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Associate Professor, Rutgers University-Camden

Email: mazelis@camden.rutgers.edu
Website: http://mazelis.camden.rutgers.edu
Twitter: @JoanieMazelis

Topics of Expertise: Economic Inequality / Public Policy / TANF & Public Assistance / Transitions: Adolescents to Adulthood

Dr. Mazelis is an Associate Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Criminal Justice, an affiliated scholar at Rutgers-Camden’s Center for Urban Research and Education (CURE), and a Faculty Affiliate at the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (IRP). She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Mazelis specializes in the study of urban poverty and social ties, using qualitative interview methods to explore the meaning and understanding people have of their own situations. Her book, Surviving Poverty: Creating Sustainable Ties Among the Poor (2017, NYU Press), is based on her research in Philadelphia and demonstrates the importance of non-kin social ties that last. She is working with Arielle Kuperberg on a longitudinal, mixed methods, NSF-funded research project on student loan debt, the transition to adulthood, and the persistence of inequality.

Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Email: akuperbe@umbc.edu
Website: https://sites.google.com/site/arielletk/
Twitter: @atkuperberg

Topics of Expertise:
Marriage, Cohabitation & Committed Relationships / Couples Conflict, Separation & Divorce / Division of Labor in Families / Economic Inequality / Gender & Sexuality / History & Trends on Gender, Marriage & Family Life / Parenthood: Motherhood/Fatherhood / Singles & Dating / Transitions: Adolescents to Adulthood / Work & Family

As a millennial generation sociologist, Professor Kuperberg’s research studies cutting edge topics related to social change in the family, gender and sexuality in her generation, such as ‘opting out’, cohabitation, college hookups, academic motherhood, and student loans.

Her research generally grapples with three interests: First, why don’t more women ‘have it all,’ meaning a highly successful career, a happy marriage with a spouse living in the same household, and children? Related to this, she has published journal articles examining occupational segregation, motherhood in academia, stay-at-home moms and dads, and the transition from cohabitation to traditional marriage, as explanations for the gender pay gap.

Second, she is interested in romantic and sexual relationships, who enters them, how they have changed over time, and how they affect behavior. She famously discovered that cohabitation does not cause divorce (but the younger ages of cohabitors increases their chance of divorce), and has written about the history of premarital cohabitation. She has also published several articles related to college hookups, dating, and romantic relationships, including articles on hookup risk-taking, motivations, which types of students are more likely to engage in which type of relationships, and same-sex hookups among college students identifying as heterosexual. Her research has also examined entrance into BDSM sexual activity, and Black women’s sexuality.

Finally, her ongoing research examines issues of student loan debt, family support in college, and transitions out of college and into young adulthood. Her research has examined the effect of student loan debt on family formation, mental health, and physical health; help to and from families in paying for college and help after graduation for students with and without loans; and how student parents pay for college. Related research has also examined which students were more likely to draw upon family support by moving home during the COVID pandemic.

Dr. Kuperberg’s research primarily uses analyses of large datasets and systematic content analysis of the media, and an economic sociological and feminist theoretical framework. She has also collected several original survey datasets, and has collaborated to write mixed-methods research.  Her work has been published in leading sociology and interdisciplinary journals, including Social Forces, Socius, Journal of Marriage and Family, Archives of Sexual Behavior, Journal of Sex Research, and Gender & Society.

Professor of Sociology, Whitman College

Phone: 509-527-4952
Email: janninmy@whitman.edu

Topics of Expertise: Children / Gender & Sexuality / Parenthood: Motherhood/Fatherhood / Work & Family

Michelle Janning is Professor of Sociology and The Raymond and Elsie Gipson DeBurgh Chair of Social Science. In addition to introductory courses and thesis advising, she teaches courses in the areas of family, gender, childhood, community-based research, human-centered design and education.

