News In This Issue
Department Happenings
Welcome
Dr. Vanessa Centelles, Assistant Professor
Sadie Kinney-McGrath, Assistant to the Chair
Ph.D. Students:
km barnhardt
Tasnim Fatir
Wuying Lin
M.A. Students:
Luca Bebo
Kaitlin Dute
Polina Kopeikin
Liberty Macias
Farewell
Sara Winter has been with CSU Sociology for over 17 years – wow! Thank you, Sara, and best wishes for your future endeavors!
Welcoming Chair Dr. Tara Opsal
This summer Tara Opsal took over as Chair of the Department of Sociology. This appointment is particularly significant as she is the first woman-identified faculty member to hold this position.
Learn more here about Tara's inspiring journey from a first-gen student to department chair, her vision for Sociology, and her recent teaching recognition, community involvement, and research awards.
Celebrating Dr. Jeni Cross
Jeni Cross is retiring from CSU after 25 years. She was honored at a celebration at The Lincoln Center, and she reflected on her many years on campus here.
“I knew that I wanted to be a sociologist from my first day in college,” Jeni told CSU SOURCE. “My greatest mentors in my educational career were my teachers at CSU. Dr. Steve Mumme, Dr. Michael Lacy, Dr. Doug Murray and Dr. Ronny Turner all encouraged my creativity and curiosity, and they are the ones who encouraged me to become a professor.”
Sociology's "Collective Effervescence" continues
The fall semester launched with a Faculty & Staff Retreat followed by our annual Graduate Student Meet & Greet, Ram Welcome, and Ice Cream Social.
Monthly Department Council meetings are now open to everyone. Tony Roberts, Laura Raynolds and senior Alex Kotaba kindly agreed to kick off the meetings as Department Member Spotlights, several folks offered high fives all around as the meetings concluded, and Sadie Kinney-McGrath brought fun treats to enjoy along the way.
Sociology's Executive Council compiled ideas from the retreat, a graduate student survey, and 1:1s with all faculty, staff, and graduate student reps to collectively identify department goals and next steps.
Department Ship Steering: Aspirations for the next 5 years
- Enhance the Visibility and Reputation of the Sociology Department
- Create Bandwidth to do Cool Things
- Strengthen Connections with Alumni
- Conduct a Graduate Program Health Assessment
- Foster Community Engagement and Dialogue
- Generate Revenue
Sociology-in-Progress events:
Vanessa Centelles, James Hale and Jessie Luna shared their current work during a Faculty Research Roundtable.
Lynn Hempel shared a chapter of her in-progress book and presented her ongoing research "Environmentalism and The Ecological Imagination."
Sociology Community Reads was facilitated by Pat Mahoney who led a discussion around Teaching with AI: A Practical Guide to a New Era of Human Learning by José Antonio Bowen.
Thanks to all Department members for participating in these events and elevating Sociology’s "collective effervescence" again this semester!
Undergraduate Happenings
First GEN SOC Grad through CSU Online
Eddie is our very first General Sociology graduate through CSU Online. Eddie chose Sociology because it is so multi-faceted and offers him many options for higher education and various career paths. Learn more about Eddie here.
Clark B Groundbreaking Ceremony
Emily Reese served as the student voice and groundbreaker for Clark’s revitalization ceremony. As President Parsons said, our future leaders are right here at CSU!
Emily is a fourth-year SOC student and president of the College of Liberal Arts Representative Council.
First Graduates to earn SOC's Certificate
Carlos Medina is one the first students to earn Sociology’s new Certificate in Applied Social Research. Carlos chose SOC because as a first-generation Latino student, he wanted to understand why certain challenges felt so common in his community and how they were connected to larger systems. Learn more about Carlos here.
Class Notes
"In my SOC 357 course before fall break, students wrote letters to incarcerated survivors of gender-based violence. I have been doing these letter-writing events in this class since I started teaching it, and students always really enjoy doing it. I got this idea to organize a letter-writing in this class from the organization called Survived and Punished, which has organized letter-writing events like this for awhile (on their website, there is actually a picture of a letter-writing event from 2013 in Fort Collins). I will be sending those letters in the mail over the winter break!" – Erin O'Callaghan
President Parsons asked "Who's Your Favorite Teacher?"
Check out the post here and don't miss the comments!
CSUPD visits SOC 253
CSU Police Chief Jay Callaghan shared his career path and insights with Jeff Nowacki's Intro to Criminology and Criminal Justice students.
Congratulations to SOC's 78 graduates this fall!
Many thanks to Pete Taylor for snapping this pic during his Marshall service.
