I am a feminist sociologist, with interests in qualitative and feminist methodologies and the gendered organization of work, including unpaid work in families and elsewhere.  My early substantive research dealt with the household labor of “feeding the family,” and the historically female professional field of dietetics and nutrition education.  In both areas, I was especially interested in women’s “invisible work” and its significance for social life, as well as how these forms of gendered work are shaped by the social relations of class, race, and other dimensions of inequality.  I’ve also written extensively on research methods, focusing on strategies for interview research, feminist methodology, experimental formats for research writing, and the institutional ethnography (IE) approach associated with Dorothy Smith’s “sociology for women/people.”

I teach courses on qualitative and feminist research methods; race, class, and gender; and feminist organizations; and I advise students using qualitative and IE methods to investigate a range of topics.  Like most feminists, I am committed to building more inclusive institutions, in the academy and elsewhere.

My current research is concerned with family life outside the home.  In a series of studies, I’ve been using various methods to investigate the experiences of parents and children in public spaces, and the institutional regimes (of parenting, schooling, commerce, and so on) that shape those experiences.  I’m currently at work on a book based on naturalistic observation in zoos and similar leisure-time attractions.  I’ve also begun an interview study on “the family outing,” and a related investigation (with SU alum Catherine Richards Solomon) of textual mediations of these activities.  I’m collaborating with current Ph.D. student Jeremy Brunson on a component of this project that investigates the public character of family life when some in the family are Deaf.

A second major project is a collaborative investigation of work and work/life policies in the context of global economic restructuring.  Using a framework inspired by IE methodology, I’m examining (with my research collaborators) how the embodied lives of workers are affected by a “new economy” regime, which includes not only material changes but also rhetorical constructions of those changes, and the textual institutional technologies that engineer change in particular settings.  I’m working closely with Alison Griffith, at York University in Toronto, who is coordinating a similar effort focused on restructuring in the public sector.  (For more information, see http://faculty.maxwell.syr.edu/mdevault/Default-old.htm.)

In the area of methodology, my current activities are focused primarily on the development and institutionalization of the IE approach.  I participate actively in an informal international network of IE scholars and I maintain an IE website at http://faculty.maxwell.syr.edu/mdevault/Default.htm.
 

Selected publications--books:

Feeding the Family:  The Social Organization of Caring as Gendered Work.  University of Chicago Press, 1991.

Editor, A Complex Sorrow:  Reflections on Cancer and an Abbreviated Life by Marianne A. Paget.  Temple University Press, 1993.

Liberating Method:  Feminism and Social Research.  Temple University Press, 1999.

Selected publications--articles and essays:

Surplus and Scarcity:  Hunger and the Origins of the Food Stamp Program.  Social Problems 31(#5): 545-57, June, 1984.  With James P. Pitts.

Novel Readings:  The Social Organization of Interpretation.  American Journal of Sociology 95(#4): 887-921, January, 1990.

Talking and Listening from Women's Standpoint:  Feminist Strategies for Interviewing and Analysis.  Social Problems 37(#1): 96-116, February, 1990. 

Between Science and Food:  Nutrition Professionals in the Health-Care Hierarchy.  Pp. 287-312 in Research on the Sociology of Health Care, Jennie J. Kronenfeld (ed.), JAI Press, Inc., 1995.

Ethnicity and Expertise:  Racial-Ethnic Knowledge in Sociological Research.  Gender and Society 9 (#5): 612-31, October, 1995.

Talking Back to Sociology:  Distinctive Contributions of Feminist Methodology.   Annual Review of Sociology 22: 29-50, 1996.

Comfort and Struggle:  Emotion Work in Family Life.  Annals of the American Academy for Political and Social Sciences 561: 52-63, January 1999.

Producing Family Time:  Practices of Leisure Activity Beyond the Home. Qualitative Sociology 23 (#4): 485-503, 2000.

Institutional Ethnography:  Using Interviews to Investigate Ruling Relations (With Liza McCoy).  Pp. 751-76 in Handbook of Interview Research, eds. Jaber Gubrium and James Holstein. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2002. 

Families and Children:  Together, Apart.  American Behavioral Scientist 46 (#10): 1296-1305, 2003.

What is Description?  (One Ethnographer's View).  Perspectives (ASA Theory Section Newsletter), 27 (#1): 4, January, 2004.