Sws-South Profiles
Current Officers
Mandi Barringer – President
Mandi N. Barringer (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of North Florida. Her research and teaching interests include sexualities, gender, religion, and applied sociology. She has utilized quantitative data to examine gender and sexual minorities’ religious identities, subjective well-being, and attitudes toward American mainline religious traditions. Her academic articles also cover religiosity, religious identity, and birth cohort attitudes. Her work has been published in journals such as Social Currents, Journal of Homosexuality, and Sociological Inquiry.
Baker Rogers – Past-President
Baker A. Rogers is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Georgia Southern University. Their research and teaching focuses on inequality, specifically examining the intersections of gender, sexuality, and religion in the U.S. South. Check out their books, Conditionally Accepted: Christians’ Perspectives on Sexuality and Gay and Lesbian Civil Rights and Trans Men in the South: Becoming Men. Also, their book, King of Hearts: Drag Kings in the American South, will be released with Rutgers University Press in October 2021. Their work is published in numerous academic journals, including Gender & Society; Journal of Interpersonal Violence; Qualitative Sociology; Sexualities; and more.
Ashley Vancil-Leap – Vice President
Ashley Vancil-Leap is an Assistant Teaching Professor of Sociology and affiliate faculty of Gender Studies at Mississippi State University. She is a gender scholar who focuses on the links between culture, identity, labor, food insecurity, and inequalities such as race and class. Her work has examined the physical and emotional labor of school food service employees in a Midwest city in response to local, state, and national policy changes to school breakfast and lunch programs. Her latest work focuses on food insecurity in Mississippi. Her work can be seen in Advances in Gender Research and Gender Issues.
Harry Barbee – Secretary
Harry Barbee is a postdoctoral researcher at the Vanderbilt University LGBT Policy Lab and Center for Medicine, Health, and Society. Their research examines how social and demographic factors–especially gender and sexuality–affect people’s health and aging. Harry is currently funded by the National Institutes of Health to work on the Vanderbilt University Social Networks, Aging, and Policy Study–a panel study of middle-age and older LGBTQ+ adults residing in Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee. Overall, Harry hopes their research will fuel policy initiatives aimed at reducing health disparities and improving LGBTQ+ people’s experiences of aging.
Corinne Schwarz – Treasurer
Rachel Allison – Awards Chair
Rachel Allison is an Associate Professor and affiliate of Gender Studies at Mississippi State University. Her research interests include gender, sexualities, sport, family, and higher education. Most recently, she has studied the challenges facing women’s professional team sport in the U.S. Rachel is the author of Kicking Center: Gender and the Selling of Women’s Professional Soccer, published with Rutgers University Press in 2018. Her research has also appeared in Qualitative Sociology, Leisure Sciences, and Sociology of Sport Journal.
Ariane Prohaska – Hand Mentor Program Coordinator
Ariane Prohaska is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Alabama. Her research and teaching areas focus on gender, bodies, fat studies, and inequality after disasters. She has published articles in numerous journals including Fat Studies, Journal of Gender Studies, Qualitative Research, and Critical Policy Studies. Dr. Prohaska has a passion for mentoring undergraduate students learning the research process. Her current research examines the social construction of beauty and femininity in various beauty pageants. In her free time, she enjoys spending time outdoors with her husband, Jay, and pets Charlie (cat) and Copper (dog).
Stacy Salerno – Membership
Shaneda Destine – Vision Committee Chair
Dr. Shaneda Destine is an Assistant Professor with a dual appointment in Sociology and Africana Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Dr. Destine’s research focus is race, gender, sexuality, and contemporary social movements. She is most interested in how state violence effects the overall well-being of marginalized people. She investigates forms of resistance of Black women and Black Queer people, as they create spaces of Black Joy and Respite, while struggling for liberation. Her research highlights the unique ways Black women and femmes are affected by state violence and the ways in which they strategize and negotiate organizing, leading and caring for themselves and movement participants, as part of their political practice. Dr. Destine’s work is theoretically informed by Critical Race Theory, Intersectionality, and Black Radical Social Movement Theory. Her goal is to further the notion that race, gender, class, and sexuality act as vectors of oppressions central to the sustaining global capitalism and systemic oppression, particularly through state violence. Dr. Destine’s work can be found in Humanity and Society, Issues in Race & Society: An Interdisciplinary Global Journal 4 (1), and Societies Without Borders: Human Rights and the Social Sciences 10 (1). She is currently working on multiple articles and a book project.
Jennifer Carruth – Newsletter
Sarah A. Rogers – Archivist/Historian
Sarah A. Rogers is an Instructor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of South Carolina. Her research focuses on gender and victimization, particularly focusing on sexual assault on campus, especially as it relates to prevention programming. Her work also focuses on trans men’s blurred boundaries between victimization and offending. She has published work in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence, Violence Against Women, and Sociological Spectrum.
Brenda Savage – SSS Program Coordinator
Brianna Patterson – Student Delegate
SWS South Meeting Photos
The photos from the SSS 2019 meetings are now available. They are all posted Tracy E. Ore’s website in a private gallery available through the link here.
To download high resolution photos, first click on the image. The image will then open and you will see an icon menu on the bottom of the page. Click on the down arrow and the photo will download. The downloads are free.
Special thanks to Tracy for taking these pictures and sharing them with SWS.
