Participant Biographies
Amy Binder
Professor
UCSD Department of
Sociology
Amy Binder received her B.A in Anthropology from Stanford University and
her M.A. and Ph.D. in Sociology from Northwestern University. Her
principal research interests are in the areas of education, social
movements, cultural sociology, and organizations. Her most recent book,
co-authored with Kate Wood, is titled
Becoming Right: How
Campuses Shape Young Conservatives; the book was published in 2013
by Princeton University Press. This study looks at conservative
college student activism on two university campuses and shows that
conservatism is far from an identity simply transported by young people to
college but is, rather, an organizational product of particular campuses.
Selected Publications
- Binder, Amy. 2013. Becoming Right:
How Campuses Shape Young Conservatives. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
- Binder, Amy. 2002. Contentious
Curricula: Afrocentrism and
Creationism in American Public Schools. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
- Binder, Amy. 2007. "Evolution
Triumphant: Review of the Charles Darwin
exhibit at the Museum of Natural History." Contexts 6: 72-74
(Winter).
- Binder, Amy and John Evans. 2008. "Teaching Evolution with an Olive
Branch," co-authored with John H. Evans. Washington Post, July
26, pA15. Available online as
Evolving toward a Compromise.
- Binder, Amy and Kate Wood. 2011. "Conservative Critics and Conservative College Students: Variations in Discourses of
Exclusion" in Diversity
in American Education: Toward a
More Comprehensive Approach, Lisa Stulberg and Sharon Weinberg
(eds.), New York: Routledge. (Covered in Inside Higher Education,
USA Today, Washington Post, First Things.)
Muni Citrin
PhD Student
UCSD Department of
Communication
Muni Citrin is a PhD student in the department of Communication at the
University of California, San Diego. After receiving a B.A. in literature
from Bard College he spent more than 10 years as a community, labor and
political organizer throughout the western United States. His current
research focuses on the intersection of local grassroots activism,
national political organizations, and popular political discourses within
the context of conservative movements in the United States since the
1960s. Since 2009 he has primarily worked with Tea Party activists in
California and Nevada.
John H. Evans
Professor
UCSD Department of
Sociology
John
Evans comes to UCSD
Sociology with a Ph.D. from Princeton and a B.A.
from Macalester College. He has been a Post-doctoral Fellow with the
Robert Wood Johnson Scholars in Health Policy Research Program at Yale, a
visiting member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, and
an assistant professor at UC Los Angeles. His research focuses on
religion, culture, politics and science. He is the author of
Playing
God? Human Genetic Engineering and the Rationalization of Public
Bioethical Debate (2002, University of Chicago Press) and
Contested
Reproduction: Genetic Technologies, Religion, and Public Debate (2010,
University of Chicago Press), and
The History and Future of Bioethics: A Sociological View (2012, Oxford University Press).
Michael S. Evans
PhD, UCSD, Department of Sociology
Post Doc, Dartmouth College, 2013-2016
Michael S. Evans mostly writes about science, religion, and public life.
He recently defended his dissertation, which examines how debate over
contentious issues shapes science and religion in the American public
sphere. His articles and chapters have been published or are forthcoming
in the
Annual Review of Sociology (with John H. Evans),
Environment and
Planning ,
Public Understanding of Science,
Science Communication,
Sociological Forum,
Studies
in History and Philosophy of Science,
The Blackwell Companion to
Science and Christianity (with John H. Evans), and
The New Blackwell
Companion to the Sociology of Religion (with John H. Evans).
Peter Gourevitch
Professor, UCSD Department of Political Science
Professor, UCSD School of International Relations and Pacific Studies
Peter Gourevitch is an expert on international political economy with a particular focus on national responses to
pressures
arising from international trade and economic globalization, trade disputes among countries, and international trade negotiations. Gourevitch's research also explores the rules that influence industry governance structures in different countries. His book,
Politics in Hard Times: Comparative Responses to International Crisis, has been published in Spanish, Italian, and soon will be available in Korean. Other publications focus on U.S.-Japan relations after the Cold War and international economic relations. For the past several years, Gourevitch has been chair of the Selection Committee of the Council on Foreign Relations' International Area Fellows Program. He was elected in 1996 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He taught at Harvard University from 1969-74, at McGill University from 1974-79, and joined UCSD's political science department in 1979. Gourevitch is the founding dean of IR/PS, where he continues to serve on the faculty.
