Profile

I am from Bloomington/Normal, Illinois.  Before arriving at the University of Oregon, I completed bachelor’s and master’s degrees in sociology from Illinois State University.  My overall research interests are in labor, social psychology, culture, inequality, the body and the senses, and food.  My training, teaching, and research experiences are expansive.  So far, I have developed and taught six courses: Work and Occupations, Social Psychology, American Society, Introduction to Sociology, Interaction and Social Order, Sociology of the Family, and Introduction to Sociology.  For my dissertation, I studied the tastemaking world of the specialty coffee industry, where coffee is treated much the same way as wine.  I examined how workers arbitrate highly individual sensory experiences and extend individual taste into collective meaning.  I suggest that these laborers perform “sense work,” which requires guiding customers through a reformulation of their sense-experience that shapes an aesthetic scheme in line with the interests of a firm or industry.  I also demonstrate how this industry relies on a process of inequality by using the body as a boundary to create distinction between those with the ‘right’ palate abilities and those without.  Sense workers naturalize these bodily capacities and the boundaries created by them; this activity has value because it allows consumers to display status through “good taste” which has been consecrated by an industry.  For my next project, I plan on building off of this research by doing a comparison of the specialty coffee industry with other kinds of minimum wage, frontline food service jobs.  I referred to the labor of specialty coffee workers as a kind of “minimum wage connoisseurship,” or a minimum wage job that also provides a form of cultural capital that can unlock other job opportunities in ways that other minimum wage, front-line service laborers may not benefit from.