Faculty Research & Teaching Concentration Area:

Identities & Inequalities

Questions about individual and collective identities and widespread inequalities guide much of the research conducted by many sociologists and anthropologists in our department.  How do we conceptualize and understand race, class, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexuality and other axes of identity and social and economic stratification?  In what ways do they interrelate, shape our experience, and inform the ways we relate to others at individual, community and international levels?  What are the causes of inequality? How do globalization and other cross-border processes affect the distribution of resources, the differential insertion of individuals and regions into the economy, and issues of identification?  What connections are there among local, transnational and global phenomena?  How does ideology shape what we perceive and how we act in this world increasingly divided along lines of identity and inequality?  The FIU Sociology and Anthropology faculty consider the research areas encompassed by these questions as one of our departmental strengths and as foundational to systematic comprehension of the human condition.

Courses in Concentration

       Associated Faculty And Research Interests

Jerry B. Brown, Founding Professor  jbbrown@gate.net  
Ph.D.,Cornell University, 1972

Dr. Brown is an applied anthropologist whose current research focuses on Mexico, environmental health, and social movements. He is co-author of Profiles in Power: The Antinuclear Movement and the Dawn of the Solar Age, and of journal articles on radiation, public health and energy. Over the past three decades, he has worked with innovative public interest organizations, such as Cesar Chavez's United Farm Workers union, Business Executives for National Security, and the Radiation and Public Health Project, a research organization investigating the relationship between environmental radiation and cancer. Dr. Brown is a Trustee and Fellow of the World Business Academy, whose mission is to explore the unique role that business leaders can play in shaping a positive and sustainable global future. He is an affiliated faculty member of the Environmental Studies Program and the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program, and a Researcher with the Global Entrepreneurship Center. Dr. Brown has won several teaching awards at the University and teaches courses on Cultural Anthropology, Mexico, Society and Technology, and Social Movements. 

Stephen M. Fjellman, Professor      fjellman@fiu.edu
Ph.D., Stanford University, 1971

Dr. Fjellman is a post postmodernist, seeking some understanding in the world without throwing up his hands in random dismay. When pressed, he claims to be an anthropologist. His most important field site is World Disney World. He is a member of the Church of Baseball, the Mickey Mouse Club, and the Fellowship of the Ecology of Mind. He has published in 11 fields and subfields, among them linguistic, mathematical, psychological, and social anthropology, social theory, African Studies, culture studies, science fiction studies, technology studies, American studies, and Disney Studies. Vinyl Leaves: Walt Disney World and America is worth reading. Among his works is A Little Baseball Music: Journey to the Heartland, available at this website. He has won all the teaching awards available at the University and his main life interest is in undergraduate education. He directs the Honors College Study Abroad Program in Italy. 

Chris Girard, Associate Professor      girardc@fiu.edu
Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1988

Dr. Girard is a specialist in quantitative methods. His research interests have a wide focus, although in recent years the major emphasis has been on race and ethnicity. With funds granted by the WAGES Board, he is currently examining the fate of individuals leaving welfare in Miami-Dade County. The study analyzes differences between Cubans and Blacks with regard to their finding jobs and rising out of poverty. Dr. Girard has also investigated the effect racial segregation has had on the relocation of blacks away from areas damaged by Hurricane Andrew. Single-author publications include an article in the American Sociological Review: "Age, Gender, and Suicide: A Cross-National Analysis", as well as a research note on suicide in the American Journal of Sociology. Another area that Dr. Girard has investigated is sexual risk-taking among adolescents, resulting in an article in the International Journal of Adolescence and Youth. Earlier in his career, he published on health maintenance organizations and health services management. He teaches courses on race and ethnicity, marriage and the family, social problems, and advanced research methods. 

Hugh Gladwin, Associate Professor  gladwin@fiu.edu
Ph.D., Stanford University, 1970.
Director, Institute for Public Opinion Research

Dr. Gladwin directs FIU's Institute for Public Opinion Research. His main interest is the application of survey research and cultural analysis to understand culturally and demographically diverse urban settings. A particular interest is to model interaction between the human population and natural systems such as the South Florida ecosystem and extreme natural events like hurricanes. As someone who is both anthropologist and survey researcher, he finds geographic information systems (GIS) the most useful research tool, one that enables ethnography to communicate with statistical sampling in studying regions inhabited by millions of people. He is a co-editor of Hurricane Andrew: Ethnicity, Gender, and the Sociology of Disaster. 

Liliana Goldín, Professor      goldin@fiu.edu
Director, Graduate Program
Ph.D., State University of New York - Albany, 1986.

Dr. Goldín's research focuses on issues related to economic restructuring in rural Latin America, economic strategies of Maya and non-Maya people in Guatemala, and the processes of economic and cultural change. Recent projects include the study of economic and social differentiation in a garment producing township of western Guatemala, the socioeconomic impact of non-traditional agricultural exports in townships of the central highlands of Guatemala, and the economic strategies of very poor women in a peripheral area of Guatemala City. She is currently working on a monograph entitled Ideology in Production: A Cultural Economy of Rural Guatemala where she explores attitudes towards the economy in the context of various economic practices. She is also interested in the labor conditions that Latin American migrants encounter in the United States and the processes of identity formation in the context of transnationalism. Her books include Procesos Globales en el Campo de Guatemala. Opciones Económicas y Transformaciones Ideológicas. and Identities on the Move: Transnational Processes in North America and the Caribbean Basin. 

