Social Sciences Department Newsletter 2025
Previous Newsletter-(https://socialsciences.calpoly.edu/newsletter/2023)
Message from the Chair
Dr. Joan Meyers
Welcome to the Department of Social Sciences! Ten years ago, the department graduated its first students in designated sociology and anthropology/geography majors rather than simply “Social Sciences,” but was still struggling to provide enough course offerings after years of Great Recession hiring freezes. Now we are home to just under 400 students in the 2 majors and 4 minors with a full roster of 16 tenure-line faculty (including two new anthropologists and one new sociologist in the past two years), 2 dedicated full-time lecturers, and over a dozen wonderful part-time lecturers providing courses in their areas of expertise. A bit of big news is that we have also expanded in space: we are offering Cal Poly’s first “2+2” BA completion program to sociology students at Allan Hancock College in Santa Maria.
As you will see, our faculty, students, and alums are doing amazing work! Sociology and Anthropology/Geography graduates share “Letters from the field” about their post-graduation experiences. Our students have been honored with awards for their community and academic efforts, and have continued to collaborate with faculty or devise projects of their own that move social science understanding and action forward—many of them using technologies and Learn By Doing grants funded by our generous alumni donors. And our faculty have won major awards, collectively published over a dozen books and articles, and presented their research around the world.
In the current climate, it is hard to predict what the future of social science will look like. One thing we know is that we need curious and capable people who are eager to question, understand, and shape the world for the better. Supporting our current students with mentoring and social networking, internship and job offers, and of course financial donations are critical ways to make sure our mission persists into the next generation.
Dr. Joan Meyers
Chair, Department of Social Sciences
Welcome to the new 2+2 sociology program
In 2022, after years of negotiations between Cal Poly, SLO and Allan Hancock College in Santa Maria, Dr. Ryan Alaniz began to recruit Cal Poly’s very first students to a brand new BA completion program located on the Hancock campus. A Santa Maria native, Dr. Alaniz recognized the challenges of the 33-mile distance for parents and caretakers pursuing a BA. Hence "2+2," named by Dr. Alaniz it for the equal contributions of both campuses to students’ degrees.
In 2024, we welcomed our first cohort of 2+2 students. Faculty from Cal Poly, SLO found the Santa Maria students engaged and passionate, bringing real-world experience into classroom discussions. Students appreciated the ability to continue their studies without relocating and felt empowered to contribute to the Central Coast.
Sociology students from both campuses have already started collaborating. Eight Cal Poly 2+2 students joined ten from Cal Poly, SLO, for a field trip to Atascadero State Hospital to learn about forensic social work. In January, five Cal Poly 2+2 students attended the Social Sciences Career Expo on the SLO campus to network with employers and peers. We’re excited to maintain this momentum!
We are here only due to the support of so many across the two campuses. At Allan Hancock, we extend our gratitude to President Kevin Walthers; Dean Rick Rantz; VPs Bob Curry and Genevieve Siwabessy; sociology chair Professor Roger Hall; student advisors Ashley Brackett, Maria Arvizu-Rodriguez, and Benjamin Britten; and administrative assistants Rose Delgado and Maryfran Marecic. Here at Cal Poly, SLO, we want to thank Provost Cynthia Jackson-Elmoore, CLA Interim Dean Kate Murphy, former CLA Dean Philip Williams, CLA Faculty Fellow Professor Jen Jipson, Social Sciences ASC Dejana Fiorenza, and our amazing in-house 2+2 coordinators Professors Martine Lappé, Sara Lopus, and Lata Murti.
Next year there will be twice as many 2+2 students, and the year after that we will watch our first cohort make their way into the world as Cal Poly graduates. We can’t wait to see what will happen next!
Meet the New(er) Faculty
Since our last newsletter was published in 2023, we have added three new tenure-track faculty members.
