NSF REU Site: Interdisciplinary Study of the Politics of Place
Explore the complex dynamics of race, power, and place in the American South through an immersive summer research experience.
Collaborate with Experts and Master Interdisciplinary Research
Award number: 2243249 | Award abstract
This REU site project immerses students in a 10-week summer research experience where they learn and put into practice interdisciplinary methods to study race, power, and the politics of place within the American South. Participants will work alongside of and learn from an interdisciplinary group of faculty, receiving hands-on instruction in research design, data collection, and data analysis. Additionally, students will participate in faculty-directed research projects that focus on understanding how race, place, and power intersect, with a special emphasis on how to conceptualize, operationalize, and study these concepts through an interdisciplinary, multi-methodological perspective.
Examples of research projects include
- studying how immigrants are incorporated into the sociopolitical and economic lives of communities that are not traditional migration destinations;
- examining how the cultural, political, and religious context of Mississippi shapes the health and well-being of underrepresented Mississippians;
- examining how food culture is used in the practice of placemaking and the evolution of regional identity;
- exploring inequalities in the criminal justice system with respect to sentencing prescriptions for diverse defendants; and
- examining how, in an era where status is increasingly scrutinized, groups are making sense of their place within America’s social structure. Students will be matched to research projects based on their substantive interests as well as the specific research skills they are most interested in developing.
Program Highlights
- 10-week research program
- $6,000 stipend for the program
- On-campus housing and meal plan included
- Fun, cohort-building activities
- Travel Stipend for the cost of transportation to and from the University of Mississippi
- Professional development, including one-on-one mentoring with faculty
- Students participate in a wide range of cutting-edge research projects
- Projects examine how race, place, and power intersect within the American South
- Students learn how to conceptualize, operationalize, and study concepts through an interdisciplinary perspective
Eligibility
Do you qualify to apply for this REU program? See eligibility requirements below.- Open to undergraduate students from any major who are US citizens or permanent residents
- Applicants must have at least one semester/term of undergraduate coursework remaining after participation in the program
- No minimum GPA required
Join Us in June!
Affiliated Faculty
James Thomas
- Associate Professor of Sociology and Anthropology
Simone Delerme
- Associate Professor of Anthropology and McMullan Associate Professor of Southern Studies
REU Senior Personnel
Conor M. Dowling is a Professor of Political Science whose research and teaching interests are in American Politics. He studies both mass and elite political behavior with a substantive focus on issues of electoral competition, representation, and public policy, campaign finance law and health and criminal justice policy in particular. He is also an expert in survey and experimental methods. To date, he has co-authored three books and more than 35 articles published in peer-reviewed journals. His most recent project, “The Consequences of Defendant Race,” explores racial inequalities in the criminal justice system with respect to sentencing prescriptions for white and non-white defendants. Specifically, through innovative survey experiments, this research asks 1) how defendant race affects the length of sentence that people view as appropriate, 2) whether the effects of a defendant’s race vary by respondents’ self-identified race and racial attitudes, and 3) whether results from an elite sample drawn from the legal profession diverge from those we find among the mass public.
Assistant Professor
School of Social Work
San Jose State University
email address here
Na Youn Lee is an Assistant Professor in the School of Social Work at San Jose State University. Prior to joining SJSU, she was an Assistant Professor of Social Work at the University of Mississippi. Dr. Lee’s research focuses on how the marginalization of groups and communities along the axes of stratification, including race, ethnicity, class, and region, impacts people’s sense of identity, political and self-efficacy, and attitudes towards outgroups. She received her PhD in Social Work and Political Science from the University of Michigan and a Master of Social Work and a Master of International Affairs from Columbia University.
Associate Professor
Department of Sociology & Anthropology
The University of Mississippi
mcdowell@olemiss.edu
Amy McDowell is an Associate Professor of Sociology, Director of the Queer Mississippi Histories Project, and qualitative researcher who specializes in interviewing and ethnographic methods. She has published on the intersections of race, religion, gender, and culture in Sociology of Race & Ethnicity, Gender & Society, and Sociology of Religion, among others. Her present book project, which is tentatively titled Small Talk: The Evangelical Search for Sameness in a Divided America, uncovers how members of white-majority evangelical communities use the routine of informal, polite conversation to powerfully avoid and reinforce the church’s complicity in oppressive power structures.
