Martha Copp

East Tennessee State University | ETSU · Department of Sociology and Anthropology

What is it like to teach qualitative methods to graduate students in predominantly quantitative departments? We draw on our experiences teaching fieldwork in three departments to show that folk notions of science—ideas about how scientific work should be done—make it difficult to teach an inductive approach to fieldwork. Specifically, these folk no...

Students share folk beliefs that make it difficult for them to understand inequality, especially the harmful consequences of social practices they routinely engage in, are attached to, and take for granted. Four of these beliefs include: (a) harm is direct, extreme, and the product of an individual's intentions; (2) harm is the product of the psych...

This paper offers six strategies for dealing with students' resistance to learning about the oppression of women: making the familiar strange, substituting race for sex, distinguishing between intentions and consequences, imagining men in women's bodies, exposing students' claims of equal gender oppression as false parallels, and analyzing some of...

This paper explores how workers try to manage their emotions under conditions that doom them to fail. The workers in question—floor instructors at a sheltered workshop for people with developmental disabilities—were expected to infuse clients with positive feelings about work and to help transform them into committed workers. But structural conditi...

We provide a qualitative analysis of resistance to calls for gender-neutral language. We analyzed more than 900 comments responding to two essays—one on AlterNet and another on Vox posted to the Vox editor’s Facebook page—that critiqued a pervasive male-based generic, “you guys.” Five rhetorics of resistance are discussed: appeals to origins, appea...

Peer sexuality educators' accounts of their work reveal two approaches to empathy with their students: affinity and alliance. ‘Affinity-based empathy’ rests on the idea that the more commonalities sexuality educators and students share (or perceive they share), the more they will be able to empathise with one another, while ‘alliance-based empathy’...

What we do in the classroom is our politics. No matter what we may say about Third World this or feminist that, our actions and our interactions with our students week in week out prove what we are for and what we are against in the long run. There is no substitute for practice. For decades, feminist teachers have been working in a chilly political...

Emotions are central to everyday interactions. They motivate behavior, shape agency, contribute to self-control and social control, and bear the traces of systemic disadvantage. Our chapter explores the contributions of symbolic interactionism as a theoretical perspective in sociological studies of emotions. We focus on how an interactionist analys...

Recognizing the Power of Qualitative Research - Janice M Morse DIALOGUE On Terminating a Project Writing It Up - Joyceen S Boyle Dissecting the Dissertation DIALOGUE What Do I Publish? The Politics of Publishing - Juliene G Lipson Protecting Participants' Confidentiality DIALOGUE Coauthorship Presenting Qualitative Research Up Close - Holly Skodol...

In this paper, we explore undergraduate students' contradictory expectations of a woman professor (Dr. Baker) who taught a feminist course. Over the course of three semesters teaching the same class, the professor got pregnant and carried her child to term. Using qualitative and quantitative teaching evaluation data from this course, we analyze how...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1993. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [190]-193). Microfiche. s

Thesis (M.A.)--University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1987. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [40]-42).