Emily Mason
Entry Cohort: Fall 2018 | She/Her/Hers
EDUCATION:
Emily earned an MA in Sociology from the University of New Hampshire in 2018 and a second MA here at UConn in 2021. She also earned UConn’s Graduate Certificate in College Instruction in 2021. She received UConn’s Graduate Certificate in Nonprofit Management in 2022. She is expected to earn her PhD in 2025.
RESEARCH INTERESTS:
Organizations and work; non-profit organizations; qualitative research methods; pedagogy; family; gender; sexualities; culture; humor; boundary maintenance; semiotics.
CURRENT RESEARCH:
For her MA thesis, Emily studied stand-up comedians to explore how they imagine audiences and negotiate humor boundaries accordingly. Her work addresses under what circumstances comedians will make exceptions to comedic boundaries they purport to hold. It elucidates how the self-policing of what comics “can” and “can’t” joke about can be illusory. She is currently working on a manuscript about the self-protective strategies carried out by individuals who produce moralized content for public consumption. It especially explores polysemic humor, lines of acceptability, and fear of being “cancelled.”
Her PhD work is an interrogation of the philanthropic sector and its turn toward an increasingly relational model of giving. As a seasoned non-profit development professional, Emily’s dissertation pulls from lived experience in the field alongside data she collected through interviews with grantmaking professionals to explore the ever-changing nature of the third sector. She is particularly interested in the uptick in collaborative endeavors like trust-based philanthropy and participatory grantmaking. Her work also looks at the institutionalization of best practices, formalization of grant decision-making processes, and formation of coalitions to promote systems-level change. Emily is eager to rejoin the non-profit sector full time once she completes her PhD research.
MAJOR ADVISOR:
Ruth Braunstein
COMMITTEE:
Ruth Braunstein, Mary Bernstein, Simon Yamawaki Shachter, and Andrew Deener