Dr. Kimberly Higuera
Dr. Kimberly Higuera joined the Social Sciences department in Fall 2023 as an Assistant Professor of Sociology. Before joining Cal Poly, she earned her PhD in Sociology and Masters in Public Policy at Stanford University. Her research focuses on immigrants in the US and in how immigrant families and transnational communities socially and economically relate to each other across borders. In 2023, Dr. Higuera’s article “Mechanism Mapping: A Qualitative Study of How Different Forms of Instability Mediate the Relationship between Legal Status and Immigrant Mental Well-being” appeared in Social Science & Medicine. This piece aimed to map out some of the pathways through which legal status impacts immigrants’ mental well-being. In the past, her work has also appeared in outlets like Academic Pediatrics, Contexts, PNAS, and Sociology of Race and Ethnicity. In 2023, she was a recipient of an Institute for Research on Poverty’s Early Career Mentoring Institute research grant. During her time at Cal Poly, she has enjoyed teaching the Sociology of Health and Illness and Qualitative Methods as well as working with her senior project advisees.
Dr. Timothy McHale
Dr. Timothy McHale joined the Social Sciences Department in 2021 at Cal Poly as a part-time lecturer. He was hired as an Assistant Professor of Biomedical Anthropology in Fall 2024. He earned his PhD from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, in 2017, where he investigated juvenile children’s acute hormone responses to competition and their relationship with performance and physical and psychosocial stress. His biomedical and behavioral endocrinology research foci have included published work on transgender males in North America, the Tsimané forager-horticulturalists of the Bolivian Amazon, and urban Hong Kongese and American juvenile children. In July 2024 , his article “Masculine Voice is Associated with Better Mucosal Immune Defense in Adolescent and Adult Males” was published in Evolution and Human Behavior. and in November 2024, his co-authored article “Evolutionary origins of temporal discounting: Modeling how time and uncertainty constrain optimal decision-making strategies across taxa” was published in PLoS ONE.
Dr. McHale has taught 95 courses online and face-to-face across 9 different universities. With 14 different course offerings, he creates a vibrant interdisciplinary learning environment for undergraduate students by drawing upon biocultural approaches and his medical field and research experiences to aid our understanding of the dynamic human condition. His courses equip students with pragmatic tools and new perspectives that expand their sphere of compassion to others while recognizing our inescapable connection to all human and non-human life on this planet
Dr. Elizabeth Minor
Dr. Elizabeth Minor is an anthropologist who specializes in the ancient Nile Valley, museums, human-computer interaction, and cultural heritage management. She earned her Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies (now Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures) at the University of California - Berkeley. She holds 20 years of experience working with anthropological museum collections, including the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, the Sudan National Museum in Khartoum, the British Museum, the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, and the Wellesley College Davis Museum. Her digital museum projects focus on connecting diverse audiences with cultural heritage, especially through community collaboration and student-led creative interactive design. She joined the Department of Social Sciences at Cal Poly in Fall 2024.
Dr. Minor is the Co-Director and PI for a National Science Foundation funded project which uses community-based research practices to better understand cultural resilience under the changing climate of the ancient Middle Nile, through analysis of historical museum collections and ethnography. She also has over 20 years of field archaeology experience, excavating in Egypt (since 2005), Sudan (since 2014), California (since 2002), and Massachusetts (since 2017).
She is excited to return to her home state of California, to get to explore the beautiful Central Coast with her family, and to develop a Digital California Cultural Heritage project. She looks forward to exploring all the local museums and heritage sites in the area
Dr. Lata Murti
Dr. Lata Murti is the new Full-Time Lecturer and Student Recruitment and Retention Coordinator for the 2+2 Sociology Program. Dr. Murti earned her PhD in American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California and taught primarily online for UMass Global (formerly Brandman University) before joining Cal Poly. She serves as a co-editor for McGraw Hill’s Sociology in the News blog and a State Board Director focused on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) for AAUW (American Association of University Women)-California.
An active member of several organizations in North Santa Barbara County and San Luis Obispo County, Lata is dedicated to documenting and elevating the lived experiences of immigrant and ethnic communities as well as communities of color on California’s Central Coast. Her interviews with Japanese-American women for the cultural documentation archive Our Roots-Our Routes are the inspiration for a book chapter to appear in a forthcoming book she is co-editing for Palgrave Macmillan on women of color and intersectional communities.
