In August 2015, Murphy Institute Prof. Ruth Milkman became President of the American Sociological Association (ASA). This month’s ASA footnotes features a profile of Prof. Milkman by Sarah Jaffe.

Jaffe begins by highlighting Milkman’s commitment to “doing research that speaks to the issues of the day,” explaining:

That mindset has led her to crisscross the country, from the East Coast to California and back again, to dig into historical archives to uncover the struggles of women workers during the Great Depression, to hang out in factories with autoworkers trying to save an industry being dismantled, to follow immigrant janitors as they disrupted an entire city, and to trace the beginnings of the Occupy Wall Street uprising.

To further illustrate the vitality of Milkman’s work, Jaffe describes her engagement with the Occupy movement:

Milkman recalls the total devastation among labor people after Scott Walker’s attacks on unions in Wisconsin, and the elation that many felt when the Occupy encampment in Manhattan’s financial district spawned similar camps across the country. “It just felt so compelling to me, and I wanted to document it somehow,” she says. She moved quickly to find collaborators and apply for funding, but the NYPD was a little bit quicker and evicted the occupants of Zucotti Park two days after the funding came in. She and sociologists Stephanie Luce and Penny Lewis, her Murphy Institute colleagues, nevertheless put together one of the first published studies of the movement, which has been widely cited in both popular media and scholarly publications.

[…]

Occupy also brought Milkman to study the so-called Millennial generation, a subject of her current work. “If we are in a new movement moment, as some people think, they’re it. So we’ve got to pay attention to what they’re about.” As always, she is learning from her students as they learn from her.

For the full profile, visit ASA Footnotes.