Defenses
Ian D. Greenwood successfully defended his doctoral dissertation, "Unresolved Homicide: A Cross-National Perspective." Committee: Drs. Prabha Unnithan, Michael Hogan, KuoRay Mao, and Jeff Snodgrass (Anthropology)
Michael Cahill successfully defended his thesis, "Chinese Trade & Investment in the 21st Century: The Impact of the Belt and Road Initiative on Industrialization in Developed and Less-Developed Nations." Committee: Drs. Anthony Roberts, Peter Harris (Political Science) and Pat Mahoney
Buday Falkinburg successfully defended her thesis, “Inequitable, Disparate Outcomes for U.S. Divorces in 2022: How Gender and Age Moderate Family Income and Divorce.” Committee: Drs. Jeff Nowacki, Tony Roberts & Elissa Braunstein (Economics)
Emily Haberlack successfully defended her thesis, entitled "Military-Government Relationships in Environmental Justice Protections: A Colorado Case Study." Emily will be joining the PhD program at Northeastern in Boston this fall and carry on the CSU/SSERHI connections. Committee: Drs. Stephanie Malin, KuoRay Mao and Peter Harris (Political Science)
Service
Amber Obermaier is part of Swipe Out Hunger's 2025 Student Leadership and Advisory Council.
Collaborations
km barnhardt, Vanessa Centelles, Erin O'Callaghan, and Janelle Viera and were judges at the Graduate Student Showcase.
Tara Opsal and India Luxton published “Collaborations between Community Corrections and Community-Organizations: Understanding their Potential for System-Involved Women and Gender Responsive Programming” in Feminist Criminology.
India Luxton and Tara Opsal published "Navigating Complex Relationships: Support Networks Among Women in Community Corrections” in Criminal Justice and Behavior.
Kellie Alexander, Jeffrey Nowacki, Tara Opsal, and Shelby Sims published “Agency Directors’ Reflections on “Success” in Community Corrections: The Role of Traditional and Alternative Measures” in Criminal Justice Policy Review.
Taylor Ellis and Tara Opsal published “Gender Rules in The Community Corrections Context: Examining How Case Managers Navigate Trans Client Supervision in a Binary Setting" in Probation Journal.
Congratulations
Azmal Hossan, Verena Knerich, Mila Nunez-Solis, and Anne Uhlman all passed their Social Change Exams.
Jacob DeBruin, Rebecca Forsythe, Amber Obermeier, and Laney Van all passed the Methods Comprehensive Exam.
Azmal Hossan, Yue Xu, and Bria Willert successfully defended their dissertation proposals.
Verena Knerich and Anne Uhlman successfully defended their dissertation prospectuses.
Publications
Anne Uhlman published “’Deliberate Indifference’: Challenging State-Sanctioned Violence Against Transgender People in Carceral Spaces” in Critical Criminology and received the Outstanding Student Paper Award from the American Society of Criminology (ASC) Division on Queer Criminology.
Adam Snitker and co-authors published "Developing reliable and valid measures for evaluating collaborative governance and adaptability: An example from the Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program" in the Journal of Environmental Management.
Adam Snitker and co-authors published "How agricultural producers use local knowledge, climate information, and on-farm 'experiments' to address drought risk" in Agriculture and Human Values.
Presentations
Anne Uhlman presented original research at ASC in San Francisco along with undergraduate co-author Jessie Roig.
Azmal Hossan represented the Great Plains Tribal Water Alliance (GPTWA), his dissertation partner, at the workshop "Status and Future of Climate Adaptation Science and Applications in the North Central Region" organized by the North Central Climate Adaptation Science Center, CU Boulder.
Also with GPTWA and some federal agencies, Azmal Hossan organized the workshop "Decolonizing Climate Change Adaptation Knowledge with the Tribal knowledge keepers in the Northern Great Plains." Based on the insights and feedback he received, Azmal wrote and published "Decolonizing Climate Change Adaptation Research: An Ongoing Process of Unlearning and Relearning" for the Humannature blog of CSU's School of Global Environmental Sustainability where he is a Sustainability Leadership Fellow.
Azmal Hossan was invited to present his paper "Elevated Concentration of Atmospheric CO2 and the Food Nutrient Depletion: A Case of Metabolic Rift" at the International Conference on Climate Change jointly organized by Gifu University, Japan, and Sebelas Maret University, Indonesia. His paper was then accepted for publication.
Research Centers & Teams
Reestablishing the Center for the Study of Crime
Tara Opsal has received CSU OVPR funding to reestablish The Center for the Study of Crime and Justice along with Jeff Nowacki and Jessie Harney (Political Science). The Center will reemerge as an interdisciplinary and community-rooted institute that will bring together faculty, students, practitioners, agencies, and stakeholders across Colorado to collaborate on improving criminal justice reform, addressing systemic inequalities, and providing technical assistance and evaluation to government and non-profit agencies via participatory processes.
Prison Agriculture Lab
The Prison Agriculture Lab has released a zine, Abolition Methodologies: Refusing and Building Worlds, to accompany a recent peer reviewed publication in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space.
Institute for Research in the Social Sciences (IRISS)
Jeni Cross and two colleagues from Ohio State and the University of New Hampshire are the leadership team for a Research Coordination Network that is building a team science toolkit that will be hosted on IRISS's website. Since this group has taken on a leadership role for the NSF Biology Integration Institute awardees, NSF program officers asked IRISS to plan and host at Spur the NSF grantee meeting. Session topics included community building, peer learning, and future visioning as well as NSF funding opportunities to support the ongoing work of these kinds of institutes.