Letters from the field
Elizabeth Dodge: Teaching Assistant in Lyon, France
A Sociological Imagination in Global Perspective
After graduating Cal Poly in 2022, I moved to France to be an English Language Assistant. I am currently wrapping up my second year teaching English at a high school in Lyon. This role has been a very formative experience in my life and further expanded on the lessons I learned as a sociology student. As a Language Assistant, I am responsible for not only teaching grammar, but sharing the culture of my home country to hopefully encourage students to continue learning English. It’s fun to answer the burning questions of whether American high school is really like High School Musical, but we frequently have lessons about more serious topics on the politics and history of the United States.
Sharing American culture to nonnative people has caused me to further reckon with the sociological and political issues facing the US. As students ask me the background on subjects like segregation, Indian boarding schools, or LGBT history, I feel the weight of my responsibility not just as an educator, but as an ambassador of my country; I could share what I learned at Cal Poly to fresh eyes. One of the common sentiments I expressed throughout my sociology education was, “How did I not know this sooner?” Now, I could actually teach these things to others. One particularly illuminating example was my lesson on the history of Thanksgiving. I saw this as an opportunity to share the truth about the holiday, rather than the white-washed version many Americans are brought up learning. I allowed students to consider the violence and colonization of Native Americans, and led a discussion about whether it is “too political” to have these discussions of genocide around a holiday, as many Americans often say. Their answers were very thoughtful, reasoning that natives have a right to mourn their ancestors and emphasizing the importance of continuing to discuss history. I feel the impact of my lectures on these students, that sharing the truth of these issues will continue to bring awareness, or even cause the French to think about the issues facing their own country in a new light.
My sociological lens informs me not only in the classroom, but as I navigate living in a new country that speaks a different language. The cultural sensitivity I fostered helps me navigate the nuances of my new country's customs, traditions, and social norms with greater sensitivity and respect. But more importantly, as I make new friends and connections across the globe, I am coming to understand subjects I have learned at Cal Poly in a new context. For instance, a new acquaintance may have lived through an ethnic conflict discussed in Global Race and Ethnic Relations. It’s given me an opportunity to learn about things outside of an Americentric point of view. Just as our sociology classes encouraged us to do, I continue to question how I was socialized to think about issues of race, gender, and social stratification.
For those considering traveling or moving abroad, I highly recommend embracing the opportunity. Engaging with unfamiliar social environments challenges us to broaden our perspectives, confront preconceptions, and cultivate empathy towards others. The Cal Poly Social Sciences Department helped me foster my curiosity about the world, and I’m grateful to be able to explore it post-graduation! Thank you to all of my professors and advisors who continue to be my role models as I try to enact change from abroad.
Forging a Path Between Development, Diplomacy, and Security
Captain Michael Rea: Foreign Area Officer, U.S. Embassy, Lima, Peru
I graduated from Cal Poly with a degree in Anthropology / Geography and was commissioned the same day as a Second Lieutenant in the Army through ROTC. My experience in the Social Sciences Department has shaped so many aspects of my military career. I strongly encourage Cal Poly Social Sciences graduates to explore careers across the public sector and at the intersection of development, diplomacy, and security.
Prior to becoming a Foreign Area Officer, I spent three years in the Army’s Civil Affairs program where I learned Spanish and focused on disaster relief, humanitarian assistance, and civil security initiatives with partner nation military and police. Since my undergraduate studies, I had always been interested in Latin America and the Caribbean and even wrote my senior project researching U.S. military disaster relief responses in the region. Then, seven years later, I found myself coordinating U.S. military humanitarian response in the aftermath of Hurricane Eta and Iota in Central America.
Working in an embassy has exposed me to how important it is to reach across sectors to create a lasting impact. I currently manage the Global Peacekeeping Operations Initiative and Humanitarian Mine Action programs. USAID, Department of State, and the Department of Defense offer a wide range of opportunities that I would encourage you to explore, since Social Sciences grads bring a unique perspective to the interagency. Most importantly, the interdisciplinary approach to problem solving, and the emphasis on sociocultural dynamics fostered in our department are incredibly valuable perspectives you bring into public service.
