SPRING 2025 NEWSLETTER EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS Society for the Study of Social Problems In this issue Letter from the Division Chair Incoming Division Chair Division Awards Member News SSSP 2025 Annual Meeting Our Division’s Sessions Date: Friday, August 8 Time: 12:30 PM - 2:10 PM Session 019: PAPERS IN THE ROUND: Doing the Work of Education Water Tower Parlor Saturday, August 9 10:30 AM - 12:10 PM Session 038: Community Approaches to Mental Health: Educators, Policy-Makers and Social Identities Indiana Room Sunday, August 10 8:30 AM - 10:10 AM Session 069: PAPERS IN THE ROUND: Problems in Schools Price Room Letter from the Division Chair Written by Kyla Walters, PhD Over four dozen of my tenured and tenure-track faculty colleagues received layoff notices on the second day of our spring semester. This wreckage comes alongside so many other damaging blows to the people and the public good, all signaling now is the time for sociological thinking and doing. This newsletter is my last as the chair of the Division of Educational Problems. I extend a hearty congratulations to the 2025 winners: Nora Gross for Brothers in Grief: The Hidden Toll of Gun Violence on Black Boys and Their Schools (Outstanding Book Award), Jillian LaBranche (Graduate Student Paper Award), and Zehra Sahin Ilkorkor (Honorable Mention, Graduate Student Paper Award). Well done! Learn more about each recipient from this newsletter. Warm thanks to Myron T. Strong and Joyce J. Kim for serving on the Outstanding Book Award Committee. I leave you in capable, warm hands with Jackie Zalewski. For more information her, keep reading this newsletter. Thank you for allowing me this leadership opportunity! Warm regards, Kyla Incoming Division Chair Jacqueline M. Zalewski Professor of Sociology Department of Anthropology and Sociology West Chester University About Jackie I have ongoing scholarly interests in the growing contingencies workers face in their jobs and employment relations. This is because of my background. I grew up as part of the working class in Kenosha, Wisconsin during deindustrialization, characterized by heavy job losses in my community and many others across the US. This experience significantly impacted my ongoing research interests in changes in work and organizations and technology in the workplace. For my master’s thesis, I conducted ethnographic research of blue-collar temporary work. For my PhD, I interviewed information technologists and human resource professionals about the outsourcing of their work and jobs. In 2019, I published a book about its effects on social relations, culture, jobs, and professional work. It’s called Working Lives and in-House Outsourcing: Chewed Up By Two Masters (2019). I have used my interests in changes in work to contribute to scholarship in academic and career advising with collaborator Dr. Leigh S. Shaffer. In 2018, our article “The Professionalization of Academic Advising: Where are We in 2010?” was awarded the first Leigh S. Shaffer Award by NACADA for significant advances made to the field of academic advising. Our article “Career Advising in a VUCA Environment” has also been well cited. Finally, because of my background and professional interests in college teaching and pedagogy, recently I conducted three years of survey research (2017-19) on teamwork in undergraduate Introduction to Sociology courses. My collaborator, Susan Brudvig (Professor of Business Informatics at Northern Kentucky University), and I have one paper that was recently published in Teaching Sociology: “Encouraging Productive Behavior in Student Teams With Interventions (2023), 51(2):127-138.” We are collecting more survey and qualitative data in 2023-5 to continue improving teamwork pedagogy in our own courses and contribute further to scholarly research in this area. 2025 Division Awards Outstanding Book Award Winner Brothers in Grief: The Hidden Toll of Gun Violence on Black Boys and Their Schools by Nora Gross Columbia University (2024, University of Chicago Press) JahSun, a dependable, much-loved senior at Boys’ Prep was just hitting his stride in the fall of 2017. He had finally earned a starting position on the varsity football team and was already weighing two college acceptances. Then, over Thanksgiving, tragedy struck. An altercation at his older sister’s home escalated into violence, killing the unarmed teenager in a hail of bullets. JahSun’s untimely death overwhelmed his entire community, sending his family, friends, and school into seemingly insurmountable grief. Worse yet, that spring two additional Boys’ Prep students would be shot to death in their neighborhood. JahSun and his peers are not alone in suffering the toll of gun violence, as every year in the United States teenagers die by gunfire in epidemic numbers, with Black boys most deeply affected. Brothers in Grief closely attends to the neglected victims of youth gun violence: the suffering friends and classmates who must cope, mostly out of public view, with lasting grief and hidden anguish. Set at an ambitious urban high school for boys during the