Dear Friends of Sociology,
Our department doesn’t normally do a Winter quarter newsletter, but we decided this is a good year to start! The articles below give you a glimpse into just one issue—homelessness—and the various ways our faculty and students are helping to find solutions to a worldwide problem—some might say epidemic. Future newsletters will focus on the many other relevant issues our faculty and students are researching and confronting during difficult times.
In this issue, I encourage you to read about how Zack Almquist, working together with Amy Hagopian, professor emeritus of health systems and population health, have developed innovative new strategies to assess the magnitude of the homelessness crisis. The data they are producing influence decisions at every level of government, shaping efforts by the City of Seattle and King County to target their outreach efforts and informing decisions by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development as it distributes $3 billion in funding to address homelessness
Several of our graduate students are also deeply involved in the effort to understand the dynamics and repercussions of homelessness and housing precarity. Sociology PhD student Brandon Morande currently collaborates with Drs. Almquist and Hagopian to investigate people’s housing outcomes and relocation patterns following encampment sweeps.
Elizabeth Nova is a PhD student in Sociology and fellow in the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology whose research focuses on population health. Her work spans diverse topics, including homelessness, health disparities, misinformation, health behavior, and COVID-19.
PhD candidate Marco Brydolf-Horwitz’s research uses ethnographic and archival methods to focus on a homelessness intervention called JustCARE which works closely with encampments to employ harm-reduction techniques and offer temporary shelter in converted hotels.
Our alumni are also doing their part including June Yang who shares that the multiple projects she has worked on under the broader umbrella of understanding homelessness in King County and beyond, has impacted her research and personal understandings about the unhoused population, as well as personal growth. You can read more about this and all of the research mentioned in the articles below.
If you visit Savery Hall, you will also see a number of new posters lining our halls. Many of these connect to our collective work on housing precarity and homelessness. I’d like to thank photographer Tim Durkan for allowing us to use his images
In addition to homelessness, Professor Sarah Quinn also recently helped organize and host a special event with the American Sociological Association called Crisis at the Treasury: What is Happening, Why It Matters, a link to a recording of this event can be found HERE. We continue to bring guest speakers to campus with our SocSem events to discuss a variety of important topics ranging from changing social dynamics within families to evolving financial systems and broad social movement, these are made possible by the generous support of the Earl and Edna Stice Memorial Lectureship.
As always, we appreciate our community here on campus and our extended community of alumni and friends around the globe. We are grateful to be surrounded by a diverse group of people who are committed and engaged in doing thoughtful work that is making an impact locally and beyond.
Please feel free to reach out to me if you have thoughts about how to enhance these opportunities for engagement.
Sincerely,
Kyle Crowder, Department Chair
Blumstein-Jordan Professor of Sociology
P.S. If you are an alumni of our program, email tmcsha@uw.edu to share news of your own successes and life changes and we’ll try to include it in future newsletters or our monthly digest.
Your support provides critical discretionary funds for student and faculty research and allows us to bring visiting speakers to campus. Gifts from alumni and friends ensure UW Department of Sociology remains one of the best in the world
Read our newsletter HERE.