Global Peacekeeping Operations is one of many
intersections of development, diplomacy, and security.
Learn more about the Foreign Area Officer program here: https://faoa.wildapricot.org/FAO-What-is-a-FAO/
Explore career and internship opportunities at USAID, State or DOD on USAJobs: https://www.usajobs.gov/help/working-in-government/unique-hiring-paths/students/
CPT Mike Rea earned a B.S. in Anthropology/ Geography at Cal Poly in 2013 and a M.S. in Foreign Service from Georgetown University. He can be reached at michaelrea24@gmail.com for further information.
Student awards
We’re not the only ones who notice our students’ awesomeness! In the last two years, these Social Sciences students have been recognized in the college, the community, and the wider world:
- December, 2024: First place (co-winner), Legados Civic Debate, Alondra Cardoso
- June 2024: CLA Academic Excellence Award, Ellie Scholes
- May 2024: Learn By Doing Good, Kelly Christian
- June 2023: Art for Social Change, Euree Hong
Learn by Doing in Social Sciences
In the last two years, our students...
- helped Facilities Management by updating campus GIS/CAD maps of buildings for handicap access and in-building navigation.
- gained research experience working in Dr. Stacey Rucas’s Human Evolutionary Ecology (HEE) Lab for two quarters to explore comfort food-seeking behavior among Cal Poly students, and present their findings at the California Workshop on Evolutionary Social Sciences.
- put on a "Trashion Show" with clothes out of old trash and modelled during Earth Week.
- organized a highly successful clothing and toiletries drive for the ECHO Homeless Shelter in North County.
- used GIS, Deep Learning and satellite imagery to map agroforestry plots (pine vs. eucalyptus) while studying abroad in Peru.
- completed a comparative analysis of a Spanish and an American city to showcase their walkability, transportation networks, and cultural attractions.
- recruited over 20 employers to a career fair specifically for Social Sciences students, with recruiters ranging from GIS mapping at Cal Fire to unhoused support at the 40 Prado Homeless Services center to the FBI.
- hand-digitized geographic boundaries of oil palm and cacao plantations in Ucayali, Peru and Para, Brazil in support of SERVIR Amazonia goals.
- recovered and shared artifacts from the Yoshia family farm on the Diablo Canyon Lands to “flesh out the lives of people whose paths aren’t that well documented,” as Dr. Terry Jones explained to the CLA’s Impact magazine.
Clubs and honor societies of the Department of Social Science
In the last year, the old multi-major Social Sciences Club died a quiet death…but in its place the Geography Club and the Sociology Club have risen to join the Archeology Club as spaces where students can discover new ways to use classroom skills in the real world, network and make lasting friendships, and serve our local communities. Geography Club students have been sharing GIS tips and tricks, the Sociology Club started to plan its future, and the Archeology Club has continued to take regular field trips to key sites in California! Cal Poly’s Alpha Omega of California chapter of the Alpha Kappa Delta International Honor Society of Sociology has grown since its first COVID-era cohort of 22 to more than 70 members, and looks forward to possibly hitting 100 in June.
Faculty awards
In June 2023 Dr. Terry Jones received the Richard K. Simon Award for Outstanding Career Achievement in Scholarship, and Dr. Martine Lappé received the Early Career Award for Achievement in Scholarship from the Cal Poly College of Liberal Arts.
In August 2023, Dr. Joan Meyers received the Employee Participation and Ownership Scholarly Research Award for her 2022 article, “Participatory bureaucracy: Authority, formalization, and gender inequality in worker cooperatives” from the HR Division of the Academy of Management.
In June 2024, Dr. Stacey Rucas received the Richard K. Simon Award for Outstanding Career Achievement in Teaching, and Dr. Ryan Alaniz received the CLA Diversity Award from the Cal Poly College of Liberal Arts.