Guillermo J. Grenier, Professor       grenierg@fiu.edu
Ph.D., University of New Mexico, 1985

Dr. Grenier was born in Havana, Cuba, and received his undergraduate education at Emory University and Georgia State University in Atlanta. He received his Ph.D. from the University of New Mexico. He is the author of Inhuman Relations: Quality Circles and Anti-Unionism in American Industry. Other books include Employee Participation and Labor Law in the American Workplace; Miami Now: Immigration, Ethnicity and Social Change; Newcomers in the Workplace:Immigrants and the Restructuring of the US Economy; and This Land is Our Land: Newcomers and Established Residents in Miami. He has written numerous articles on labor and ethnic issues in the United States and conducts yearly surveys on the attitudes of the Cuban-American community towards Cuba. 

Abraham D. Lavender, Professor  lavender@fiu.edu
Ph.D., University of Maryland, 1972

Dr. Lavender is a sociologist specializing in ethnicity, emphasizing the Jewish community, but also including Hispanic (mostly Cuban) politics in Miami-Dade, black culture in Miami-Dade, and French Huguenots. Five of his six books study ethnicity (see link to CV). Studying descendants of secret Jews of the Spanish-Portuguese diaspora is a special interest. He has received outstanding teacher awards, and shows his love of teaching by having one of the department's heaviest teaching loads including ethnicity, sexuality, social deviance, political sociology, and sociology through film. Dr. Lavender has applied his sociology in Miami Beach as special assistant to the mayor, vice-chair of the Housing Authority, chair of the Homeless Committee, and founding president of the Miami Beach Historical Association. As president of the local Phi Beta Kappa Association, he worked diligently to help FIU obtain a PBK chapter for its students. Dr. Lavender is president of the national Society for Crypto-Judaic Studies.

Barry B. Levine, Professor   levineb@fiu.edu
Ph.D., Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research, 1973.

Dr. Levine's main theoretical interest is the relationship between society and the individual; particularly the degree to which societies foster or thwart human vitality. This is one of the issues behind his widely regarded Benjy Lopez, A Picaresque Tale of Emigration and Return, as well as behind his work-in-progress, Who Gets to Make What for Whom: Teddy Snyder in the Age of Sociology. He was editor of the award-winning Caribbean Review. Among his publications are: El desafío neoliberal: el fin de tercermundismo en América Latina; The New Cuban Presence in the Caribbean; The Caribbean Exodus; and Problemas de desiguldad social en Puerto Rico. He teaches graduate and undergraduate theory courses, is the department webster and faculty advisor to the department's graduate student society. He is a Founding Professor of the University

Sarah J. Mahler, Associate Professor            mahlers@fiu.edu
Ph.D., Columbia University, 1992

Dr. Mahler is a cultural anthropologist and a specialist on international migration and the transnational ties that migrants sustain and build between their homelands and their adoptive countries. Her research has focused primarily on migrations from Central America and the Caribbean to the United States. In recent years she has pioneered research on how gender relations are negotiated transnationally, co-authoring a special volume on this issue in the journal Identities: Global Studies on Culture and Power and articles in the International Migration Review. She has studied the role religion plays in the lives of different immigrant groups in Miami and the transnational religious ties that link several countries, including Cuba and Nicaragua, to Miami. Among her publications are two books documenting the lives of Salvadorans in the U.S., American Dreaming: Immigrant Life on the Margins and Salvadorans in Suburbia. 

Lisandro Pérez, Professor
Ph.D., University of Florida, 1974

Dr. Pérez has a lifelong interest in Cuban migration to the U.S., the dynamics of the Cuban-American community, and social change in Cuba. His writings have appeared in the Latin American Research Review, the Journal of Latin American Studies, and the International Migration Review. He is the editor of the journal Cuban Studies and the co-author of The Legacy of Exile: Cubans in the U.S. In 1991, he founded FIU's Cuban Research Institute and developed it into the premier academic center in the

Jean Muteba Rahier, Associate Professor               jrahier@fiu.edu
Ph.D., Université de Paris X, Nanterre, France, 1994
Editor, Journal of Latin American Anthropology

As a social and cultural anthropologist, Dr. Rahier's primary focus is on identity processes in the African diaspora in Latin America. His approach to the study of identity processes is through the analysis of festivities and rituals, beauty contests, oral traditions, the imagination of plantation history, the analysis of representations of blackness in the press as well as the representations of Africa and Africans in films. Most of his fieldwork has been in the Province of Esmeraldas and the Chota-Mira Valley, Ecuador. Dr. Rahier was born in what was then the Belgian Congo, from a Congolese mother and a Belgian father and grew up in Belgium. He is planning research on inter-racial intimacy in the Belgian Congo; this has led to study of the Belgian Congo archives now located in Brussels. His courses all relate to Africa and or the African diaspora. Dr. Rahier coordinates international graduate summer seminar, "Interrogating the African Diaspora" which is funded by the Ford Foundation, 2004-06. 

Alex Stepick, Professor         stepick@fiu.edu
Ph.D., University of California at Irvine, 1974
Director, Immigration and Ethnicity Institute

Richard Tardanico, Associate Professor and Chair               tardanic@fiu.edu
Ph.D., Johns Hopkins University, 1979

Dr. Tardanico's current research centers on Central America, and focuses on issues such as neoliberal restructuring and the poor; urbanization and social inequality; sustainable agriculture and campesino households .He has published on Mexico, Colombia and Costa Rica where he was a Fulbright scholar (1985-87). Following his Fulbright, he studied the contemporary interplay of the world political economy on Latin American cities. His edited books include Crises in theCaribbean Basin; Global Restructuring, Employment, and Social Inequality in Urban Latin America; and Poverty or Development: Global Restructuring and Regional Transformations in the US South and the Mexican South (with Mark B. Rosenberg). His publications have appeared in journals such as Comparative Studies in Society and History, Politics and Society, Theory and Society, Studies in Comparative International Development, and International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. 

Dennis Wiedman, Associate Professor         wiedmand@fiu.edu
Ph.D. University of Oklahoma, 1979
Coordinator, Undergraduate Program