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Current Research Activities:
Dr. Ross Haenfler recently submitted a paper on "lifestyle movements" with Brett Johnson and Ellis Jones based upon their study of voluntary simplicity and social responsibility movements. He also finished a book chapter called "Sociology and Social Change" about the potential for using the sociological imagination to create a more just and sustainable world. Ross is also putting the final touches on a new book about a variety of youth subcultures for Oxford University Press. Ross Haenfler recently presented his research on both to the Louisiana State University and Linfield College sociology departments.

Dr. Kirk Johnson is preparing a discourse analysis of interjournalistic conversations during television reports about African Americans during hurricane Katrina. He is working with Dr. John Sonnett and Dr. Mark Dolan (Journalism) on a comparative analysis of news coverage of Katrina in mainstream and black-owned newspapers in three U.S. cities. Another of Dr. Johnson’s current projects involves working with Dr. Laura Johnson (Psychology) to plan a study on the correlates of political awareness/activism among African American youth.

Dr. Elise Lake is currently working on projects in two areas. For the first project, which examines emergence of the “thin ideal” as the standard for health and beauty, she has been examining the pages of Good Housekeeping to track trends and changes in dietary advice dispensed over the last century. Her paper, “Whatever Happened to Embonpoint? Representations of Diet and Body Ideals in Good Housekeeping Magazine, 1901-1931” looks at the ways in which health and fashion advice, as well as advertising, increasingly promoted the “thin ideal” of feminine beauty while disparaging the Victorian ideal of “embonpoint” (pleasing plumpness). Such “prescriptive popular literature” reveals changing notions regarding women’s roles, and shifts in attitudes toward health and nutrition, physical appearance, fashion, and the role of governmental and other “experts” in dispensing nutritional and weight advice. The second project is a collaboration with Dr. Gary Long on a book, More Than Southern Grotesque: A Sociological Take on Harry Crews. The book, a sociological interpretation of the fiction, essays, and autobiography of Southern writer Harry Crews, explores Crews’s critique of contemporary America. Dr. Long is also preparing to launch the first issue of Alabama-Mississippi Online Sociological Review.

In the summer of 2005, Dr. Matthew Murray began an ongoing archaeological project in a portion of the Loess Hills of Lower Bavaria, Germany, between the Danube and Isar rivers. Six field seasons have so far been completed during the late winter, late spring and early summer, and late fall. The project examines long-term prehistoric and early historic occupation (ca. 8000 to 1800 years ago) of the region, and Dr. Murray also uses fieldwork to study methodological issues such as formation and analysis of surface collections and interpretation of “folk landscapes.” As part of the project, University of Mississippi anthropology students have an opportunity to conduct original fieldwork in Central Europe. Dr. Murray presents results of this project at national and international conferences. Aspects of the project were published in Landscape Ideologies, edited by Thomas Maier, and will be published in a forthcoming monograph by the Polish Academy of Sciences (see below).

Dr. John Sonnett is revising and extending his dissertation research on media representations of climate change. This work includes a paper examining discourses of risk in different types of magazines and journals and a second which compares the framing of climate issues over time in newspapers from the United States and United Kingdom. Dr. Sonnett is also collaborating with Dr. Kirk Johnson and Dr. Mark Dolan on a series of papers examining news coverage of African Americans during and after the Hurricane Katrina crisis, including an analysis of visuals and speaking roles in television coverage and the construction of disaster narratives.

Dr. Kirsten Dellinger is currently involved with two research projects that have distinct areas of focus: catfish and Katrina. The first project is an on-going ethnographic and in-depth interview study of the work dynamics in the catfish industry. She will present some of this work on a panel at the ASA meetings in San Francisco (August 2009) and is currently working on a chapter that will be part of the "Gender & Sexuality in the Workplace" volume in the"Research in the Sociology of Work" series. The second project involves in-depth interviews with social science researchers who conducted research on the Mississippi Gulf Coast following Katrina. Dr. Dellinger and another sociologist from the University of Southern Mississippi, Ann Marie Kinnell, are interested in understanding the subjective experiences and ethical dilemmas of doing research in a disaster area. They will present a paper at the upcoming Southern Sociological Society meetings in New Orleans (April 1-4, 2009) entitled, "Both Counting and Caring: Negotiating Survey Research After Katrina." In addition to these projects, I have also been collaborating with my colleagues Patti Giuffre (Texas State University) and Christine Williams (University of Texas at Austin) on two articles that address the dynamics of "gay friendly" workplaces. My recent articles are listed below.