heartbreaking year following the death of JahSun, the book chronicles the consequences of untimely death on Black teen boys and on a school community struggling to recover. Sociologist Nora Gross tells the story of students attempting to grapple with unthinkable loss, inviting readers in to observe how they move through their days at school and on social media in the aftermath of their friends’ and classmates’ deaths. Gross highlights the discrepancy between their school’s educational mission and teachers’ and administrators’ fraught attempts to care for students’ emotional wellbeing. In the end, the school did not provide adequate space for grief, making it more difficult for students to heal, reengage with school, and imagine hopeful futures. Even so, supportive relationships deepened among students and formed across generations, offering promising examples of productive efforts to channel student grief into positive community change. A searing testimony of our collective failure to understand the inner lives of our children in crisis, Brothers in Grief invites us all to wrestle with the hidden costs of gun violence on racial and educational inequity. About Nora Nora Gross is a sociologist of youth, race, and education and a documentary filmmaker. She is Assistant Professor of Education at Barnard College, Columbia University and received her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in Sociology and Education. Previously, Nora was a high school writing teacher on the West Side of Chicago. Nora uses qualitative, multimodal, and participatory methods to understand the ways youth develop and protect their inner lives in the face of external constraints. She has published on issues related to racialized masculinity for both Black and white boys, grief and loss, political polarization in schools, teens’ social media use, youth resistance and emotional solidarity, and school supports for vulnerable youth. She has also produced several documentary films focusing on the lives of Black boys and men. Nora is the author of the ethnographic book, Brothers in Grief: The Hidden Toll of Gun Violence on Black Boys and Their Schools (University of Chicago Press, 2024), as well as co-editor of Care-Based Methodologies: Reimagining Qualitative Research with Youth in US Schools (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022). 2025 Division Awards Graduate Student Paper Award Winner “Transitional Justice, Collective Memory, & Teaching Practices.” by Jillian LaBranche University of Minnesota Abstract Scholars have begun to seriously examine the relationship between transitional justice mechanisms and educational reform in post-conflict societies. Yet research investigating the relationship between transitional justice, collective memory, and teaching practices remains nascent. This comparative study explores how secondary school teachers in Rwanda and Sierra Leone negotiate narratives generated by transitional justice mechanisms when educating youth about their countries’ histories of mass violence. In both countries, transitional justice mechanisms have generated collective memory. The narratives they produce both frame the violence and identify victims and perpetrators. However, the degree to which these narratives have been institutionalized within education differs. The Rwandan government enforces a singular historical narrative found in state-sponsored texts, while Sierra Leone’s lack of state-mediated memory leaves teachers with greater discretion in constructing lessons. Drawing on 60 teacher interviews and over 20 hours of classroom observations, the study reveals that teachers in both contexts adopt narratives generated by transitional justice mechanisms, even when these narratives have not been fully institutionalized within educational materials. Drawing upon literature from the sociology of violence, comparative and international education, and memory studies, this article underscores the complex relationship between state power, transitional justice mechanisms, and teacher agency. These findings contribute to a growing body of research on post-conflict history education, suggesting that transitional justice mechanisms play a crucial role in how historical trauma is understood by educators and taught to future generations. About Jillian Jillian LaBranche is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of Minnesota. She will join the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies in September 2025. Her research uses comparative and qualitative methods to examine how knowledge is constructed in the wake of mass atrocity. More specifically, she investigates how Rwandan and Sierra Leonean educators and parents teach newer generations about their nation’s recent history of violence. Her work has been funded by the US Fulbright Program, the National Academy of Education/Spencer, the American Sociological Association, and the University of Minnesota, and it has been published by the American Journal of Sociology and the American Journal of Cultural Sociology. 