New Section officers '21

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​Chair-Elect (3-Year term begins in '21 as Chair elect) Penny Edgell, University of Minnesota is a professor of Sociology at the University of Minnesota and identifies as a cultural sociologist who studies religion and non-religion in the United States and strives to understand how religion, non-religion, and spirituality influence moral culture. She is the author of Congregations in Conflict and Religion and Family in a Changing Society and co-editor of Religion is Raced. She is currently working on two NSF funded research projects. One related to religion and understanding controversial social issues and the second utilizes the American Mosaic Project to discover how religion is both a source of inclusion and exclusion in the United States.

Counsel Member (2-Year term begins in '21)
Monica Whitham, Oklahoma State University is an associate professor at Oklahoma State University and specializes in social psychology, urban and community sociology, and social networks. Broadly, her work examines processes through which social actors form, maintain, and utilize social connections in order to achieve individual and collective goals. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation and been published in top sociology journals, including the American Sociological Review, Social Psychology Quarterly, and City & Community.

Lijun Song, Vanderbilt University is an associate professor of sociology at Vanderbilt University. Her overarching research question is “what are the causes and consequences of social networks across society and time?” Her recent ASA awardwinning research contributes and examines a new theoretical framework on the double-edged (protective and detrimental) role of social networks across culture and society. Her work has appeared in journals such as Social Forces, Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Society and Mental Health, Social Psychology Quarterly, Social Science & Medicine, Social Networks, Sociological Perspectives, American Behavioral Scientist, Chinese Sociological Review, and Research in the Sociology of Work.

Michaela DeSoucey, North Carolina State University is an associate professor of sociology at North Carolina State University. Her research interests include culture, food politics, moral markets, consumption, and more recently the cultural intersections of risk, trust, and responsibility. She is the author of Contested Tastes: Foie Gras and the Politics of Food (Princeton University Press, 2016), and other recent work has appeared in Poetics, Organization Studies, and is forthcoming in Strategy Science.

Secretary Treasurer (3-Year term begins in '21)
Daniel Shank, Missouri University of Science & Technology is an assistant professor in the Department of Psychological Science at Missouri Science & Technology. He has an MS in Artificial Intelligence and a PhD in Sociology from the University of Georgia. His research interests involve social psychological approaches to interaction with and perception of artificial intelligence (AI) agents. Current projects include investigating how people differently judge morality, mind, uncertainty, and affective impressions of actions, recommendations, and creations of AIs compared to those of humans. He currently has grants from the Army Research Office, the Leonard Wood Institute, and the National Science Foundation.

Student Council Representatives (term begins in '21)
Rebeca Herrero Sáenz, University at Albany (SUNY) (1-year term) is a PhD candidate interested in the intersection between health and medicine, culture, and media. She is currently working on her dissertation, where she is examineing the public discourse on organ donation and transplantation in Spain and its implications for Spanish nationalism.

Rachel Underwood, Vanderbilt University (2-year term) is a PhD candidate with research interests examining the experiences of women, mental health, and poverty. She is a research advocate and has recently been awarded a Mellon Digital Humanities fellowship at Vanderbuilt University. Her dissertation focuses