Professor Janning’s research focuses on the intersection between social roles and relationships and the spaces and objects of everyday life. In addition to her frequent public speaking and applied consulting projects, she has done interdisciplinary research on how family roles connect with home and neighborhood design, the role of digital and physical objects and spaces on intimate relationships, the impacts of COVID-19 on families and schools, and the social meaning of vacation homes and investment properties in changing conceptions of the family.

She has written or edited several books, including The Stuff of Family Life: How our Homes Reflect our Lives (2017), Love Letters: Saving Romance in the Digital Age (2018), and Contemporary Parenting and Parenthood: From News Headlines to New Research (2019). She is a frequent contributor to blog posts and news stories about contemporary family issues, and has been featured in stories from NBC News, BBC, NPR, PBS, Christian Science Monitor, The Atlantic, Cosmopolitan, Parents.com, Vox, Real Simple, and The New York Times. Michelle has received a Fulbright for teaching and assessment projects with DIS-Study Abroad in Copenhagen, Denmark, where she has also taught courses in family and childhood studies in the Scandinavian context.

Associate Professor of Family, Health, and Policy in the Department of Family and Consumer Studies at the University of Utah

Email:
daniel.carlson@fcs.utah.edu

Topics of Expertise:
Cohabitation, Committed Relationships & Marriage / Division of Labor in Families / Feminism & Families / Gender & Sexuality / Health & Illness / History & Trends on Gender, Marriage & Family Life / Marriage & Divorce / Race, Ethnicity & Culture / Transition – Adolescents to Adulthood / Work & Family

Daniel Carlson is an associate professor of Family, Health, and Policy in the Department of Family and Consumer Studies at the University of Utah. His research focuses, generally, on the causes and consequences of variation in family formation and family processes. To date, this overarching focus has produced three streams of research.

The first stream of research involves understanding the health consequences of shifts in family formation patterns during the second demographic transition. Specifically, Dr. Carlson examines the prevalence and mental health consequences of discrepancies between individuals’ expectations for family formation and their actual experiences.

The second research stream explores race/ethnic and socioeconomic differences in family formation experiences and orientations and the consequence of these for well-being and health disparities.

The final stream of research examines the causes and consequences of the gendered division of labor in families and shifts in these domains across cohorts.

Dr. Carlson’s research findings have been published in outlets such as Journal of Marriage and Family, Journal of Family Issues, Social Science & Medicine, and Journal of Youth and Adolescence and have earned me the Graduate Student Paper Award from the American Sociological Association Section on Aging and the Life Course (2007; 2010) and the Outstanding Graduate Student/New Professional Award from the National Council on Family Relations (2011). Additionally, my research has been featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, Daily Telegraph, the Independent, and Time magazine.

Willa Cather Professor of Communication Studies Emerita, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Phone: (402) 540-8414
Email: dbraithwaite@unl.edu
Topics of Expertise:
Cohabitation, Committed Relationships & Marriage / Couples Conflict, Separation & Divorce / Step-Families

Dawn O. Braithwaite is a Willa Cather Professor of Communication Studies Emerita at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She is a specialist in interpersonal and family communication, studying how people in personal and family relationships interact and negotiate family change and challenges in understudied and changing families, communication rituals, and dialectics of relating in stepfamilies, among voluntary kin, and by family kinkeepers. Her early work focused on communication of people with disabilities. Dr. Braithwaite’s research expertise is centered in interpretive qualitative methodologies. Dr. Braithwaite has authored over 150 articles and is co-author or co-editor of five books including Family Communication: Cohesion and Change, Engaging Theories in Family Communication. She is a Distinguished Scholar of the National Communication Association and the  Western States Communication Association and was President of both NCA and WSCA.  Dr. Braithwaite received the National Communication Association’s Brommel Award for Outstanding Contributions in Family Communication, the division’s distinguished book award (which is now named after her), the UNL College of Arts & Sciences Award for Outstanding Research in Social Science and the university’s James O’Hanlon Academic Leader Award.