Gender, Sexuality and Embodiment

Dr. Brooks is an Associate Professor in Women’s and Gender Studies and Sociology, teaches courses in comparative and historical sociology, globalization and postcolonial social formations. She is currently finishing a book on transnational organizing in the garment industry with a focus on Dhaka , San Salvador and New York City.

Dr. Brooks is interested in relations of gender, race, class, labor practices and nation-state formations, with a focus on South Asia, Central America and the United States. Her research explores areas of critical political economy, globalization, social movements, feminist theory, comparative sociology, nationalism, urban geographies and post-colonialism, with close attention to epistemology. In her dissertation, she examined three transnationally-organized protest movements for workers' rights in the global garment industry: (1) against poor working conditions in export-processing zones in El Salvador; (2) against the use of child labor in the Bangladesh garment industry; and (3) against immigrant sweatshops in New York City. Her work focuses on the relationship between protest organizers and the mostly women workers they represent, as part of the everyday manifestations of globalized production practices. She is currently working on a book that looks at transnational labor organizing, women's work and relations of globalization and empire.

Dr. Brooks's recent and forthcoming publications include "Transnational Protest, Production and Women's Labor: The politics of sweatshops and the global garment industry," forthcoming in The Journal of International Labor and Working Class History, 2001; "Bangladesh's Garment Industry, Child Labor and Urban Sustainability," forthcoming in Saskia Sassen, ed., The Encyclopedia of Urban Sustainability, (UNESCO: 2001); "Globalized Chinese Capital in Central America," with Amy Freedman, in Asian Pacific Perspectives, May 2001; "Campañas transnacionales de protesta y la nueva división internacional de trabajo: Cuestiones de género en el sector maquila," in Apuntes de Investigación, November 2000; and "After the Wars: Cross-Border Organizing in Central America" with Winifred Tate in NACLA: Report on the Americas, Special Issue on Labor, January/February 1999. Her future projects include an examination of consumption practices and discourses of empire, gender and agrobusiness in Central America and South Asia and a critical study of Romanies and discursive formations of "gypsiness." Professor Brooks has a joint appointment with the Department of Women's and Gender Studies.

Sharon Bzostek (Ph.D., Princeton University, 2009) is an associate professor of sociology and Senior Associate Dean of Undergraduate Education at the School of Arts and Sciences. She is a social demographer particularly interested in recent changes in family demography and their consequences for child and family well-being, as well as social disparities in health and health care.

Prior to joining the department, Professor Bzostek was a postdoctoral fellow in the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholars in Health Policy Research Program at Harvard University. She is currently working on projects related to mothers’ re-partnering after a non-marital birth, better understanding survey respondents’ self-rated health, comparing parent and child reports about children's lives, and the effects of mixed health insurance coverage within families on children’s health care access and utilization. Her research has appeared in peer-reviewed journals including Demography, Social Forces, Journal of Marriage and Family, Social Science and Medicine, and Health Affairs.

Joanna Kempner, associate professor in the Department of Sociology at Rutgers University, is an award-winning sociologist of science, medicine, and inequality, and the author of Psychedelic Outlaws: The Movement Revolutionizing Modern Medicine (Hachette Books 2024) and Not Tonight: Migraine and the Politics of Gender and Health (Chicago 2014). Kempner’s research gives voice to those without power and asks challenging questions about how medicine talks about, understands, and makes policies for those it serves. 

Kempner has held visiting positions and fellowships at Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Michigan, and has served on multiple editorial boards and in leadership positions across academia and within headache advocacy. Her research appears in top journals across multiple disciplines, including Science, PLoS Medicine, Neurology, and Social Science & Medicine and is often featured in the media. You can learn more about Joanna Kempner at www.joannakempner.com.

Catherine Lee is associate professor of sociology and faculty associate at the Institute for Health, Health Care Policy, and Aging Research. As a political sociologist, she examines how meanings of race and ethnicity shape social relations and inequalities across three critical sites: immigration; science and medicine; and law and society. Catherine is the author of Fictive Kinship: Family Reunification and the Meaning of Race and Nation in American Immigration (2013, Russell Sage) and co-editor of Genetics and the Unsettled Past: The Collision of DNA, Race, and History (2012, Rutgers University Press). Her current projects include an investigation of the use of DNA testing in family reunification cases in the United States and Europe and of the meaning of diversity in U.S. biomedicine given shifting ethnic and racial demographics and the rise of multiraciality due to increased immigration.

 Air Quality Study

Norah MacKendrick’s research falls within the fields of environmental sociology, medical sociology, gender, food studies, science and technology studies, and consumer studies. From 2020-23 served as Chair of the American Sociological Association’s Section on Environmental Sociology. In 2023, she became co-editor of Rutgers University Press’s award-winning “Nature, Society, and Culture” book series.

MacKendrick is the author of Better Safe Than Sorry: How Consumers Navigate Exposure to Everyday Toxics, which identifies the rise of “precautionary consumption” in the United States. She finds that chemical body burdens are the consequence of decades of regulatory failure to properly assess the health consequences of environmental chemicals. The burden of addressing this failure has fallen to women and mothers who feel responsible for protecting their children from exposure to chemicals, and do so through cooking, grocery shopping, and management of the household. The book reveals how discourses of maternal responsibility and consumer empowerment circulate within the campaigns of environmental health advocacy groups, and as well as through the retail landscape for organic foods and ‘green’ products, particularly Whole Foods Market.

