut with a BA in Communication. She has a love for design and a passion for social sciences, which makes SWS the perfect place to put her skills to use. After seeing how much SWS has grown in the past years, she cannot wait to see what will take place in the near future. Feel free to email her with any questions you may have or if you would like to get to know her.

Contact Natasha at: nsantana@socwomen.org

 

---

Shuchi Sanyal, SWS Intern

Shuchi Sanyal is the SWS Intern. She uses she/her pronouns and identifies as an Asian American woman of Indian descent. Shuchi is in her third year studying sociology and psychology at Hollins University – a small, liberal arts, women’s college in Virginia. She aspires to someday become a child advocate with a concentration in educational rights, as she is a firm believer that our future is dependent on education reform across the globe. During her time as the SWS Intern, she has been a member of the CEDAW Subcommittee and launched the Colleges for CEDAW Program. As of recently, she is taking a more active role in the administrative aspect of this organization and looks forward to giving back to SWS all that it has done for her.

Contact Shuchi at: ssanyal@socwomen.org

---