This page is no longer being updated and remains online for informational and historical purposes only. The information is accurate as of the last page update.
For questions about page contents, contact the Communications Division.
Caroline Lee, assistant professor of anthropology and sociology, has won the 2008 Outstanding Article Award from the Collective Behavior and Social Movements Section of the American Sociological Association for her article on democratic reforms in community planning.
The article, titled “Is There a Place for Private Conversation in Public Dialogue?” was published in July 2007 in the American Journal of Sociology, the oldest journal in the discipline. Her research was supported by fellowships from the Social Science Research Council and the Miller Center of Public Affairs.
The article examines how different communities take different cultural and political approaches to democracy in community decision-making.
“The main argument in the article is that if we value the unique insights of local people, we should also appreciate that communities have their own regional political cultures of participation already, and processes should respect these,” explains Lee. “I hope that [the article] has relevance to practitioners in the field and to political scientists and sociologists trying to design democratic processes that work well for local communities.”
Lee’s research involved traveling to California, South Carolina, New Hampshire, and Washington D.C., where she interviewed participants and performed participant observation at local environmental events in various communities.
This spring, she will teach a seminar in American Studies called, “Designs for Living: Environmentalism, Counterculture, and American Utopias,” as part of the curriculum development for the College’s new Environmental Studies major, of which she is a member of the steering committee.
“I talk to my students often about my own research experiences in the field when we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of all types of research methods,” Lee says. “This helps make the research and writing process more concrete for them, since they can tie what we are reading in the textbook to my own and their own research projects.”
Lee will present her findings on a panel entitled, “Deliberation and Representation in Administrative Practice” at the Southeast Conference for Public Administration Sept. 24 – 27 in Orlando, Fla.
In 2007, Lee began working with EXCEL Scholar Zachary Romano ’10 (Hawley, Pa.), a double major in government & law and anthropology & sociology, on a new project building on one of her conclusions in her article.