Faculty Director

Office Hours:   By Appointment

About:

• Ph.D. | Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
  Geology, 1996
• M.S.  | University of Arizona, Tucson
  Geosciences, 1991
• B.S.  | University of New Mexico, Albuquerque
  Geology, 1989

Office Hours:   By Appointment

Research interests:
The organization of society perpetuates racial inequalities, and strategies for overcoming these unequal relations.

Office Hours: By Appointment

Research Area/Focus:

Rebecca L. Som Castellano is Professor of Sociology and Director of Human-Environment Systems in the School of the Environment at Boise State University. A rural and environmental sociologist by training, her current projects include understanding the sustainability challenges faced by farmers from refugee backgrounds in the Boise community, well-being among Latina farmworkers in Southern Idaho, rural land use change with a focus on the development of agricultural land and sagebrush steppe in Idaho, and experiences with labor among wildland firefighters and their families. She earned her Bachelor of Arts degree from Fairhaven College at Western Washington University in Interdisciplinary Studies, a Master’s of Arts degree in Sociology from the University of Kentucky, and a PhD in Rural Sociology from The Ohio State University. She frequently engages in interdisciplinary research and works closely with community partners to design research grounded in local needs and to ensure that results inform policy and practice.

Marty Orr: Vita
Office Hours: By Appointment

Research Area/Focus:

• Researches media and power—particularly how “conspiracy theory” is used to marginalize dissent.
• Studies political economy, with work on capitalist crises, inequality, and social movements.
• Also engaged in public scholarship connecting theory to contemporary social issues.

Dora Ramirez: Vita
Office Hours: By Appointment

Research Area/Focus: 

• Scholar of Latine and Indigenous literature, film, and cultural rhetoric; focuses on identity, resistance, intersectionality, and feminist/decolonial frameworks.
• Researches ideas of nation-building and the sociopolitical effects of settler colonialism on marginalized communities in the United States.
• Author of Medical Fragmentation: Literary Modernism, Scientific Discourse, and the Mexican Indigenous Body, 1870-1940s (analyzes the medical industry’s colonial influences on indigenous peoples at the turn of the 19th century), and a variety of other scholarly essays.
• Examines Latine representation and modernity in media and art (Dolores del Rio, rancheras, muralism/gentrification, “cyberborderlands”/Latinx technological body).
• Public-humanities leader. Boise State University’s Director of Ethnic Studies and Gender Studies, community organizer, develops community-engaged courses and events.

Raul S. Casarez Vita
Office Hours: By Appointment

Research Area/Focus:

• Sociologist of race, ethnicity, and immigration. Recent work focuses on how individuals conceptualize and experience “Americanness” and negotiate processes of belonging.
• Studies Asian American and multiracial identities, boundary making, and intergroup relations; examines how race and nationalism shape immigration attitudes.
• Uses quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods research to analyze public opinion and dimensions of social inequality (e.g., jury pool underrepresentation, multiracial family change.)
• Current work probes the relationship between educational attainment and immigration views and the mental health effects of racial contestation among multiracial adults.

Soulit Chacko Vita

Office Hours: By Appointment

Research Area/Focus:

• Studies immigrant economy and refugee integration in the U.S.
• Focuses on intersectional experiences, community-engaged and embodied practices that explain how social inequalities emerge, persist, and get reproduced as people create alternative realities to survive.
• Uses ethnographic and interview methods to understand migrant experiences and applies program evaluation and community-participatory methods to analyze and inform refugee integration processes.
• Received Ph.D from Loyola University Chicago, followed by a two-year Postdoctoral Fellowship with Religion and Urban Culture Project at the School of Liberal Arts in Indiana University, Indianapolis. Has a Master of Arts degree in Sociology from Loyola University Chicago, a Bachelor of Arts degree in Urban Planning and Public Policy from University of Illinois Chicago, and a Bachelor of Commerce degree in Accounting and Management from Christ University India.

Sarah Mawhirter: Vita
Office Hours: By Appointment

Research interests: Sociology, Gender Studies, Focuses on: Critical Higher Education, Embodied Research Methods, Carceral and Mass Incarceration Activists’ Studies, Higher Education in Prison, and Transformative Criminal Justice Law and Public Policy.

Desiree Brunette: Vita
Office Hours: By Appointment

Research interests: Sociology of the family, Sociology of the Sex, Sociology of Religion, and Medical Sociology,

Michael Kreiter Curriculum Vitae
Office Hours: By Appointment

Research interests: Inequality and institutional power, neoliberal higher education, extremism and political culture, race and masculinity, qualitative and digital sociology

Carissa Wolf: Vita
Office Hours: By Appointment

Research Areas/Focus: 

• Studies media and journalism through a sociological lens—political economy of the public sphere, media & democracy, and how news ecosystems, platform logics, and misinformation shape civic life.
• Focuses on media literacy and the social epistemology of journalism (how we know what we know), including pedagogy and newsroom practice.
• Investigates fringe/extremist movements and the policy arenas they intersect with (health, environment, religion), emphasizing inequality and public accountability.
• Additional interests: disability and accessibility in media/public spaces, and the sociology of food/food politics.

Julia Broderick: Vita

Office Hours: By Appointment

Research Area/Focus: 

• Teaching & learning in higher education: Builds/assesses curricula (e.g., Social Communication), and studies first-year student success, facilitates multiple faculty learning communities
• GAP Analysis and studies how to better support contingent faculty
• Faculty Senator, COAS Project Team Lead, Co-Teaching in UF 100

Jeff Cates: Vita

Office Hours By Appointment

Research Area/Focus:

• Researches poverty, inequality, and the political economy of capitalism, focusing on neoliberalism’s social and institutional effects.
• Examines predatory inclusion and economic exploitation in industries targeting low-income populations (“Poverty Delivered” on the rent-to-own industry).
• Investigates how neoliberal higher education systems reproduce elitism, reduce academic freedom, and commodify learning.
• Uses qualitative and public sociology methods, including digital media, to critique and promote social awareness.