Center for the Study of Social Movements and Social Change

Center for the Study of Social Movements

and Social Change
University of Notre Dame, South Bend, Indiana USA

Home The Center SPAM Events 2006/07 Undergraduates Graduate Students Mobilization

Maria-Elena D. Diaz

Maria-Elena graduated magna cum laude with honors in sociology from Brandeis University, and earned a Master of Human Relations from the University of Okalahoma and Master of Arts in sociology from the University of Notre Dame. She passed her area exams in statistics and methods and race/ethnicity (with distinction), co-authored an article on newspapers as a data source, and wrote a book review on the second wave of feminist mobilization. Her interests include social inequality, social movements, and macro-micro interactions in social change. Her current work includes an examination of the economic integration of Native Hawaiians at the end of the twentieth century, and the interaction of culture and power in the establishment of a constitutional monarchy in the Hawaiian Kingdom in the early 19th century; the development of a model for the interaction between self-transformation, structure, and social change; and an analysis of the transnational links in the mobilization of indigenous movements.

Karen Monique Gregg

Karen Monique Gregg, a first-year graduate student, recently earned a Master’s of Science in Sociology from Purdue University. There she developed her substantive areas of interests in gender and religion. Her thesis work at Purdue pertained to how the powwow setting is used to define, maintain and reinforce gender roles in Native American culture. In 2004 Monique received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Indiana University at South Bend, having worked with the scholars Daniel V. Olson and Mike Keen. There her main areas of study were sociology, religion, and philosophy. At Notre Dame she intends to continue her work in the sociology of religion and plans to study social movements.

Christopher Hausmann

Chris Hausmann is a second-year graduate student. In 2004, he graduated summa cum laude from St. John's University, in Minnesota. Before coming to Notre Dame in 2005, he traveled to Brazil and Bolivia as a service-learning facilitator for the University of Pittsburgh's summer courses, and was the Assistant Coordinator of Service-Learning at St. John's University. Chris's research is focused on social movements, globalization, and methodology. He is currently working on his Masters' thesis, "State Governance and Transnational Meetings," and a project studying the integration of retreat-like experiences into daily life. He is a teachers' assistant for undergraduate Qualitative Methods.

Liz Martinez

Before entering the Ph.D. program in sociology at Notre Dame, Liz was an intellectual property attorney in Los Angeles for ten years, representing such clients as Pixar, Sid Luft, Larry Flynt, Jackie Joyner-Kersee, CAA/TeleTV, and Netscape. While in law school, Liz studied trade regulation and music piracy; and she was an editor for the Loyola of Los Angeles Entertainment Law Review. During the end of the dot-com boom (2000-2002), Liz worked as an Internet journalist for the E-Commerce Times, covering business and technology news. More recently, as a graduate student, she was appointed to the position of Assistant Editor of Mobilization: An International Journal, reporting to Daniel J. Myers (2006-07). Liz’s research interests include: sociology of law, culture, mass media, and social movements.

Brian Miller

Brian is a third year student who completed his MA degree at Notre Dame in May 2006. His thesis was titled: "Redeveloping the Cabrini-Green Housing Project: A Sociological Perspective, 1989-2004." Brian graduated from Wheaton College (Ill.) in 2004 with bachelor degrees in sociology and anthropology. His areas of interest include urban sociology, particularly the development of suburbs, housing, and sociology of culture. Currently, Brian is working on projects dealing with McMansions and the social causes of assassinations.

Carl Neblett

Carl Neblett is in his fifth year of graduate studies and became ABD in May, 2006. He received his M.A. in Sociology in 2004 from the University of Notre Dame, and was awarded his B.A. in Criminal Justice and an Associate's Degree in Social Science with a Concentration in Philosophy from McNeese State University in 2002. His research interests are social movements, ethnographic methods, culture, sexuality, and microsociology. He is co-author of an article that appeared in the journal Mobilization, was a teaching assistant for an undergraduate course on social movements, and is currently the lab assistant for two qualitative methods courses, one of which is explicitly focused on research on social change.

Nicolás Somma

Nicolás earned a B.A. (1999) and M.A. (2004) in Sociology from the Universidad de la República (Uruguay), where he taught classical social theory, research methods, and sociology of education. He arrived at Notre Dame in the fall of 2004 and earned an M.A. in Sociology in 2006. He is broadly interested in the interactions among social movements, states, and inequality structures in the U.S. and Latin America. He is currently working on a series of papers about protest participation and recruitment networks in the U.S. using survey data. He is also starting a research project about the dynamics of popular protest in countries with progressive governments in Latin America using newspaper data.