Angela Donelson

University Of Arizona
Department of Geography and Regional Development

Dissertation Abstract

Angela Donelson successfully defended her dissertation, “Social Networks, Poverty, and Development: An Analysis of Capacity Building in Arizona and New Mexico Colonias,” in March of 2005. Her dissertation focuses on capacity-building and community development, with a particular focus on funding and revenue streams to underdeveloped and rural communities. The RPRC dissertation award supported her exploration of government’s role in promoting social capital to improve life in colonias, U.S.–Mexico border communities lacking basic community services and infrastructure. She emphasizes social capital, given the poor track record of such strategies as infrastructure development to lift persistently poor rural regions from decline. Her focus on the U.S. border region leads her to also explore the effect of location on the success of social capital development strategies as well as which elements of successful strategies can be transferred to less successful locations.

Donelson earned an MA in regional and community planning from Kansas State University and a BA in political science and journalism from University of Arizona, Tucson. She was a community-builder fellow and an Arizona colonias specialist with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Prior to her HUD job, she worked on community development and planning issues in city government and a private consulting firm.

During the 2004 - 2005 school year, Donelson taught a junior-senior level class at the University of Arizona, “Problems in Regional Development,” which explores theories of development, and how they have been applied in economic development practice. She is now working on publishing the work of her dissertation in refereed journals and hopes to work on a book to be published.

Michelle Eley

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Department of Human and Community Development

Dissertation Abstract

Michelle Eley successfully defended her dissertation, “Going Mobile in the Rural South,” in November of 2004. She was a doctoral candidate in community and rural studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her dissertation is an exploration of the social and community ties among African-American families in a North Carolina mobile home park. Eley used ethnographic data to explore how living in a mobile home park shapes the life chances of residents and how such families use social networks to help mobilize resources to meet their daily needs. Preliminary data suggest that rural African-American families draw more on churches than other community institutions for social support and other resources. Social ties within the community are also integral in securing informal work activities that aid daily survival.

Eley worked as a research associate in the Rural Families and Mobile Home Parks Study at University of Illinois, Department of Human and Community Development. Her BS, from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, is in agricultural economics, as is her MS, from University of Illinois. She was an economist assistant for the U.S. Department of Agriculture at the Foreign Agricultural Service in the International Trade Policy, Food Safety and Technical Services division, and in the Economic Research Service, market and trade economics division.

Eley is now employed with the North Carolina Cooperative Extension Program at North Carolina A&T State University (Greensboro) as an Extension Specialist in Community and Economic Development.

Mark Harvey

University of Wisconsin-Madison
Department of Rural Sociology

Dissertation Abstract

Mark Harvey defended his dissertation, “Mandates without Means: Welfare Reform and Household Survival Strategies in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas,” in January 2005. In his dissertation, he assessed the impact of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), and local institutional conditions on low-income residents in two persistently poor, rural Texas border counties. Preliminary evidence finds that although NAFTA has contributed to the growth in the retail sector in both counties, one county, Maverick County, is rapidly becoming integrated into the emerging regional economy as a port of international trade between the United States and Mexico while the other county, Starr County, has seen most of its agricultural sector depart to Mexico. Harvey’s analysis examines how families in the two counties are patching together survival strategies from multiple sources of income, including government, informal work, wage labor, and other informal exchanges with kin and friends. His findings point to the importance of considering the indirect effects that stem from the interaction of social welfare policies and policies that affect labor markets and trade.

Harvey received a double BS in finance and sociology from Boston College, and an MS in Justice Studies from Arizona State University and an MS in sociology from University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Harvey is now a postdoctoral fellow at the Southern Rural Development Center (SRDC) at Mississippi State University. He is currently editing a co-authored manuscript on the impacts of welfare reform in high poverty rural areas which has been accepted for publication by the Rural Sociological Society, and he is also conducting evaluation research for the SRDC on two initiatives designed to spur community and economic development in the Delta regions of Mississippi and Arkansas.

