Schedule

Conference Schedule

University of Montana
Conference on Undergraduate Research (UMCUR)
April 12, 2013
UC 3^rd Floor

Please view the full PROGRAM BOOKLET for all session times, titles, abstracts, and presenters. 

General Conference Schedule:

Keynote Abstract

This talk explores the possibilities and challenges of conducting ethnographic research on contemporary social issues. The talk draws upon my experience teaching a research/service-learning course about hunger and homelessness for the past four years. Students in this course volunteer at Missoula’s Poverello Center, receive training in qualitative research methods and conduct their own qualitative research into hunger and homelessness in Missoula. I start with a brief introduction to qualitative social research, with an emphasis on participant observation and in-depth interviewing. I then discuss several challenges of this sort of research, including the unpredictability of human subjects, the emotional impact of investigating charged social issues such as homelessness, and the assumptions and biases of researchers. Finally, I introduce some of the promises of qualitative social research, including its potential to give a voice to marginalized members of society, its attention to individual stories and life experiences and its capacity to capture students’ interest and enthusiasm. Throughout the talk I’ll share excerpts from students’ fieldnotes as examples of each of these points.

Daisy Rooks is an Assistant Professor in UM’s Department of Sociology. She earned her Ph.D. in Sociology in 2007 from the University of California, Los Angeles. Dr. Rooks is a practitioner of “public sociology,” a movement to provide useful, accurate, and scientifically rigorous sociological research to policy makers and community leaders. She has published articles on the career trajectories of union organizers and interdisciplinary service learning. Since arriving at UM, Dr. Rooks has conducted research on labor-environmental coalitions in rural areas, media coverage of charter schools, and leadership in union recognition campaigns. She recently completed a book manuscript about activism in the 1990s entitled Venture Activism: Incubating Agents of Change inside American Public Education and Organized Labor.