Research interests: The change-making world of cultural politics, specifically with practical implications for changing symbolic politics, addressing structural power, and realizing social justice; applied and public sociology; structural inequality and social policy; civic studies and community engagement; class, race, gender, and intersectionality; education; community engagement.
Past work:
- Navigating the Path to Presence: Ideology, Politics, and the Campaign for Gender Balanced Boards and Commissions in Iowa From 1986 through 1988, Iowa adopted and strengthened a gender balance law that required men and women be equally represented on state boards and commissions. In 2009, Iowa extended this law to also require its counties, municipalities, and school districts to gender balance their boards and commissions. Iowa’s law remains unique in the United States. Through archival research and interviews, my research investigates how advocates navigated the ideological landscape associated with this policy issue. My research unveils the mechanisms that substantially deradicalized gender balance in Iowa, enabling its passage and shifting Iowans’ perceptions of gender, governance, and affirmative action—disembedding gender segregation, normatizing and institutionalizing gendered representation practices, and prioritizing an ideology of good governance. Based on my findings and analyses, I argue for reconceptualizing ideology through navigation theory—actors simultaneously hold multiple complementary and competing ideologies and must negotiate how these ideologies are (de)activated, (de)prioritized, and interpreted and applied to the issue under consideration. In Iowa, advocates employed collective action frame management to facilitate and steer this navigation such that a majority of legislators voted for and governors signed these affirmative action legislation.
- Missing Structure: A Critical Content Analysis of the Olweus Bullying Prevention Program (2018)
School bullying is dominantly understood as an individualistic phenomenon, overlooking the sociostructural environment that creates and maintains it. A critical content analysis reveals that the Olweus Bullying Prevention Program is similarly lacking. The programme labels students as bullies and victims, ascribes these groups’ particular character traits, sidelines issues of bias and at times reproduces norms that foster bullying. The programme hyperfocuses on real‐time manifestations of bullying incidents, attempting to end bullying through universal monitoring of students and student compliance with anti‐bullying rules. It is argued that efforts to reduce school bullying should address both its individualistic and structural determinants. - Democratic governance and civic health in Newark, Delaware: A case study (2010)
Local governments should use democratic governance to enhance a community’s problem-solving capacity and civic health. Strategically using democratic governance tools and a systematic shift toward a democratic framework of governance would enhance any community’s ability to accomplish its goals. This article offers a case study of Newark, Delaware. Newark’s civic health is evaluated through a survey administered to a cross section of stakeholders in the community. Democratic governance techniques that could help Newark capitalize on its strengths and address its growing edges are discussed. - Democratic Institutions Create Civic Health: How local jurisdictions can enhance their problem-solving capacities through inclusive governance, including a case study of Newark, Delaware (2009, MPA analytical paper)
Download here: Temko.DemocraticGovernanceCivicHealth.2009
Here’s a newspaper article about my study: Robin Brown’s News Journal article
Research in progress:
- Communities transitioning from gender-specific to gender-inclusive events
As U.S. society undergoes cultural shifts regarding its perceptions and evaluations of gender identity, gender expression, and family diversity, many local communities (city governments, school districts, PTAs, etc.) have begun to rebrand and remake gendered events into more inclusive ones (e.g. a Father-Daughter Dance becoming a Family Dance). This research project explores this issue. What are the problems with gender-specific community events that communities that have considered or made these changes are trying to address? What motivated these communities to make these changes? What was the conversation like around making these changes, both before the change and after its implementation? What was the result of these changes? In what ways did they change the events or community? What information, best practices, or other lessons learned from communities that have gone through these changes should communities that still sponsor gender-specific events be aware of? - Sociology of Drag
What (was) and is drag? What is its purpose? How does it interact with the social world? To what extent and in what ways is drag a liberatory force? An art form that legitimates inequality? This research aims to enable both the casual and intensive drag consumer to engage with drag with more depth and with a critical understanding of its context, diversity, and often subversive utility.
Writing in progress:
- School Inclusion, Power, and the Interplay of Structure and Agency: An empirical test of three-dimensional and de-faced power theories
This paper seeks to resolve Steven Lukes and Clarissa Hayward’s argument that power should respectively be conceived as agential versus structural. My fieldwork at Mitchell Primary School demonstrates that understanding how power impacts school inclusion outcomes requires integrating the two theoretical approaches. Educators and students at Mitchell were structurally constrained and enabled, but they also exercised agency in how they navigated these institutional boundaries. Not only are both structural and agential conceptions of power valid, considering their interplay moves social analyses forward. At Mitchell, teachers’ otherwise frequent metacognitive talk evaporated when their inclusion-oriented practices were more distant from institutional norms.
- Utilizing Stakeholders in Policy Development and Administration: Utility, Power, Legitimacy
Public policy are laws and programs instituted to benefit society. Those affected by specific policies are said to have a stake in the policy and are therefore called stakeholders. (Stakeholder actually comes from business literature and is presented in contrast to stockholders). As policymakers develop and implement policies, they sometimes engage stakeholders in the policy making process. There are different techniques for stakeholder management, some of which include determining which stakeholders are “legitimate” stakeholders as well as their level of “power.”Knowing the extent to which stakeholder techniques are used in public policy is important to understanding how policies and regulations are created. The extent to which and method within which notions of legitimacy and power are incorporated into a stakeholder analysis can also have important implications for policy outcomes. The purpose of this study is to roughly ascertain the extent to which state policy makers and deliberative democracy policy practitioners are using stakeholder techniques, as well as to get a general picture of how they are using these techniques. The study is also intended to identify thoughtful practices regarding how to address stakeholders with high levels of legitimacy but low levels of power and stakeholders with low levels of legitimacy but high levels of power. I am currently collecting survey responses from policy staff from all 50 states and major municipalities across the United States, in the areas of: gubernatorial/mayoral offices, environmental departments, transportation departments, health departments, education departments, and land use departments. - Who cares about public investment in childcare?
For the majority of U.S.-American children five and under, all available parents are employed, yet childcare is often lacking in quality, affordability, and accessibility, particularly for disadvantaged parents. Who supports public investment in childcare will impact its political success. This paper uses General Social Survey data to explore demographic variation in support for increased public investment in childcare, and whether this variation is attributable to ideological and/or positional determinants. Childcare is often thought of as a women’s issue. Women are more likely than men to favor increased childcare assistance spending, though they are not more likely to support childcare being funded primarily by the government/public funds or employers. Through multivariate logistic regression analysis, I demonstrate that variation based on gender, as well as parent status, are explained by age, family income, and race in a reduced positional model, as well as ideology in the full model. Childcare support variation is positional, primarily due to class. Women and single parents’ increased support for childcare investment is fully explained by their comparative disadvantage. Liberals and black respondents, regardless of class, are more likely to support public investment. This lends support to ideological determinism, though both demographic groups still primarily support family being the main source of childcare funding. Structural disadvantage entails experiences that can challenge dominant ideologies; support for public investment in childcare comes most from those who need childcare assistance. These individuals have the least resources, including political capital; this in turn privileges the status quo and reproduces structural inequality.