Elizabeth "Brooke" Kelly

Michigan State University
Department of Sociology

Dissertation Abstract
Full Dissertation

Elizabeth “Brooke” Kelly defended her dissertation, “Working for Work in Rural Michigan: A Study of How Low-income Mothers Negotiate Paid Work,” in 2004. She studied what it takes for low-income mothers in rural areas to get and keep a job in the context of welfare reform. Specifically, she focuses on “negotiating work,” or the invisible labor necessary to attain and sustain paid employment. Kelly used in-depth interviews to follow two sets of low-income mothers in different counties—one group, Latino migrants and the other, white, settled families—chronicling the experiences and obstacles the women face in managing employment. Her findings point to the varied experiences of the women based on the particular rural economies and life situations.

Kelly holds an MA in Sociology from Michigan State and a BA in Sociology from the University of Florida. Her research interests focus on race, class, and gender and their effects on inequality, the sociology of work, and welfare reform and economic structuring.

Kelly has just completed her first year of a tenure track position as an assistant professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke. She is involved in the Jobs for the Future project, a research project with the aim of documenting the impact of job losses for individuals, families, and communities in a high poverty county in North Carolina. She has published a paper, “Leaving and Losing Jobs: Resistance of Rural Low-Income Mothers,” in the Journal of Poverty this year. The paper is based on some of the data from her dissertation research on the backstage labors necessary for rural low-income mothers to get and keep employment.

Alina Oxendine

University of Minnesota
Department of Political Science

Dissertation Abstract

Alina Oxendine’s dissertation examines the link between social capital and income inequality by comparing the attitudes and behavior of individuals in stratified communities with those living in more cohesive communities. She uses cross-sectional, individual level survey data from a variety of national data sets and supplements the data with an original quasi-experimental survey that examines two rural communities that are demographically similar and that have similar mean income levels but that differ in how equally the income is distributed. She hypothesizes that economic inequality depresses social capital among both poor and wealthy groups by discouraging cross-class interaction and by creating frustration and alienation among the poor. She also posits that income inequality discourages the affluent from sympathizing with and helping the needy.

Oxendine has an MA in political science and a BA in international studies, both from Emory University. She is currently a visiting professor at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota teaching a course on economic inequality and public policy in the United States. She is finishing up her Ph.D. at the University of Minnesota and expects to be done by late summer. She will begin a tenure-track Assistant Professor position at Hamline University in Fall 2005. She will be teaching courses on urban politics, public policy, and American politics but plans to devote substantial time and attention to rural areas in the classroom.

She continues to work with the GrandNet research group at the University of Minnesota. They are developing two manuscripts for possible publication, both of which deal with electronic networks in rural towns and how they relate to civic engagement.

Timothy Slack

Pennyslvania State University
Department of Agricultural Economics and Rural Sociology

Dissertation Abstract

Timothy Slack successfully defended his dissertation, “Work, Welfare, and the Informal Economy: An Examination of Family Livelihood Strategies,” in July of 2004. His dissertation examines the alternative strategies used by poor rural families to make ends meet. These strategies include combining formal and informal work, barter, and self-provisioning. In addition, he will seek to uncover the barriers to and links between such strategies and formal employment and identify the motivations for and importance of these strategies to rural families. He is using a combination of cross-sectional, nationally representative data, in-depth interviews, and a telephone survey of 500 rural households in his study. Slack holds an MS in rural sociology and demography from Penn State and a BS in rural sociology from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He held a joint research assistantship with Penn State’s Center for Work and Family Research and the Department of Agricultural Economics and Rural Sociology. He has coauthored, with Leif Jensen, a number of publications on underemployment, with a focus on rural employment hardship.

Slack is now an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Louisiana State University, where he is also an affiliate of the Louisiana Population Data Center (LPDC) and the Louisiana Center for Rural Initiatives (LCRI). His primary research interests include social inequality and poverty, social demography, and work and labor markets. Tim continues to be involved in research related to rural poverty, including a project scheduled to begin this summer with colleagues at Texas A&M examining the patterns and determinants of poverty in two persistently poor rural regions, the Lower Mississippi Delta and the Texas Borderlands.