The Sociology Reporter | Spring 2026

Advocating for Our Neighbors: A Conversation with PC Alumni
October 2025

This October, the department hosted the Fall ’25 alumni panel for our, “Sociology in the Real World: Alumni Lecture Series”. The topic for this panel was “Advocating for Our Neighbors”, and we welcomed four alumni who work in Social Work; Meghan O’Connor, Cristy Romero, Molly Helms, and Kristen Rezuke. The alumni shared their experiences, career trajectories, and how sociology intersects with their work every day.

“Reflections Unheard” Documentary Screening
October 2025

Also in October, the department co-sponsored the screening of Reflections Unheard: Black Women in Civil Rights with the Departments of Black Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies. Directed by Nevline Nnaji, the film, “through the personal stories of several former black female Civil Rights activists, unearths the lesser-known story of black women’s political marginalization between the male-dominated Black Power movement, and the predominantly white and middle class Feminist movement during the 1960s and 70s.”

Dr. Joanna Dreby, “How Communities Matter for Surviving the I.C.E. Age”
November 2025

In November, the department welcomed Dr. Joanna Dreby, Professor of Sociology at the University at Albany, SUNY, to give a talk on her newly-published book, Surviving the I.C.E. Age: Children of Immigrants in New York. Dr. Dreby’s research explores family dynamics under conditions of increased globalization, with specific expertise on international migration, gender, and children. In the book, Dr. Dreby draws on interviews with young adults with foreign born parents to better understand what it was like to grow up during a time of heightened U.S. migratory control.

“Forever Coming Out”

Congratulations to Dr. Outlaw, who had a new book come to print on February 19th!
Three of her Sociology alumni students of helped contribute to the coding of the data. “Forever Coming Out” is a book that challenges the persistent myth of a singular coming-out experience and introduces the concept of the “safety dance,” a recurring and complex set of assessments and adjustments LGBTQIA+ individuals engage in when determining whether, and when, to disclose their identity. The notion of the safety dance is based on data and insights from interviews with 69 LGBTQ+ adults’ lived experience of identity disclosure and exposure (“coming out”) in various regions throughout the United States. The book highlights the interaction of social forces and social institutions as critical variables impacting decisions. Ultimately, it provides a way of understanding this ever-present feature in the lives of LGBTQIA+ people through examining their approaches, awareness, assessments, and adjustments to the social scenarios they encounter.

Dr. Miller Article and Award

Congratulations to Dr. Miller, who has been named a 2026-2027 Early Career Fellow with the Work and Family Researchers Network. She also recently published an article entitled “Police Radio Communications as a Measure” with her co-author Stephen L. Morgan.
The article is about how criminal justice research on policing effectiveness is limited by available measures of police activity. This article proposes a new measure – the summed duration of all police radio transmissions per hour, distributed across channels used by an agency to coordinate patrol-related police activity. Based on an analysis of policing in Baltimore, over an interval of 40 months from 2019 through 2022, this new measure has a clear and separable relationship with calls for service, recorded crime incidents, and arrests, as well as sixteen specific policy shocks in response to the COVID pandemic. The measure’s residual error variance across police districts also has an interpretable pattern, lending further support to a claim of construct validity. In conclusion, additional uses of police radio communications to construct measures are discussed, including those that code the spoken content of transmissions. The viability of these more detailed measures will depend on the success of future work to machine-transcribe recorded transmissions in order to generate text corpora.