Here’s a little about me and why I do what I do: 

I lived in 12 small towns in New York State before I was six when my family moved to Syracuse.  My parents and grandparents were involved with peace and social justice work.   It was a little hard to rebel. 

As an undergraduate, I majored in Environmental Studies and Politics at Oberlin College.  I was a member of housing and dining cooperatives and took part in a solidarity project with a women’s cooperative in Nicaragua. 

I worked for two years in the Dominican Republic with a small, grassroots organization called One Respe.  (One Respe is a greeting in Haitian Kreyol that means honor and respect).  We did human rights work and base community organizing with children, youth and women’s groups in Dominican and Haitian communities. 

While doing my Ph.D. at Cornell in Development Sociology, I learned about social movements with a crew of colleagues involved in other movements around the world.  My dissertation project was about the popular education strategies of the organizations that support the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, Mexico. 

Here in Ithaca I work with the Tompkins County Workers Center.  We run an Organizing School as part of the Service Learning for Social Justice program.  We work to build relationships among community members and students.  We want to prepare leaders for a movement to end poverty led by the poor, across color lines.  Our local work supports the national efforts of the University of the Poor and the Poverty Initiative. We also have an ongoing connection with Justicia Global in the Dominican Republic. 

I began teaching at Ithaca College in the fall of 2006.  I love our students.  I’m proud of their enthusiasm and sense of justice.  I see my role as facilitating students’ engagement with efforts for social change locally, nationally and internationally. 

I teach courses in the area of Public Sociology:

• Social Change - How change happens in the world
• Public Sociology -  Learn about sociologists who study the world in order to change it, and learn about doing what they do
• Social Movements - Study how people demand rights, stop wars, stop global warming, end poverty.  Imagine that another world is possible!   
• Community Organizing - Learn theory and practice for organizing, in class and in the community  
• Global Sociology - How do regular people relate to big, global processes, like colonialism, development and globalization?
• Research Methods - How do sociologists study the social world around us
• Culture and Society: An International Field Experience - Travel to the Dominican Republic, learn from grassroots organizations, come home and put your knowledge to work.  Study how people have made change.  
  • Learn about this class here.  Applications for the Spring semester course (Sociology 312) and to travel to the Dominican Republic are due in late October for the following Spring.  Applications are available here. 
  • Read the students' blog from last year:  http://soci312.blogspot.com/