Better Safe Than Sorry won the Best First Book Award from the Association for the Study of Food & Society (2019), and the Allan Schnaiberg Outstanding Publication Award from the Environmental Sociology section of the American Sociological Association (2020).

In her other research, MacKendrick has examined the intersections of risk, individualization, and modern motherhood, as well as the dynamics of non-toxic consumption, “foodscapes” and science activism. Her research has been published in Gender & Society, Signs: The Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Social Science & Medicine, Sociological Forum, Socius, Science Advances, Journal of Consumer Culture, Food, Culture and Society, Contexts, and Gastronomica.

MacKendrick is working on several new projects. One explores the social construction of hormones as risky technologies and substances essential for realizing wellness and selfhood. Another examines air quality and heat stress under climate change. A third, with Dr. Edmée Ballif, examines the normative arguments surrounding the place of plant milks in the diets of children and adults in Switzerland and the United States.

Zakia Salime teaches courses in feminist theory, gender, globalization, contemporary social theory, social movements, postcolonial theory. Salime’s book: Between Feminism and Islam: Human Rights and Sharia Law in Morocco (Minnesota, 2011) illustrates this interplay of global regimes of rights and local discourses by exploring the spaces of encounters of liberal feminism and Islamism in Morocco.  Her co-edited volume Freedom Without Permission: Bodies and Spaces in the Arab Revolutions (Duke, 2016) explores how bodies, subjectivities and memories were constituted and constitutive of sexed and gendered spaces during the North African and Middle Easter Uprisings of 2011. Salime’s current book manuscript explores global extractive modes of governance through the study of land-and-resource-grab in Morocco. The study unpacks the nexus of law, power, gender, and capital through attending to peasant populations' quotidian dealing with the state and its regimes of legality, citizenship, inclusion and exclusion.  Salime publications encompass a wide range of interests including urban youth protests and music, Islamophobia, war and racial politics in the U.S.

My current book manuscript Seeing like a Woman: Land and Extractive Governance in Morocco foregrounds peasant women’s own understanding of the social and cultural transformations taking place in the context of intensified land privatization and extractivist governance. I write these stories by centering women’s daily dwelling to unpack the bureaucratic and legal regimes obstructing their access to land, the words through which they grapple with economic and social change, and the desires, hopes, and pain through which they articulate the present and imagine the future. This project documents these hopes and desires as an integral part of the present history of neoliberal encounters. I understand this present history as messy and traversed with antagonistic meanings of value, place, legality, and gender. My ethnographic fieldwork and research help answering a set of questions: What do we learn about neoliberal encounters by listening to un-schooled, dispossessed yet resourceful rural women? What does women’s mobilization against land and resource privatization tell us about the hasty implementation of development projects, and the slow yet daily penetration of ‘rent’, and circulation of multiscalar capital? What do we learn about the state, its ‘verticality’, or ‘effects’ at this juncture of privatization and protests? What kind of legitimation and reconfiguration of political power takes place when women engage with the capitalist penetration of their local community? What kind of power and authority are strengthen and disrupted?

Kristen W. Springer is Associate Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University (PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2006; MA, Yale University, 2000; MPH, Emory University, 1997; BS, University of California at Santa Cruz).

Professor Springer’s scholarship focuses broadly on gender and health, prioritizing the intersection of social and biological influences. Her current research explores how the anti-transgender legislative climate harms health access for transgender youth, with a particular focus on how youth of color are affected. Other recent areas of research include: 1) experimental studies of biosocial reactions to masculinity threats; 2) conceptual and methodological interventions for how to best research gender and health using biosocial and intersectional frameworks; and 3) quantitative analyses on masculinity ideals, socioeconomic status, marriage, and men’s health. She has published in journals including American Journal of Sociology, American Journal of Public Health, Gender & Society, Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Journal of Marriage and Family, Social Science & Medicine, and Social Science Research. Professor Springer’s research has also been featured in national and international news sources including ABC News, LA Times, The New York Times, US News & World Report, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today. She teaches classes on research methods, family, gender, and biosociology.

Arlene Stein’s research focuses on the intersection of gender, sexuality, culture, and politics. The author or editor of nine books, she received the American Sociological Association’s Simon and Gagnon Award for career contributions to the study of sexualities. She teaches courses on the sociology of gender and sexuality, culture, self and society, and trauma/memory, and writing within and beyond academia. A former director of the Institute for Research on Women at Rutgers, she serves on the graduate faculty of the Department of Women's and Gender Studies.

Her latest book is Unbound: Transgender Men and the Transformation of Identity (Pantheon, 2018). She is also the author of The Stranger Next Door, an ethnography of a Christian conservative campaign against lesbian/gay rights, which explores clashing understandings of religion and sexuality in American culture; it received the Ruth Benedict Book Award. Her book Sex and Sensibility examines generational shifts in lesbian identities. Reluctant Witnesses: Survivors, Descendants, and the Rise of Holocaust Consciousness (Oxford, 2014), looks at how children of survivors became narrators of their parents’ stories of genocide. Going Public: A Guide for Social Scientists (J. Daniels, coauthor), is a guidebook for publicly engaged scholars.