Catarina Passidomo is an Associate Professor of Environmental Studies at Washington and Lee University.
Catarina earned a B.A. in Sociology and Anthropology from W&L University in 2004, where her undergraduate thesis examined the connections between early American jazz music and African American identity. Catarina earned a M.A. in Environmental Anthropology from the University of Georgia in 2009. Her thesis investigated social capital within a network of local food producers in Athens, Georgia. Her doctorate in Human Geography, also from UGA, was an ethnographic study of food justice organizations in post-Katrina New Orleans.
Catarina is interested primarily in studying food systems to better understand and contest broader social systems and phenomena. Through work with her students, she is investigating the connections between the food system and migration between the Global South and the U.S. South; structural racism; economic inequality; and demographic and culinary changes in the American South. Catarina has published articles in Food, Culture, and Society; Urban Studies; Geoforum; Agriculture and Human Values; The Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems and Community Development; and ACME, and has contributed chapters to edited volumes on Food Sovereignty, the food-immigration nexus, and social and cultural geographies of food. She is currently working on a book entitled Gastroimaginaries: Dreams of Food and Place in Perú and the American South. Catarina teaches Geography 101, Southern Food Studies (SST 555), and other courses in Anthropology and Southern Studies.
In 2019, Catarina traveled to Lima, Peru on a Fulbright Teaching and Research fellowship. In 2020, she was recognized by the UM College of Liberal Arts with the Cora Lee Graham Award for the Outstanding Teaching of First-Year Students.
Project Descriptions
The Summer Avenue Oral History Project
“The Summer Avenue Oral History Project,” which began during May of 2021, documents how immigrants are incorporated into the sociopolitical and economic lives of communities that were not traditional migration destinations. Memphis, Tennessee is a city with a history of segregation and a historic black-white racial binary; however, there have been demographic changes in the last decades due to an influx of immigrants that are contributing to the revitalization of blighted communities. The oral history interviews and accompanying documentary shorts focus on foreign-born business owners on Summer Avenue, a commercial district in Memphis, to collect details about the migratory process, settlement, and the establishment of their businesses. Interviews are archived and made public on the Southern Foodways Alliance’s online oral history archive and the Digital Ethnography Project website.
Whiteness in Crisis
“Whiteness in Crisis” (NSF Award # 2115147) is a large-n (>100) interview project that aims to advance our understanding of how white southerners—a group often characterized as a monolith—are making sense of what it means to be white within the context of large-scale social, economic, and political shifts whereby the material and ideological durability of whiteness is increasingly called into question. Specifically, this research asks (1) how, in an era where whites’ dominant status is increasingly scrutinized, are white southerners making sense of their dominant racial group status? And, (2) what are the contexts and experiences that white southerners draw upon when making sense of their dominant group status? Students will have the opportunity to collect interview data with White southerners in three locales: Memphis, Tennessee, Oxford, Mississippi, and the Mississippi Delta. Students will then learn and apply a ‘flexible coding’ strategy (see Deterding and Waters 2021) to analyze the data.
The Queer Mississippi Histories Project
The Queer Mississippi Histories Project collects and preserves life history interviews and archival materials from LGBTQ+ persons living in or from Mississippi. To date, the project has collected 46 life history interviews with LGBTQ+ trailblazers, drag performers, churchgoers, activists, and community leaders from across Mississippi, and has established a growing LGBTQ+ archive of queer memorabilia, LPs, and videos in Archives and Special Collections at the University of Mississippi. On top of these achievements, students in sociology, history, and southern studies have used the archive as the basis for their master’s thesis and dissertation research, and have turned the archive into a theatrical script, library exhibition, as well as conference presentations.
In the summer program, students will gain first-hand experience collecting, analyzing, and writing about oral history interviews with a focus on how gender and sexual identity intersects with race, power, and the politics of place in a rural, conservative social context. This student work will also become part of queer history on the University of Mississippi’s eGrove digital repository.