Faculty Directory

Office Hours:   By Appointment

Research Area/Focus:

• Researches student success, academic performance, and retention especially among first-year and transfer students.
• Focus on inequality, higher education, and institutional reform to support diverse learners.
• Principal Investigator on multiple NSF-funded STEM education and inclusion initiatives (e.g., LSAMP, WIDER)
• Experienced academic leader (former Vice Provost for Undergraduate Studies) with expertise in teaching effectiveness and evidence-based pedagogy.

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:

• Rural and environmental sociologist focused on food and agriculture systems, dynamics of labor in environmental occupations, and rural community change.
• Boise State University’s Director of Human-Environment Systems (HES) in the School of the Environment.
• Current research projects include understanding sustainability challenges faced by farmers from refugee backgrounds in the Boise community, 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.
• Collaborates with public agencies and community partners to translate research into 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.
• 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

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: Vita
Office Hours: By Appointment

Research interests: Inequality; Critical Race Theory; Cultural Studies: Popular Culture; Neoliberalism; Gender; Intersectionality; Mixed Methods

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.