Check out UConn Today’s recent article “Pop-Up Food Pantry at UConn Stamford Aims to Curb Food Insecurity” featuring Assistant Professor in Residence, Laura Bunyan’s, work with Katharine Vartuli ’23 (CLAS) to provide food to those in need. The pop-up pantry is a hands-on project that came about at the suggestion of colleagues and after talking with organizers of a pantry at Norwalk Community College.
Author: Brereton, Ajalon
UConn Junior Named a Truman Scholar
Congratulations to Irene Soteriou ’23 (CLAS) who has been recently named a Truman Scholar with the help of mentoring from Professor of Sociology, Bradley Wright. Check out the article here.
*Excerpt from Article*
“Working with Dr. Wright was illuminating in that it opened my eyes to the possibility of leading a life of intentionality and purpose without compromising on sustainability,” says Soteriou. “His mentorship motivated me to consider ways in which I could more creatively utilize resources uniquely accessible to me at UConn so as to leave a tangible impact in spaces that hold great meaning to my community, and he showed me that it was feasible to carve out a path towards a long-lasting career that I find deeply fulfilling.”
Nicholas Xenophontos: 2022 SURF Grant
Please join us in congratulating undergraduate Sociology major Nicholas (Niko) Xenophontos and his faculty mentor, Mary Bernstein, on being awarded a SURF grant for his research project entitled:
“Preventing Gun Violence Online: Comparing Social Media Content from the National Rifle Association and Everytown for Gun Safety.”
Darrell Irwin: Russian Disinformation Campaign Targeted Ukraine
Dr. S. Anandhi: The Pandemic of Caste
Bandana Purkayastha: Where We Live
Check out Professor of Sociology and Asian American Studies Bandana Purkayastha on CT’s Public Radio “From Bangladesh to Bengali Harlem and Hartford Stage, a conversation with actor and playwright Alaudin Ullah.”
Noel Cazenave: “Keeping Our Eyes on the Prize”
Check out Professor of Sociology, Noel Cazenave’s, recent talk with the Matrix Center “Keeping Our Eyes on the Prize: Why Racial Justice Activists Must Chart Our Own Course and Not Get Sidetracked into Reacting to the Backlashes of Frightened Democrats and Angry Republicans Like Those Against ‘Defund the Police’ and ‘Critical Race Theory.“
Rianka Roy: “Politics through Precarity”
Christin Munsch: Residential Fellow at CASBS
Jane Pryma- “Technologies of Expertise: Opioids and Pain Management’s Credibility Crisis”
Read Assistant Professor of Sociology Jane Pryma’s recent article titled, “Technologies of Expertise: Opioids and Pain Management’s Credibility Crisis” in The American Sociological Review. Pryma discusses the reasoning for the
*Abstract*
Journalistic accounts of the opioid crisis often paint prescription opioids as the instrument of profit-minded pharmaceutical companies who enlisted pain specialists to overprescribe addictive drugs. Broadening beyond a focus on pharmaceutical power, this article offers a comparative-historical explanation, rooted in inter- and intra-professional dynamics, of the global increase in rates of opioid prescribing. Through archival analysis and in-depth interviews with pain specialists and public-health officials in the United States and France, I explain how and why opioids emerged as the “right tool for the job” of pain relief in the 1980s and 1990s, affecting how pain science is produced, pain management is administered, and a right to pain relief is promised in different national contexts. I argue that opioids, selected and destigmatized as the technology for pain relief, helped establish a global network of pain expertise, linking a fledgling field of pain specialists to the resources of global-health governance, public-health administration, humanitarian organizations, and pharmaceutical companies. I then compare how U.S. and French pain specialists leveraged opioids to strengthen the boundaries of their emergent fields. Pain specialists’ differing degrees of autonomy in each country’s network of pain expertise shaped the extent to which opioids could dominate pain management and lead to crisis. Tracing the relationship between opioids and pain expertise, I show how technologies can drive crises of expert credibility if and when they escape the control of the networked fields that selected them.