Dr. Minjoo Oh is currently completing two articles that examine the issues of globalization and culture. The first examines theoretical issues related to the international controversies surrounding the consumption of dog-meat in East Asia. The other, explores the popular culture phenomenon of “Hallyu” (the “Korean wave”).

Dr. Robbie Ethridge is currently working on an edited volume under contract by the University of Nebraska entitled Mapping the Mississippian Shatter Zone: The European Invasion and Regional Instability in the American South and a monograph under contract with the University of North Carolina Press tentatively titled From Chicaza to Chickasaw: The Indian Slave Trade and the Transformation of a Southeastern Indian Society.  Both projects are part of Dr. Ethridge’s current investigation of the collapse of the pre-contact Mississippian chiefdoms following the European invasion and the reorganization of Native social groups in the ensuing decades.  In particular, Dr. Ethridge’s work explores the involvement of Southeastern Indian groups in the colonial commercial trade in Indian slaves, and uses the Chickasaws as a case study of a group that early on opted to become trading partners with Europeans in the trafficking of Indian slaves.

Dr. Jeff Jackson is currently conducting an in-depth analysis of statistics on official development aid flows to developing countries (based on OECD data) in order to examine the global history of nation-building and the emergent transnational state.  This data analysis, which tracks official aid flows to all recipient nations from 1960-2003, will make up a significant portion of a larger historical analysis of nation building since World War II that is the subject of his next book that he is preparing for Johns Hopkins University Press,  “The Rise of the Globalizers:  Global Aid Flows and the Birth of World Government, 1960-2010”.

Dr. Gabriel Wrobel is a co-director of the Caves Branch Archaeological Survey project and supervises excavations in the Caves Branch River Valley in Central Belize focused on a variety of sites, including ritual rockshelters and caves, a large urban ceremonial center and its surrounding settlement zone. This research is conducted as part of a summer archaeological fieldschool through the University of Mississippi Study Abroad program. The excavations and analyses conducted so far show that Ancient Maya communities used the cave sites for various ceremonial and mortuary purposes over a span of approximately 2000 years. The changes over time in the rituals performed at the rural rockshelters and caves closely parallel other transitions evident at Deep Valley, as well as at other larger urban ceremonial centers throughout the Maya region. For this reason, the sites in the Caves Branch Valley are important in characterizing the effects of large-scale sociopolitical transformations on ancient Maya communities. The data derived from small rural agrarian contexts will provide a different perspective than that of the larger urban centers at which most archaeological investigations are focused. Dr. Wrobel has also begun to work with Jay Johnson and members of the Mississippi Department of Archives an History at the Carson Mounds site.

Dr. Ahmet Yukleyen is currently conducting research on Wahhabi-Salafism in Europe. This is a puritanical and literalist Islamic movement that is growing particularly among the Muslim youth. He compares Moroccan and Turkish Islamic organizations in the Netherlands and Germany to examine the rise of this movement.

Books by Faculty

	Haenfler, Ross. 2007, The Better World Handbook: Small Changes That Make a Big Difference, New Society Publishers, coauthored with Ellis Jones and Brett Johnson.
	Ethridge, Robbie & Pluckhahn, Thomas J. eds.  2006.  Light on the Path: The Anthropology and History of the Southeastern Indians. University of Alabama Press
	Creek Country: The Creek Indians and Their World, University of North Carolina Press, 2003.
	The Transformation of the Southeastern Indians, 1540-1760, co-edited with Charles Hudson, University Press of Mississippi, 2002.
	Haenfler, Ross. 2006. Straight Edge: Clean Living Youth, Hardcore Punk, and Social Change. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
	Jackson, Jeffrey T.  2005.  The Globalizers:  Development Workers in Action.  Baltimore:  The Johns Hopkins University Press. (2007 Paperback)
	Johnson, Jay K. ed.  2006.  Remote Sensing in Archeology:  An Explicitly North American Perspective.  University of Alabama Press.
	Sisson, Ed.  2005.  Tlacuilolli; Style and Contents of the Mexican Pictorial Manuscripts with a Catalog of the Borgia Group. University of Oklahoma Press.   ]
Secularism, Democracy and Islam in Europe: Muslims in France, Germany, and the Netherlands, co-authored with Ahmet T. Kuru, Turkish Economic and Social Research Foundation (TESEV) Istanbul, February, 2006.

