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Roberta Villalón, President-Elect
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, Professor and Chairperson of the Sociology and Anthropology Department 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). Roberta has recently been elected President of SWS, her tenure as President-Elect beginning in February 2021.
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 (Bristol University Press), and wrote an article “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). Last, Roberta is collaborating with Nancy López, Verónica Montes, and Erika Busse to develop a collective initiative on Latinx Antiracist Feminist Liberatory Praxis.
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Josephine Beoku-Betts, Past-President
Josephine Beoku-Betts is Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Sociology at Florida Atlantic University. She earned her B.A. in Sociology and Social Anthropology at Hull University, U.K., M.A. in Sociology and West African Studies at Birmingham University, U.K., and Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research focuses on women’s political activism in post-war Sierra Leone and African women in academic scientific careers. She has published book chapters and peer-reviewed articles in several feminist and other scholarly journals. She is currently completing two co-edited books: War, Women and Post-Conflict Empowerment: Lessons from Sierra Leone (with Fredline M’Cormack Hale-Seton Hall University) and Producing Inclusive Feminist Knowledge: Positionalities and Discourses in the Global South (with Akosua Adomako Ampofo-University of Ghana). She is the current President of Sociologists for Women in Society (SWS) and former Co-President for Research Committee 32 (Women, Gender and Society) of the International Sociological Association. Josephine was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Sierra Leone in 2011 and 2018.
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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.
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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.
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Veronica Montes, Past Treasurer
Veronica Montes is an Assistant Professor at Bryn Mawr College in the Department of Sociology. Her research falls in two areas: on immigration from Mexico and Central America to the United States and on the intersection between the process of homemaking, belonging and migration. Her publications have appeared in Gender & Society, Gender, Place and Culture, Apuntes, Contexts, and Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. She is a recipient of an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral recently began her term as Treasure of the Sociologist for Women in Society Association.
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Kristy Y. Shih, 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.
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Jennifer Rogers-Brown, Treasurer-Elect
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
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Andrea Boyles, Secretary
Dr. Andrea (Drea) S. Boyles, a native of St. Louis, MO, holds a B.A. in English and M.A. in Sociology from Lincoln University of Missouri. Later, she earned a Ph.D. in Sociology from Kansas State University with concentrations in Gender and Criminology. Her research areas/interests are the intersections of race, gender, and class; police-citizen relations; neighborhood disadvantage and disorder; community resilience and collective action; and qualitative methods/ethnography.
Dr. Boyles is also author of books You Can’t Stop the Revolution: Community Disorder and Social Ties in Post-Ferguson America and Race, Place, and Suburban Policing: Too Close for Comfort with the University of California Press.
Kumiko Nemoto, Parliamentarian
Kumiko Nemoto is a professor of sociology in the Department of Global Studies at Kyoto University of Foreign Studies. Her research focuses on gender, race, work, organizations, and institutional conditions. She completed her Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Texas at Austin. Nemoto is the author of Too Few Women at the Top: The Persistence of Inequality in Japan (Cornell University Press, 2016) and Racing Romance: Love, Power, and Desire among Asian American/White Couples (Rutgers University Press, 2009). Nemoto is currently working on comparative research regarding gender differences in corporate career mobility and pathways in different institutional contexts in Japan, Norway, and the United States. She is currently a Parliamentarian for Sociologists for Women in Society and also serves as a regional representative for the International Sociological Association and an editorial board member for the journal Contemporary Sociology. Nemoto resides in Tokyo, Japan.
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Tristen Kade, Student Representative
Tristen Kade received his master’s degree in sociology from the University of New Orleans in 2016. His scholarship derives from his personal experiences of being a trans man, first-generation student, and racial and ethnic minority identifying as Black and Mexican. His research interest is in gender and sexuality, with emphases in masculinity, trans studies, identities, intersectionality, and measurement. For his doctoral studies, Tristen will attend the University of California, Santa Barbara and plans for his research to incorporate an intersectional analysis at the axis of race, gender, and sexualities to understand how these identities intersect with each other among transmasculine individuals of color in their everyday social interactions as well as within social institutions.
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Alexis Grant-Panting, Student Representative-Elect
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.
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Rebecca Hanson, Awards Committee Chair
Rebecca Hanson is Assistant Professor of Crime, Law & Governance at the University of Florida, with a joint appointment in the Department of Sociology and Criminology & Law and the Center for Latin American Studies. Hanson has conducted research in the Venezuela, Colombia, and the US. Her research is centered on gender, policing, politics, violence, and qualitative methods. In 2019 she published Harassed: Gender, Bodies, and Ethnographic Research (University of California Press) with Patricia Richards. Her current book manuscript asks how revolutionary politics in Venezuela transformed policing and violence in the 21st century. Hanson has been a member of SWS since 2014.
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Kris De Welde, Social Action Committee 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.
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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.
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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.
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Pallavi Banerjee, Co-Chair for Committee on Academic Justice
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.
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Esther Hernández-Medina, Co-Chair, Sister to Sister Committee
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.
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LaTonya J. Trotter, Co-Chair, Sister to Sister Committee
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.
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Victoria Reyes, Co-Chair, Publications Committee
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.
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Yasemin Besen-Cassino, Co-Chair, Publications Committee
Yasemin Besen-Cassino is a Professor of Sociology and Distinguished Scholar (2013) at Montclair State University, where she chairs the Sociology department. She is the Editor of Contemporary Sociology, an official publication of the American Sociological Association. Her pronouns are she/her/hers. She served as the Book Review Editor of Gender & Society(2014-2018) and the Managing Editor of Men & Masculinities (2003-2005). She received my Ph.D. In Sociology from State University of New York in Stony Brook in 2005. My research focuses on work, gender and youth. My work has appeared in many sociology journals such as Contexts, Sociological Forum, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Theory& Society, NWSAJ and Education& Society and has been featured in many popular venues such as the Washington Post, The Guardian, Atlantic, CNN, MTV, Fortune and Ms. magazine among many others. Her most recent book The Cost of Being a Girl (Temple University Press, 2018) focuses on how early work experiences lead to later gender inequalities in the market. In addition to her academic work, she has been an activist of equal pay and testified before the NJ State Legislature.
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Heather Laube, Chair of the Career Development Committee and Co-Chair of Committee on Committees
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.
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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 erinbaker@wayne.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.
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Natasha Santana, Assistant to the Executive Officer
Natasha Santana, previously SWS Intern, is now 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
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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