SOCIOLOGY - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor, Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine Bioscientific Medical Staff Member, MetroHealth Medical Center
CASSI PITTMAN CLAYTOR is an associate professor of sociology. Her research focuses on middle-class Blacks' financial lives. Using qualitative methods her work uncovers how contemporary processes of social exclusion and inequality function to disadvantage even those racial minorities who have access to economic and cultural capital.
Currently Pittman Claytor is launching a new line of research that focuses on middle-class Blacks' attitudes and perceptions of climate change and their sustainability-driven consumption. It will also investigate middle-class Blacks' understandings and perceptions of environmental racism. In a related project, she is collaborating with an interdisciplinary team of scholars here at CWRU that examines and compares attitudes and perceptions of climate change held by members of the university community (faculty, staff, senior administrators, and students) and those of residents in the adjacent majority Black communities.
In Pittman Claytor's book Black Privilege: Modern Middle-Class Blacks with Credentials and Cash to Spend (Stanford University Press), she enriches our understanding of the Black middle class, focusing particularly on their economic reality and experiences as consumers. She has investigated Blacks' experiences "shopping while Black" in retail settings, as well as their experiences of discrimination in the mortgage market.
In 2019 Sephora, Inc. brought Pittman Claytor on board in their effort to systematically study the problem of retail racism. She served as the research lead, designing, and assisting in the orchestration of a first-of-its-kind, national study of racial bias and exclusionary treatment in retail settings. In recognition of her work, Pittman Claytor was named as one of 100 People Transforming Business by Business Insider.
While an associate professor at Case Western Reserve University, she has been awarded the Woodrow Wilson Foundation's Early Career Enhancement Fellowship and the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research's Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellowship at Harvard University. Pittman Claytor received her B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and her Ph.D. from Harvard University.
Dr. Danielle Czarnecki earned her Ph.D. in Sociology and a Graduate Certificate in Science, Technology, and Society (STS) at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She completed postdoctoral fellowships at McGill University and the University of Cincinnati, where she was a researcher with the Ohio Policy Evaluation Network.
Her research focuses on issues related to gender, technology, and reproduction. Her current research examines people's moral lives in the context of their experiences with contested medical technologies and procedures. She has studied Christian women's experiences with infertility and assisted reproductive technologies, how health care providers make decisions about participation in abortion care, women's experiences with genetic carrier testing in reproductive health care settings, and how policy restrictions on reproductive health care impact patients and clinicians. Her work has been published in Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Gender & Society, Qualitative Sociology, Social Science & Medicine, Journal of Health Politics, Policy, and Law, and Contraception.
Job Titles:
- Emeritus Professor of Sociology, Holy Cross College
Job Titles:
- Distinguished University Professor
- Elderly Care Research Center
Job Titles:
- Editor - in - Chief of Journal of Gerontology
- Professor Chair of the Department
Jessica currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences (2021 - 2024). Jessica also serves as Co-Editor (with Dr. Roland J. Thorpe, Jr. of Johns Hopkins School of Public Health) of the series Annual Review of Gerontology and Geriatrics. She served as volume editor for Volume 40, 2020, on Economic Inequality in Later Life.
Her own work has appeared in Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences, Research on Aging, Journal of Health and Social Behavior and American Sociological Review. Her article with Jielu Lin, "From Noise to Signal: Capturing the Age and Social Patterning of Intra-Individual Variability in Late-Life Health" (JG:SS 2017) received the 2019 Outstanding Publication Award from Section on Aging and the Life Course of the American Sociological Association.
Jessica also serves on the Editorial Boards of Journal of Aging and Health, Research on Aging, and Journal of Aging and Social Policy. Jessica has a position on the Advisory Board for the Resource Center for Minority Data at ICPSR. She also recently completed terms as Chair of the Section on Aging and the Life Course in the American Sociological Association and Member-at-Large for the Behavioral and Social Sciences section of the Gerontological Society of America.
Some of her previous work focused on issues of access to healthy food in disadvantaged urban neighborhoods. Jessica is featured on NetWellness.com discussing family-based strategies for healthy eating. She also completed a cooking-based intervention project for residents of public housing. The project was featured on WVIZ in a story on Be Well: Obesity - Poverty and Food Deserts.
Job Titles:
- Professor, Medicine and Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine
Job Titles:
- Distinguished Fellow, National Institute of Disability and Rehabilitation, 1992 - 93
Job Titles:
- Professor Director, Undergraduate Studies in
Job Titles:
- Professor Director, Graduate Program
Tim Black is Professor of Sociology. His scholarly work examines the intersections between larger social structures and personal lives. He attempts to identify the processes and mechanisms through which social and economic marginalization is (re)produced and to show how life in marginalized spaces is negotiated and contested. His research focuses on the post-1970s period of neoliberalism and its impact on the working class and marginalized communities. He advances a medium of sociological storytelling to illustrate how social structures are lived. Black teaches courses on capitalism, cities, and inequality; race and mass incarceration; the history of social and political thought; and qualitative research methods.
Research and Scholarly Interests
Tim Black's research focuses on socially and economically marginalized communities. He is the author of three books. His first, When a Heart Turns Rock Solid: The Lives of Three Puerto Rican Brothers On and Off the Streets (Pantheon, 2009; Vintage, 2010) is based on an unprecedented 18-year ethnographic study of a network of Puerto Rican men from Springfield, Massachusetts. The book examines the lives of these men across a variety of social spaces - city schools, the drug trade, the formal and informal low-wage workforce, the trucking industry, prisons, and drug treatment programs. The book received a number of accolades. It was identified as one of best books of 2009 by The Washington Post, won the 2010 Mirra Komarovsky book award from Eastern Sociological Society, the 2010 book award from Association of Humanist Sociology, and was selected as a finalist by the Puerto Rican Studies Association for their 2010 book award.
His second book, coauthored with Mary Patrice Erdmans, is On Becoming a Teen Mom: Life Before Pregnancy (University of California Press, 2015). Based on life-story interviews with 108 adolescent mothers from vulnerable families in Connecticut, Erdmans and Black argue that teen motherhood has been largely decontexualized and reified as a social problem by public leaders, pundits, and, to some extent, scholars. Instead, the authors recontextualize adolescent motherhood through the use of life stories, by examining interrelated issues such as child sexual abuse, failing urban schools, concentrated poverty, structural and symbolic violence, and gendered practices of sexuality. The book was awarded the 2017 Distinguished Book Award from the ASA Section on Race, Class and Gender, was runner-up for the 2016 William J. Goode Book Award from the Family of Sociology Section of the ASA, and won the 2015 Betty & Alfred McClung Lee Book Award from the Association for Humanist Sociology.
Black's third book, entitled It's a Setup: Fathering from the Social and Economic Margins (Oxford University Press, 2021), focuses on socially and economically marginalized fathers in Connecticut and is based on three studies conducted in the first decade of the new millennium. The book is co-authored with Sky Keyes, a former research assistant who currently works on the front lines of the Prenatal Homeless Project in San Francisco. Tracking the life histories of 138 low-income fathers, Black and Keyes argue that while the norms and expectations for involved fatherhood have increased, labor force and state support for fathering on the margins has deteriorated. The book illustrates the lived experiences of job precarity, welfare cuts, punitive child support courts, public housing neglect, and the criminalization of poverty to demonstrate that without transformative systemic change, fathers on the social and economic margins are being setup to fail.
Black's more recent writing is from a four-year study at an alternative incarceration facility in Cleveland, Ohio, which draws on ethnographic research inside the facility as well as a series of interviews with 75 men after their release. The study focuses on the issues of masculinity, fatherhood, incarceration, and citizen reentry.