Forthcoming Books

Recent Faculty Articles / Book Chapters
Giuffre, Patti, Kirsten Dellinger, and Christine L. Williams. 2008. “No retribution for being gay?: Inequality in Gay- Friendly Workplaces.” Sociological Spectrum 28: 1-24.

Kinnell, Ann Marie and Kirsten Dellinger. 2007. “Challenges of Collecting Survey Data on the Mississippi Gulf Coast After Hurricane Katrina: An In-depth Interview Study of Survey Team Members,” Journal of the Mississippi Academy of Sciences (October).

Schulenberg, Stefan E., Kirsten Dellinger, Ann Marie K. Kinnell, David A.Swanson, Mark V. Van Boening, Richard, G. Forgette. 2007. "Psychologists and Hurricane Katrina: Becoming Involved in Natural Disaster Response Through Training, Education, and Research," Training and Education in Professional Psychology, Vol 1 (4).

Yukleyen, Ahmet. “Sufism and Islamic groups in Contemporary Turkey” in The Cambridge History of Turkey Volume 4, Resat Kasaba ed., Cambridge University Press, 2007

Yukleyen, Ahmet. Entries on “Balkan Muslims”, “Tablighi Movement”, “Secularism,” and “Da’wa”, Encyclopedia of Islam in the United States, in Jocelyne Cesari ed., Greenwood Press, 2007.

Yukleyen, Ahmet. “Islamophobia and Evangelicals in the United States” in Islamophobia and Anti-Islamism in the West, (in Turkish) Kadir Canatan and Ozcan Hidir ed., Eskiyeni Yayinlari, 2007

Yukleyen, Ahmet. “Islamic Civil Society and Social Capital in Turkey: The Gulen Community” in Diversity Management in Asia: A Research Companion, Mustafa Ozbilgin and Jawad Syed (eds.) Edward Elgar Publishing (2008): Cheltenham and New York

Oh, Minjoo. 2009 (forthcoming). “Fast Food Frontiers: I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore” in Studies in Popular Culture.

Oh, Minjoo and Jorge Arditi. 2009. “Self-Cultivation as Microphysics of Reverence: Towards a Foucaudian Understanding of Korean Culture” in Philosophy East and West (January).

Oh, Min-Joo and Hyun Park. 2008. “Does Culture Matter for Economic Growth?” in Oughtopia: The Journal of Social Paradigm Studies (Vol. 23, #1, pp. 5-36)

Oh, Minjoo and Elise Lake. 2006. “Sociology of Food.” The Handbook of 21st century Sociology. Sage Publications.

Johnson, Kirk A. and Dixon, Travis L. (2008). Change and the Illusion of Change: Evolving Portrayals of Crime News and Blacks in a Major Market. Howard Journal of Communications, 19: 1-19.

Jackson, Jeffrey T. and Dellinger, Kirsten A. 2007. "Volunteer Voices: Making Sense of Our Trip to the Mississippi Gulf Coast After Katrina," in Narrating the Storm: Sociological Stories of Hurricane Katrina, Danielle A. Hidalgo and Kristen Barber, eds. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Wrobel, Gabriel (2007) Issues Related to Determining Burial Chronology by Fluoride Analysis of Bone from the Maya Archaeological Site of Chau Hiix, Belize. Archaeometry 49(4): 699-711.

Danforth, Marie Elaine, Keith P. Jacobi, Gabriel D. Wrobel, and Sarah Glassman (2007) Health and the Transition to Horticulture in the South Central U.S. In Ancient Health: The Skeletal Indicators of Economic and Political Intensification, edited by M. N. Cohen and G. Crane-Kramer, pp.65-79. Gainesville: University of Florida Press.