Faculty activities
Dr. Ryan Alaniz recently completed a chapter with two undergraduate students entitled “In/Action in Addressing the Climate Crisis: The Paradoxical Challenge of Global North Generation Z” which reviews the contradictory messages young people receive—be a good consumer and your consumption is killing the planet and it is up to you to stop it. This paper relates to the growing field of climate anxiety (or eco-anxiety) and underscores both the opportunities and challenges GenZ face in a warming world. Dr. Alaniz is also collaborating with the United Nations University to investigate best practices for communities that must be relocated due to the climate crisis, including a policy brief for the Council of Parties meeting and developing a best practices guide on planned relocation. He is currently on leave from the department, working as Director of Rural & Remote Outreach of the RE-AMP Network to help those communities around the Great Lakes access grants for projects to address the current and projected effects of climate change.
Dr. Andrew Fricker has been collaborating with faculty members in Biology, Computer Science, Physics, Natural Resources, Animal Science and Economics on numerous applied research projects which involve undergraduate and graduate students from across campus. He is the Principal Cal Poly Investigator on a collaboration with NASA-JPL titled "Unlocking the Power of NISAR for Mapping the Amazon’s Forest-Agriculture Interface". In this project, students use high resolution satellite imagery to map palm oil and cacao agroforestry in the Western Amazon as part of the NASA SERVIR project. Through this research his team seeks to better understand the spatio-temporal human impact on the western fringes of the Amazon rainforest. He is also a co-investigator with the Urban Forest Ecosystem Institute at Cal Poly where an interdisciplinary team maps socioeconomic and environmental factors and the interplay with urban forests in California. Finally, Dr. Fricker is a co-investigator on a local project which maps and monitors the status of eelgrass in Morro Bay, using drone-based imagery and deep learning. In the past year, he has co-authored four peer reviewed publications and two data publications with student researchers and served as a BEACoN mentor. He is also the faculty advisor for the Geography and Van Life clubs on campus and maintains a strong commitment to student professional development and building technical skills to prepare students for their careers in Anthropology and Geography.
In January 2024, Dr. Liz Johnston published a casebook of 80 clinical cases with case analysis, risk factors, diversity factors and DSM-5-TR diagnoses with the National Association of Social Workers Press. In December 2024, her edited volume summarizing current research by experts in the field on gangstalking was published by Ethics International with chapter contributions by Cal Poly students and faculty. She has given talks on both studies to the National Association of Social Workers and local social worker groups. Dr. Johnston continued her longitudinal study of older adult survivors of critical illness, and is co-authoring a paper with undergraduate student research assistants. She has also continued to lead a local support group for caregivers of persons with Frontal Temporal Dementia (FTD).
In 2023, Dr. Terry Jones was elected as a Fellow to the California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco. He also received the 2023 Richard K. Simon Award for Outstanding Career Achievement in Scholarship from the College of Liberal Arts. He published three papers in peer-reviewed journals with undergraduate co-authors: “Anarchy Meets Hierarchy: Socio-political Implications of Diachronic Variation in Exchange Indices from Central California’s Pecho Coast,” in California Archaeology, with Christina Hornbaker, Kate Knox, Zoe Levit, Sierra Lyman, and Jake Wanzenreid (2023); “Picking up the Pieces: Assessing Alternative Methods for Reconstructing Whole Red Abalone (Haliotis rufescens) from Fragments,” in Journal of Archaeological Sciences Report, with Zoe Levit (2023); and “Cleaning Up California Culture History: The Malaga Cove Leaf Projectile Point Type,” in California Archaeology, with Christina Hornbaker (2024). In June 2024 he delivered a paper at the Warfare, Environment, Social Inequality, and Pro-Sociability Biennial Conference in Seville, Spain, and gave a presentation to the San Luis Obispo Chamber of Commerce. In August 2024 he delivered a presentation to Osher Life Long Learning Institute, University of Nevada, Reno.
