Elizabeth Klainot-Hess, PhD
I am an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Criminology at Capital University. I received my PhD in Sociology in 2020 from the Ohio State University. My research and teaching interests include work, labor and labor movements, social movements, gender, social inequality, education, and qualitative methods. My research explores how the emergence and growth of contingent and precarious work creates and reproduces inequality as well as how workers respond to these new forms of work and the inequality they create. I have extensive teaching experience and have taught and designed courses for 12 years and am very interested in the scholarship of teaching and learning. I have published in TRAILS: Teaching Resources and Innovations Library for Sociology.
Research
My dissertation research was a qualitive study of contingent faculty at large public research universities based on in-depth interviews with one hundred contingent faculty. I also wrote a book based on this research which has a revise and resubmit at Temple University Press. Most of the research on contingent faculty has focused on variation and inequality between contingent and tenure-track faculty, but this obscures important sources of variation and inequality among contingent faculty. The argument of my book is that inequality among contingent faculty themselves is a key obstacle to collective responses to the restructuring and corporatization of higher education. In my book I argue that variation in job pathway and the role of income in the household intersect to create fault lines that divide contingent faculty, leading to differences in job satisfaction and quality of life, and creating barriers to collective action. This research has important implications for understanding other types of contingent or nonstandard professional workers, and sheds light on the consequences of the transformation of higher education. An article based on this dissertation has been published in Research in the Sociology of Work, another article has been published in Labor Studies Journal, and I wrote a book manuscript based on this research which has a revise and resubmit at Temple University Press.
I have also conducted research on the labor movement response to anti-collective bargaining legislation, which has been published in Sociological Focus, and I have conducted research with colleagues on the overrepresentation of women in involuntary part-time work, which has been published in Sociological Perspectives.
Elizabeth Klainot-Hess 