2025 Division Awards Graduate Student Paper Award Honorable Mention “Comparison of Bias-Based Bullying and Non-Bias-Based Bullying: Prevalence Rates, Impacts on Students, and the Buffering Role of Social Support.” by Zehra Sahin Ilkorkor Viriginia Commonwealth University Abstract This study compares bias-based and non-bias-based bullying in terms of their prevalence rates across years and their impacts on students’ self-esteem, social relationships, schoolwork, and physical health. The ordered logit model was conducted using a national sample of adolescents aged 12 to 18 in the United States to test the differential impacts of bias-based bullying and the buffering role of social support, as suggested by the Minority Stress Theory. The prevalence rates of bias-based bullying have been consistently increasing since 2015 whereas the prevalence rates of non-bias-based bullying showed a sharp decline in the 2022 school year. Bullying victims who report negative effects are more likely to have low and moderate than high levels of bullying impacts. For each level of bullying impact (low, moderate, and high), victims of bias-based bullying have a higher probability of having effects than victims of non-bias-based bullying. White students are more vulnerable to having high levels of bullying impacts on self-esteem while Asian students are more vulnerable to having high levels of bullying impacts on schoolwork, social relationships, and physical health. Social support ameliorates the negative impacts of bullying victimization and an increase in social support benefits the victims of bias-based bullying more than the victims of non-bias-based bullying. About Zehra Zehra Sahin Ilkorkor is a Ph.D. candidate in Public Policy & Administration at Virginia Commonwealth University, L. Douglas Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs. While pursuing her studies, she also works as a graduate teaching assistant. She is an applied policy researcher who examines the role of public policy in expanding access to economic opportunities for all individuals. Her research focuses on the intersection of social, urban, and education policy, with particular interest in economic mobility, social capital, discrimination, and social stratification. Her research and commitment to public service have been recognized by prestigious national awards, including the ASPA Founders’ Fellows (2023), the ASPA Walter W. Mode Scholarship (2025), and the APPAM Equity and Inclusion Student Fellowship (2023). Prior to pursuing her doctoral studies, Zehra served as a policy analyst at the Turkish Treasury for over a decade. Her service in the public sector included responsibilities of coordinating Turkish relations with G20, IMF, and OECD. She earned a Master of International Affairs with a concentration in Economic and Political Development from Columbia University, School of International and Public Affairs. She got her B.S. in Business Administration from Bilkent University, Turkiye. Member News Corey Moss-Pech is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Florida State University. His research examines how individuals navigate educational organizations and labor market institutions to better understand stratification and social mobility outcomes with particular emphasis on gender inequality. Moss-Pech’s new book, Major Trade-Offs: The Surprising Truths about College Majors and Entry-Level Jobs, is out now with University of Chicago Press (https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo246051255.html). Jacqueline M. Zalewski Social Media Post Assignment was published in the ASA's Teaching Resources and Innovation Library for Sociology, Spring 2025. Received College of Sciences and Math, West Chester University of Pennsylvania, Research Alternative Work Assignment (released from teaching one course) for presenting "Career Advising for Non-standard Employment: A Human Capital Approach" at the NACADA Region 1 and 2 Conference and making progress on a related journal article, Spring 2025. Presented "Career Advising for Non-standard Employment: A Human Capital Approach" at NACADA Region 1 and 2 Conference, April 2025, Buffalo NY. Nora Gross' new book, Brothers in Grief: The Hidden Toll of Gun Violence on Black Boys and Their Schools, has recently been recognized as a finalist for the C. Wright Mills Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems and was named a 2025 Outstanding Book by the Society of Professors of Education. You can hear more about the book in an interview with the New Books Network: https://newbooksnetwork.com/brothers-in-grief. (You can also purchase the book at a 30% discount with the code UCPNEW directly from the University of Chicago Press.) The Winter 2025 issue of Contexts features an article by Gross drawing on her fieldwork at a Philadelphia high school and highlighting many key themes from the book about Black boys' hidden grief in the aftermath of neighborhood gun violence. Find the article here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/15365042251318668. And the accompanying podcast here: https://sagesociology.libsyn.com/contexts-the-hidden-toll-of-grief-after-youth-gun-violence.