Inquiry
Bringing research, lived experience, and local knowledge together before defining the problem or proposing a response.
Public sociology
Sociology belongs in the places where communities make decisions.
My public work connects evidence, civic participation, education, and the local knowledge residents bring to shared questions. Ashtabula is not an abstract setting for that work. It is home.
Working alongside, not for
Public sociology is most useful when scholarship enters into relationship with local knowledge. I approach this work as inquiry and praxis: listening before defining the problem, aligning strategy with community priorities, connecting evidence to policy and action, and strengthening the support people and organizations need to exercise agency.
That means working alongside residents, educators, civic leaders, and community organizations—not arriving with a ready-made answer. My role is to help ask better questions, bring evidence into the room, clarify where goals and systems are misaligned, and make space for knowledge that institutions too often overlook.
Place-based partnerships
C.J. Prentiss Education Resource Center
The C.J. Prentiss Education Resource Center is a legacy-rooted educational justice and family-engagement hub in Ashtabula City. Named in honor of the late Ohio State Senator C.J. Prentiss and her late husband, educator and activist Michael Charney, the Center carries forward their legacies of commitment to public education and educational justice. Prentiss championed literacy, fair school funding, cultural competency, and social justice; Charney’s work as a teacher and union activist included co-founding WELCOME, a multiracial coalition supporting peaceful school integration in Cleveland.
The Center is being built to meet a moment in which educational inequities persist amid long-term disinvestment, uneven access to resources, fragmented supports, and opportunities too often missed or foreclosed. Its mission is not simply to provide services, but to serve as an educational hub where families, educators, mentors, and community partners can build knowledge, relationships, and pathways for young people to read, lead, belong, and thrive.
I contribute sociological, educational, and evaluation support across four connected areas:
- Literacy-rich homes: expanding access to culturally relevant books and resources that support reading at home.
- Youth leadership: developing Rites of Passage programming, mentoring relationships, and opportunities for identity and civic growth.
- Family–school relationships: creating parent–educator dialogue grounded in shared learning, trust, and problem-solving.
- Organizational learning: supporting evaluation, community convening, and partnerships that connect immediate opportunities with the systems shaping access and belonging.
Ashtabula City Council Ad Hoc Committee
As a member of Ashtabula City Council’s Ad Hoc Committee addressing racism and racial inequity as public health concerns, I participate in inquiry at the intersection of resident experience, public health, local governance, and institutional practice. I contribute a sociological perspective to committee and Council conversations, helping connect community conditions and evidence with questions of representation, policy, and administrative response.
This ongoing work reflects three connected contributions of public sociology:
- Inquiry: supporting a community’s capacity to study its own conditions and identify who is most affected or least reached.
- Strategy and structure: clarifying who has authority, how decisions move, and where evidence can inform practical pathways toward change.
- Participation: strengthening opportunities for residents to contribute meaningfully to public learning and decision-making.
Public sociology in practice
Alignment & strategy
Connecting community priorities with institutional roles, organizational capacity, and practical next steps.
Policy & praxis
Translating sociological evidence into public learning, deliberation, and action without flattening complexity.
Support & empowerment
Strengthening conditions for people to participate, exercise agency, and shape decisions affecting their communities.
Civic participation and collective capacity
I serve as president of the League of Women Voters of Ashtabula County, after serving on its executive board and leading much of its public communication since 2018. I work alongside members and community partners to make civic systems more understandable, strengthen voter education and engagement, convene public conversations, and create clearer pathways for residents to participate in public life.
League leadership is also organizational work: aligning mission with volunteer capacity, developing partnerships that distribute effort, and building structures that can sustain informed civic action over time. The League is nonpartisan—it does not support or oppose candidates or political parties—but it creates space for education, listening, consensus-building, and advocacy grounded in adopted positions. For me, this is public sociology expressed through the practical work of local democracy.
Ph.D. Mamas: caregiving as public sociology
In 2015, I founded Ph.D. Mamas, an international online community of approximately 20,000 academic mothers. The community functions as relational infrastructure: members exchange resources, offer formal and informal mentorship, celebrate accomplishments, name struggles that institutions often privatize, and connect across disciplines, institutions, and career stages.
Ph.D. Mamas is also a site of public scholarship and collective sensemaking. My research, writing, and community practice connect personal accounts of time poverty, caregiving, precarity, and belonging to the institutional arrangements that produce them. The aim is not to speak for all motherscholars, but to make patterns visible and translate shared knowledge into more compassionate mentoring, clearer resources, and more equitable academic policies and cultures.