Jeffrey M. Haydu
Professor
UCSD Department of Sociology
Jeff Haydu is a Professor of Sociology at the University of California, San Diego. His most recent book
is
Citizen
Employers: Business Communities and Labor in Cincinnati and San Francisco,
1870-1916 (Cornell University Press, 2008). More information is
available at his
academic
web
page.
Robert Horwitz
Professor
UCSD Department of Communication
Robert B. Horwitz is Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of California, San Diego.
He received his BA from Stanford and PhD in Sociology from Brandeis University.
His most recent book,
America's Right: Anti-Establishment Conservatism
from Goldwater to the Tea Party (Polity, 2013), examines the development and political
ascendance of anti-establishment conservatism. He is also the author of
The Irony of Regulatory Reform: The Deregulation of American Telecommunications
(Oxford University Press, 1989) and several articles on American free speech and communications law.
Horwitz spent 1995/96 as a Fulbright Research Fellow at the University of Cape Town and helped write
the Green and White papers on South African telecommunications policy.
This resulted in the publication of
Communication and Democratic Reform in South Africa
(Cambridge University Press, 2001), a study of the transition from apartheid to democracy through
the lens of on-the-ground reform efforts in one particular sector of the South African political economy.
More information is available on his
website.
Verónica Hoyo
PhD, UCSD, Department of Political Science
Post Doc, CIDE - Mexico
Verónica Hoyo completed her PhD in Political Science during 2011. Her
dissertation, titled "Outsider
Politics: Radicalism as a Political Strategy in Western Europe and Latin America," examines the
competitive dynamic of outsider political parties across 30 democracies in Western Europe and Latin
America. She is currently a Postdoc at the
Centro De Investigaciona Y
Docencia Economicas.
Isaac William Martin
Professor
UCSD
Department
of Sociology
Isaac William Martin is a Professor in the
Department of Sociology. His research concerns conservative movements
against taxation. He is the author of
The Permanent Tax Revolt
(Stanford
University Press, 2008), and
Rich Peoples' Movements: Grassroots Campaigns to Untax the One Percent (Oxford University Press, 2013).
Stephanie Martin
PhD Student
UCSD Department of Communication
Stephanie Martin's research examines individual worker identity in the late modern capitalist firm, especially in Fortune 500 companies. Martin hypothesizes that top executives have successfully employed conservative economic and political rhetoric to allow them to undo post-war social employment contracts, allowing them to shrink both benefits and salaries without facing much worker resistance, all the while increasing their own share of the pie. Unlike previous macroeconomic or policy-focused explanations of attenuated labor union influence and other worker protections, Martin's work highlights the power of executive rhetoric and verbal subterfuge. This executive rhetoric matches conservative ideology and is highly beneficial to the economic policies and political aspirations of the global right.
Tom Medvetz
Assistant Professor
UCSD Department of Sociology
In the context of research on think tanks, Tom Medvetz has carried out historical and ethnographic research on
the network of conservative foundations, donors, activists, and scholars that make up the American right.
Selected Publications
- Medvetz, Thomas. 2012. Think Tanks in America: Power,
Politics, and the New Forms of Intellectual Engagement. University of
Chicago Press.
- Gross, Neil, Thomas Medvetz, and Rupert Russell. 2012. "The Contemporary American Conservative Movement."
American Review of Sociology 37: 325-354.
- Medvetz, Thomas. 2009. "Les think tanks aux États-Unis: L’émergence d’un sous-espace de production des savoirs." Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales 176-177: 82-93.
- Medvetz, Thomas. 2008. "Think Tanks as an Emergent Field." Social Science Research Council Initiative on Think Tanks. Web Essay
- Medvetz, Thomas. 2006. "The Strength of Weekly Ties: Relations of Material and Symbolic Exchange in the Conservative Movement." Politics & Society 34(3): 343-368.
Ian Mullins
PhD Student
UCSD Department of
Sociology
Ian Mullins is a graduate student in Sociology at University of
California, San Diego. He has a B.A. from the University of
Minnesota in Sociology and American Studies, and an M.A. in Sociology
from California State University, Northridge. His primary research
interests are ethnographic methods, theory, and political sociology. His current research examines conservatism
in San Diego and Orange County.
