Spring 2024 Sabbatical Presentations

Join us on Thursday, April 13 in Lindquist Hall 112 for the fall 2022 semester CSBS sabbatical presentations. Read full project abstracts below.

Noon

Thom Kuehls, Professor of Political Science

A little bit of this, a little bit of that
During my fall 2022 sabbatical I completed four separate projects. First, I wrote and presented a paper on the theory of religious toleration at the annual WSU diversity conference. Second, I designed an online version of my Pols 1100 American National Government class, complete with over 60 recorded lectures. Third and fourth, I developed "cost-free" versions of my Pols 4380 Modern Political Thought class, and my Pols 2300 Intro to Political Theory class. This involved locating open source versions of various texts and editing those texts down to versions usable in my class. This also involved composing new lecture notes for what in some cases was completing new material and in other cases was the same material but in different editions/translations.  

12:50 p.m.

Barrett Bonella, Associate Professor of Social Work

Preparing Social Workers to Challenge Community Problems: Descriptives of Six Years of Community Engaged Projects
With the challenges of institutional and systematic oppression of many of the populations we serve, the need to learn how to engage such systems and organize for power has never been more important. Over the course of six years, social workers in a baccalaureate program in the west were trained to challenge their realities and learn to organize by studying Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals and other texts that emphasize self-care (as a radical practice), leadership, and conflict engagement. To show that they had learned the materials, students were required to engage in a project that would address a real problem in their communities. Students were allowed to determine which problems they thought were most pressing and could be realistically addressed. Students were required to demonstrate that they had worked to do at least two of the following tasks: Awareness Raising, Fundraising, Grant Writing, Leadership/Personnel Management, Community Organizing, Public Advocacy, Programmatic Research, Program Development, and/or Multiplying (by virtue of creating new collaborations between organizations). Students documented their progress on their tasks and processed their learning via semi-weekly journals. Projects were proposed and planned using the PREPARE and IMAGINE models as delineated in the Kirst-Ashman and Hull text Generalist Practice with Organizations and Communities. To assess factors that made projects successful in achieving their goals, data from the courses were organized into a database and analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively. This session will describe the data and relationships between variables related to the training of social workers.

1:40 p.m.

RC Morris, Associate Professor of Sociology

Becoming myself: a sociological memoir on identities and crisis
In 2017, a group of students and I began working on a project connecting the social psychology of self to the lives of the students working on the project. Over the next 3 years, 21 students were involved with some part of the project. Two students took their projects to the national conference on undergraduate research. Two used the data to inform their senior theses and successful applications to graduate school. And more than a dozen students presented at national, regional, and local conferences. Using the student data to inform a larger project, we next designed a survey intended to be distributed among a nationally representative sample. With the support of Hemingway funds, we administered a survey to nearly 1,400 participants across the United States. This colloquium reflects on the core questions informing this study. Of particular interest is the role Sociology plays in the development of identity. Using these data and my own life as a narrative hook, I report on how identity develops across the life-course, the central role Sociology plays in the development of self and identity, and the regional and cultural implications for those identities. This colloquium talk will also have non-traditional elements, including some hands-on experiences with a section at the end intended to provide the audience with tools aimed at improving a person's mental health.

2:30 p.m.

Dennis Lee, Associate Professor of Criminal Justice

Media Engagement and Procedural Justice
Recent research has examined the relationship between individuals’ news media consumption and attitudes toward police, including how media preferences influence individuals’ perceptions of procedural justice. Building on this work, the current study examines the impact of mass communication engagement on attitudes toward procedural justice among college students in the United States. Using a sample of students from several universities, our results provide evidence that media engagement plays an important role in explaining attitudes toward procedural justice. In contrast to findings reported in prior research on media engagement and procedural justice, we found that media engagement is negatively associated with procedural justice.