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

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

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