Elizabeth Cherry

Food for Thought, Thought for Food: Consumption, Identity, and Ethnography:

Movements associated with lifestyle and consumption politics have gained increasing visibility in society and in sociological research, but scholars’ methodological insights for studying these issues have lagged behind. How might the lifestyles and consumption practices of researchers themselves shape data collection, and how might these movements affect researchers? The authors offer a collaborative, reflexive analysis of their experiences conducting fieldwork on three different consumption movements centered on food production. Building on feminist and symbolic interactionist methodological literature, they show how their own “consumption identities” affected their data collection, analyses, and written work. The authors also discuss how conducting research on consumption and lifestyle movements may also affect researchers’ own identities and practices. They conclude by discussing how their process of “collaborative reflexivity” brings new insight into feminist methodological concerns for reflexivity.

Using Structured Reading Groups to Facilitate Deep Learning.

Two significant challenges in teaching college courses are getting students to complete the readings and, beyond that, having them engage in deep reading. We have developed a specific group work format within our courses to facilitate both deep reading and active discussion of course material. Early in the semester, students are assigned to their small groups and a set of rotating group roles: discussion leader, passage master, devil’s advocate, creative connector, and reporter. Students meet with their group regularly in class throughout the semester. Before each group meeting, they are to complete a set of readings and a reading preparation sheet for their given reading group role. In this article, we outline how to implement these groups, the benefits of them, and variations to the standard format. We also present quantitative and qualitative student evaluations of this group work format demonstrating the success of this teaching technique.

“The Pig That Therefore I Am” Visual Art and Animal Activism

How does visual art affect the work of social movements? In her photography series “The Pig That Therefore I Am,” artist Miru Kim photographs her nude body alongside pigs in factory farms and in farm sanctuaries. Using Kim’s photographs, her artist’s statement, and her artist talk from her exhibit opening, I argue that Kim’s work, and several other visual artists’ work, mirrors the work of animal rights activists as they bring to light typically invisible animal practices, subvert typical power relations regarding “the gaze,” and shift symbolic boundaries between humans and animals. By making the invisible visible, and by highlighting symbolic boundaries between humans and animals, I show how visual art plays a significant role in viewers’ initial awareness of and potential mobilization into the animal rights movement. I argue that these roles hold true for art created explicitly for animal rights purposes, as well as art created without such a political goal in mind. In doing so, this article contributes to our broader understanding of the relationship between art and social movements.

Process Memos: Facilitating Dialogues about Writing between Students and Instructors.

We have created a new teaching tool—process memos—to improve student writing. Process memos are guided reflections submitted with scaffolded assignments that facilitate a written dialogue between students and instructors about the process of writing. Within these memos, students critically assess available teaching tools, discuss their writing processes, pose lingering questions about the assignment, identify weaknesses in their writing, and give advice to future students. Using process memos (N = 240) collected in spring 2014, we outline the benefits of process memos, including how this tool establishes a productive dialogue about writing and increases self-reflection among both students and instructors.

Animals, Violence Toward

Humans inflict violence upon animals in numerous ways, both deliberately and inadvertently. Purposeful cruelty towards animals is most likely to be seen as violent. But the “normal” use of animals for food, clothing, entertainment, and testing can also be considered violence towards animals. Human development may also threaten animal habitats, causing extinction or endangerment of certain species. Activists work to protect animals from these various forms of violence, which they consider to be effects of “speciesism.”

Birding, Citizen Science, and Wildlife Conservation in Sociological Perspective

Sociological research on wildlife typically looks at how nonhuman animals in the wild are hunted, poached, or captured for entertainment, or how they play a symbolic role in people’s lives. Within sociology, little research exists on how people appreciate nonhuman animals in the wild, and how people contribute to wildlife conservation. I explore birding-related citizen science projects in the US . Citizen science refers to scientific projects carried out by amateurs. Literature on citizen science focuses on the perspective of professional scientists, with the assumption that only professional scientists are concerned with the quality of data from citizen science projects. The research showed birders share this skepticism, but they still find satisfaction in participating in citizen science projects. This paper contributes to sociological understandings of wildlife conservation by showing how birders’ participation in citizen science projects helps professional scientists study environmental problems such as climate change and its effects on wildlife.