Congratulations
Dr. Stephanie Malin, Professor
Dr. Tara Opsal, Professor
Dr. Jessie Luna, Associate Professor
Publications
Pat Hastings and co-authors published “The Fall and Rise of Parental Financial Investments during the COVID-19 Pandemic" in the Journal of Marriage and Family.
Erin O'Callaghan published "Impaired, incapacitated, or neither? Qualitative descriptions of impairment during substance-involved sexual assault" in Psychology of Violence.
Pat Hastings and a co-author published “What’s a Parent to do? Measuring Cultural Logics of Parenting with Computational Text Analysis” in Social Science Research.
Carrie Chennault (Anthropology & Geography) and Joshua Sbicca published “Abolition Methodologies” in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space.
Tara Opsal and Jeff Nowacki published with graduate students as noted in the above section.
Edited Books
Shawn Bingham and a co-editor published Reframing the American Dream: Tiny Housing as a Window into Consumer Culture, Political Landscapes, and Structural Equity. Severin Mangold (M.A. '21) contributed one chapter.
Joshua Sbicca published the “Food Justice” chapter in Elgar Encyclopedia of Environmental Sociology.
Contributing Near & Far
Jeni Cross kicked off CSU's new Ram Talks series with “Hidden hurdles – Inventing new approaches to old problems by re-thinking systems.”
Shawna Bendeck presented "Social Networks and Mental Health Resilience of Parents during Pandemic School Closures" at the 2024 Natural Hazards Workshop Researchers Meeting.
Jeni Cross presented "Accelerating team performance in a new era of science" at the Distinguished Scientist Seminar held at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Pat Hastings spent my sabbatical in Europe, where I was a visiting researcher at the Centre for Research on Social Inequalities, Sciences Po and at Nuffield College, University of Oxford. I also gave invited talks at Bocconi University, University College London (UCL), and the University of Copenhagen.
James Hale is in a new research and engagement position called "Research Director of Community Food Systems and Social Sustainability." This position is tied to the new CSU Spur campus and the Metropolitan Agricultural Research Center with close links to CSU's Ag Experiment Station and Office of Engagement and Extension. The focus is on community engaged research in the food insecurity space, as well as sustainable agriculture transitions.
Mike Hogan's letter to the editor was published in The New York Times opinion piece "A Republican Governor’s Plea to Stop the Personal Attacks."
Jessie Luna was featured on CSU's The Audit podcast for her research "Beyond ‘The Lion King:’ Why are cultural stereotypes still found at zoos, museums?"
Jeff Nowacki presented "The Social Ecology of Gender Inequality & Female Representation in Policing" (co-author Tony Roberts) at the American Society of Criminology (ASC) Annual Meeting in San Francisco.
Jessie Luna is traveling to the African Studies Meeting in mid-December to present emergent ideas on pesticide knowledge politics in Cote d'Ivoire.
Tara Opsal served as a keynote panelist at the Fostering Public Safety: A Collaborative Workshop conference funded by Arnold Ventures.
Josh Sbicca is the Chair Elect of the Section on Environmental Sociology of the American Sociological Association (ASA). In this role he is responsible for the section's program at the annual meeting August 8-12, 2025 in Chicago. Please consider submitting to one of four paper sessions or the roundtable session.
Prabha Unnithan continues to serve as an Adjunct Professor at Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman in Kampar, Malaysia. He recently visited the country where he born and raised to give a public lecture "Trends and Crises in Social Science Research."
Alumni Updates
Kellie Alexander is now an Assistant Professor of Teaching at the University of Denver.
Austin Luzbetak is an Assistant Professor of Teaching at the University of Minnesota.
This fall, two students from Jeni Cross' Fall 2020 capstone each reached out to let her know they got jobs because of what they learned in her Community Development class – in the Fall of 2020 when the pandemic peaked, the class was fully hybrid, and regular research projects were not possible.
"My supervisor said that my references towards the application of the approach is what made me stand out in being hired to her unit, and that they don't often hear that knowledge from candidates unless their background is in public health or social work." – Jarred Winchester ('21), Eligibility Specialist, Michigan Department of Health and Human Services
Stay tuned for more alumni updates this spring! We emailed over 3,500 this fall and Tara is currently reviewing a list of 6,500.
Save the date for Sociology's annual Alumni Panel: Wednesday, April 9, 4–5:30pm.
SOC Alum Christopher Brewer in the news
"I first discovered my passion for social impact in college. While studying sociology at Colorado State University — the intellectual home of the Peace Corps — I had the privilege of learning from thought leaders in the field of symbolic interactionism. My education instilled in me a curiosity about the root causes of social issues and the way people create shared meaning. This curiosity has motivated me to spend the last 25 years helping nonprofit organizations understand how their interactions with technology and stakeholders can enable social impact," Christoper Brewer ('97) told Authority Magazine.
"Christopher has more than 25 years of experience working with some of the world’s largest nonprofits and NGOs to enhance their technological capacity. As growth director for nonprofit at Unit4, Chris helps leaders identify and address changing patterns in philanthropy and technology to ensure their organizations’ ongoing success and increase their social impact." Check out the full article on Medium.
Thank You For All You Do!
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