Wrobel, Gabriel, James Tyler, and Jessica Hardy (2007) Rockshelter Excavations in the Caves Branch River Valley. Research Reports in Belizean Archaeology, Vol. 4, edited by John Morris and Jaime Awe, pp. 187-196. National Institute of Culture and History, Belmopan, BZ.

Ethridge, Robbie.  2006.  "Raiding the Remains: Indian Slave Traders and the Collapse of the Southeastern Chiefdoms," in Light on the Path: The Anthropology and History of the Southeastern Indians edited by Thomas J. Pluckhahn and Robbie Ethridge, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.

Murray, Matthew L.  2006.  Place Names and Folk Landscapes in Southern Germany as Archaeological Resources. In Landscape Ideologies, edited by Thomas Maier, pp. 155-173. Archaeolingua, Budapest.

Sonnett, John, Barbara J. Morehouse, Thomas D. Finger, Gregg Garfin, and Nicholas Rattray. 2006. “Drought and Declining Reservoirs: Comparing Media Discourse in Arizona and New Mexico, 2002-2004.” Global Environmental Change, vol. 16, no. 1, pp. 95-113.

Marie Elaine Danforth, Keith P Jacobi and Gabriel D Wrobel.  2006.  Health and the Transition to Agriculture in the Deep South: Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee.   In Ancient Health:  The Skeletal Indicators of Economic and Political Intensification, edited by Mark N. Cohen and Gillian Kramer-Crane. Gainesville: University of Florida Press.

Forthcoming Faculty Articles / Chapters
Williams, Christine, Patti Giuffre, and Kirsten Dellinger. "The Gay Friendly Closet," Sexual Research and Social Policy. (Forthcoming).

Yukleyen, Ahmet. “State Policies and Islam in Europe: Milli Görüş in Germany and the Netherlands” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 2008, forthcoming.

Metcalfe, Jessica Z., Christine D. White, Fred J. Longstaffe, Gabriel Wrobel, and Della Collins Cook (in press) Hierarchies and Heterarchies of Food Consumption: Stable Isotope Evidence from Chau Hiix and the Northern Belize Region. To appear in Latin American Antiquity.

Danforth, Marie Elaine, Gabriel Wrobel, David Swanson, and Carl Armstrong (in press) A Model Growth Curve for Juvenile Age Estimation Using Diaphyseal Long Bone Lengths among Ancient Maya Populations. To appear in Latin American Antiquity.

Murray, Matthew. Forthcoming. “Revealing a Landscape ‘Between:’ The Archaeological Study of a Rural Micro-Region in Southeastern Germany” in Human Impact on Lowland, Upland and Mountain Geosystems – Similarities and Differences, edited by Bartłomiej Szmoniewski. Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw.

Ross Haenfler, Johnson, Brett, and Ellis Jones. 2010. “Sociology and Social Change: Creating a More Just and Sustainable World.” In Patricia A. Adler and Peter Adler (eds.). 2010. Sociological Odyssey: Contemporary Readings in Introductory Sociology. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Cengage.

Ethridge, Robbie. " Measuring Chickasaw Responses to a Changing Frontier During the Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Century Using Ethnohistory and the Restudy of Archived Site Collections." Co-authored with Jay K. Johnson, John W. O Hear, Brad R. Lieb, Susan L. Scott, and H. Edwin Jackson. Southeastern Archaeology, accepted.

Ethridge, Robbie. "On Interpreting Cofitechequi." Co-authored with Charles Hudson, Robin Beck, Chester DePratter, and John Worth. Ethnohistory, in press.

Ford, Janet. Forthcoming. “Delta Dawn: An Ethnographic Account of Martha’s Early Work in the Delta.” Accepted for publication of papers in honor of Martha Rolingson. Arkansas Archeologist.

Danforth, Marie Elaine, Gabriel D. Wrobel, Carl Armstrong.  "A Model Growth Curve for Juvenile Age Estimation Using Diaphyseal Long Bone Lengths Among Ancient Maya Populations."  To be published in Latin American Antiquity.

Wrobel, Gabriel.  Forthcoming.  “Determining Burial Chronology by Fluoride Analysis of Bone from the Maya Archaeological Site of Chau Hiix, Belize.” Archaeometry.