Faculty Research
Professor Kathleen Jenkins
In "Genetics and Faith: Religious Enchantment through Creative Engagement with Molecular Biology", Sociology Professor Kay Jenkins explores how the U.S. evangelical subculture uses the newer science of molecular biology to legitimate and enchant religious worldview. Responding in part to simplistic understandings of the Intelligent Design movement as recycled creationism, Jenkins develops heuristic types for more complex sociological analysis. These interconnected types - symbolic, disputatious and performative creative engagement - are tools meant to provoke a deeper understanding of the relationship between our contemporary science of molecular biology and religious subcultural efforts. These types contribute to recent theories of religious strength and identity by providing a framework for exploring the complexity and quality of creative engagement efforts in religious subcultures. Jenkins argues that the power of these types to have an impact on audiences lies in sophisticated subcultural levels of discursive engagement through media employment, as well as cursory lay knowledge of molecular biology and a pervasive cultural faith and doubt in scientific advancement. The full article describing Professor Jenkins study appears in Volume 85 of the journal Social Forces.
Professor Graham Ousey
For more than a century, a conventional wisdom in America has held that the level of crime is driven in part by the extent of immigration. Yet, as Sociology Professor Graham Ousey and his colleague Charis Kubrin (George Washington University) note in their recent study, we actually know very little about how over-time changes in immigration actually impact rates of serious crime. Using data from large U.S. cities for the time period from 1980 to 2000, Ousey and Kubrin examine whether changes over time in immigration are in fact related to changes in serious violent and property crime rates. Contrary to common perception and classic criminological theory, their analyses indicate that in cities where immigration increased, crime rates have declined significantly. Moreover, their work suggests that the "more immigration, less crime" relationship occurs because immigration counteracts family instability, a factor consistently linked to weak informal social control. The full description of Ousey and Kubrin's longitudinal study of the immigration-crime relationship is reported in the article "Exploring the Connection between Immigration and Violent Crime Rates in U.S. Cities, 1980-2000", which appears in Volume 56 of the journal Social Problems.