Selected Publications
- Mullins, Ian. forthcoming. "Cultural Conflict." in Emerging Trends, edited by Nancy Pinkerton
and Robert A. Smith. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
Reece Peck
PhD Candidate
UCSD Department of Communication
Reece Peck completed his PhD in Communication during Summer 2012. He has since accepted an Assistant Professor
position at the City University of New York and will begin Fall 2013. His dissertation, titled "Fox Populism in the
Great Recession," examines news-based talk, populist modes of representation, and conservative social movements, in
order to understand how working class culture is used in contemporary U.S. politics.
Ryan Reft
PhD Candidate
UCSD Department of
History
Ryan Reft is a PhD candidate in the History Department at UCSD. He has
studied at the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois
at Chicago, New York University, and Columbia University, and taught
for nine years in the New York public school system. His dissertation
explores the place of military families and military housing in Sunbelt
metropolitan regions and how each provides a window into the impact of
conservative New Right rhetoric and neoliberal economic policies
regarding citizenship, integration, and anxieties about the declining
nuclear family. His broader research concerns include the history of
housing, homeownership, metropolitan America, gender/sexuality and the
politics of race and class in the twentieth century US. His work has
appeared in The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics, and Culture,
the journal Souls, and Barack Obama and African American
Empowerment: The Rise of Black America's New Leadership.
Philip Roeder
Professor
UCSD Department of Political
Science
Philip G. Roeder is Professor of Political Science at the University of
California, San Diego. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University. A
specialist on the politics of the Soviet successor states, Roeder is the
author of Where Nation-States Come From: Institutional Change in the
Age of Nationalism (Princeton University Press) and Red Sunset:
The Failure of Soviet Politics (Princeton University Press). He is
the co-author of Postcommunism and the Theory of Democracy
(Princeton University Press) and co-editor of Sustainable Peace: Power
and Democracy After Civil Wars (Cornell University Press). His
articles have appeared in such journals as the American Political
Science Review, World Politics, and International
Studies Quarterly. He is currently working on two longer-term
projects: [1] Alternatives to Independence (This asks: What are the
consequences of various institutional arrangements designed to avoid
granting independence to secessionists?) and [2] The Tenacity of the
Nation-State (This asks: Why do states almost never relinquish sovereignty
willingly?)
Ronnee Schreiber
Associate Professor
Department of Political Science
San Diego State University
Ronnee Schreiber is an Associate Professor of Political Science at San Diego State University.
She earned a PhD in Political Science from Rutgers University, an MA in Women's Studies from George Washington
University and a BA from the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests are in the area of women and American
political institutions. In 2008, she published
Righting Feminism: Conservative Women and American Politics (Oxford University Press),
which was featured on NPR's
Fresh Air with Terry Gross.
She has also written "Conservative Women as Leaders of Organization for the forthcoming
Sage Handbook of Women's Leadership (edited by Karen O'Connor) "Pro-Women, Pro-Palin, Anti-feminist
Conservative Women and Conservative Movement Politics" for the forthcoming edited volume on the
Future of the Right in American Politics (edited by Gillian Peele and Joel Aberbach).
Nayan Shah
Professor, Chair
USC Department of American
Studies and Ethnicity
Nayan Shah received his BA from Swarthmore College and PhD from the
University of Chicago. Professor Shah’s research and teaching
investigates the paradoxes of democracy and inequality in the 19th and
20th century United States and Canada and focuses on the waves of Asian
migrations along the Pacific Coast of North America and the U.S.-Mexican
border region. His books and articles examine the contests over state
power and citizenship in public health, law, and social welfare. His
research explores the dynamics of racialization and the perpetuation and
reproduction of inequity in the distribution of resources, wealth,
entitlements and state protection. His research has contributed new
methods and interpretations of how racialization is constituted and
perpetuated in political, cultural and state arenas by divergent
conceptualizations of gender, sexuality and domesticity, which have
justified the disparate allocation of resources and protections. Shah is
the author of Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San
Francisco's Chinatown (University of California Press, 2001) and
Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality and the Law in the North
American West (University of California Press, 2011).