Dr. Sara Lopus has two new publications investigating linkages between education and demographic events: “No end to hypergamy when considering the full married population,” in Population and Development Review co-authored with Dr. Daniela Urbina (USC) and Dr. Maggie Frye (University of Michigan), and “The educational differentiation of African birth timing,” also co-authored with Dr. Frye, forthcoming in Studies in Family Planning. During Summer 2024, Lopus advised undergraduate researcher Grace Trenholme on a project called “A+ for Effort?” as part of the CLA’s Summer Undergraduate Research Program (SURP), gathering data about students’ and faculty members’ experiences with A+ grades at those Californian public universities that allow them and from Cal Poly students and faculty. The results of this research could inform Cal Poly’s future decisions regarding adoption of an A+ grading scheme. This summer, Dr. Lopus will head to Belo Horizonte, Brazil as the recipient of a 2024-2025 Fulbright Scholar Award. There, she will join former classmate Dr. Maria Carolina Tomás (Pontifícia Universidade Católica de Minas Gerais) in researching the household compositional conditions associated with favorable outcomes for children’s schooling. This marks Lopus’s first big research trip with her family since spending the summer of 2018 in Kenya, where she helped create and disseminate a survey of farming households, her son spotted a cheetah in the wild, and her daughter celebrated her first birthday.
Dr. Joan Meyers recently published a book chapter with three collaborators, “A New Generation of Worker Cooperatives,” on the current state of democratic worker ownership in the The Cambridge Handbook of Community Empowerment (2024), as well as an online article, “Want gender egalitarian workplaces? Worker co-ops can help,” at The Gender Policy Report, University of Minnesota (2023). Currently, with BEACoN Scholar undergraduate research assistant Maya Rodriguez, she is exploring the viability of student worker cooperatives in general and their development here at Cal Poly in particular.
With colleagues from the Southern Sociological Society, Dr. Kylie Parrotta presented at the 2022 American Sociological Society meetings in Los Angeles on “Creating a Professional Development Curriculum for Teacher-Scholars: Striving Towards Anti-Racist Teaching in the South (STARTS)” and received funding from the DEI Proposal Development Program to expand the STARTS program. She received 2022-23 RSCA funding with Stacy Kolegraff to host the 2nd annual Verifying Everyone’s Safety Together (VEST) Hackathon. They presented findings at the 2023 World Conference on Qualitative Research in Faro, Portugal and published the results, “Safety First Means Safety Fits: A Mixed Methods Analysis of Gender and Personal Protective Equipment Hackathon,” in New Trends in Qualitative Research. They also received teacher-scholar grants from the Hearst Teacher & Student Scholars Fund and the Extended Education and Campus Partner Funds through the College of Architecture and Environmental Design to support additional interdisciplinary Learn by Doing opportunities. Dr. Parrotta also presented a paper with her SURP research assistants titled, “Analysis of Content Warning Usage Across Course Modalities” at the 2023 International Sociological Association meetings in Melbourne, Australia and a paper with Dr. Buck on “A Negotiated Order Approach to Organizational Identity Change Processes.”
In the past year, Dr. Benjamin F. Timms was engaged in teaching, promoting study abroad, and finishing a book project, The Other World: Issues and Politics in the Developing World, with sociology professor Dr. Sara Lopus as well as colleagues in Political Science. Dr. Timms led the Cal Poly Global Program in London in Summer 2024, where students explored the cultural diaspora of the former British Empire in unique neighborhoods of London and addressed global environmental issues. During a sabbatical, he revisited his research site in Jamaica on sustainable tourism and visited Social Sciences alum Megan Nellis to learn more about her work in South Africa with students at the NGO Imagine Scholar.
Staying in touch and supporting the department
We love to hear from our alumni! If you’re interested in offering mentoring, working with us to set up an internship program at your place of employment, or meeting our future graduates at our annual Social Sciences Career Expo, get in touch! Or stay in touch with us and other alumni through our LinkedIn group, Cal Poly SLO Social Sciences.
We also love your financial support! Your contributions allow our clubs to go on research trips or provide community service, fund Learn By Doing grants for student research and project development, allow faculty to travel to present their research, and support undergraduate research and teaching assistants. If you felt supported by the department when you were at Cal Poly, please consider paying it forward to future generations of Social Sciences students.