Jennifer Garfield-Abrams

Jennifer Garfield-Abrams Personal Website

I am a Doctoral Candidate in the Sociology Department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Whether a complex community study, an ethnography of polling places, or an interview-based examination of campus bullying culture, three core questions animate my research: 1) how do local organizations and community groups change and, at times, resist change?; 2) how are social and symbolic boundaries constructed and deconstructed; and 3) how is the wider symbolic and cultural order re-mapped through conflict between community groups? My qualitative research bridges sociologies of cities and communities, culture, and politics in projects on community change, partisanship and participatory democracy, and campus culture. My scholarship on how communities work in concert and conflict with extralocal organizations and agencies is published in Journal of Urban Affairs and International Journal of Urban and Regional Research.

What happens to a small town's collective sense of self and social order when successive waves of urban migrants move in? In my dissertation project, I examine how political culture shapes the social production of place and community life. Put simply, I ask: amidst deep division, spatial sorting, and renegotiation of our social order, how do we achieve community? Building on robust literatures that explore community change processes and politics as a system of meaning we use to organize our lives, I use ethnographic methods to investigate how community members in a small, gentrified city in New York’s Hudson Valley impute a political identity and culture on place, construct social and symbolic boundaries around political identity, and achieve community across difference through ‘recognition.’ This research is generously supported by the UMass Graduate School and UMass Sociology Department.

I am the outgoing Coordinating Editor for the American Sociological Review. I am also a dedicated teacher and have constructed core and elective classes for a variety of teaching contexts. In 2019 and 2020, I was a finalist for the UMass Office of the Provost’s Distinguished Teaching Award, the highest teaching honor awarded on campus.

2020     M.A., Sociology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

2014     B.A., Sociology and Public Policy, Hobart and William Smith Colleges

Community and Urban Sociology; Culture; Politics; Self and Identity; Sociological Theory; Ethnography, Qualitative, and Visual Methods

Garfield-Abrams, Jennifer L. and Jonathan R. Wynn. 2024. “Cultural Economy.” Oxford Bibliographies Online: Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press.

Garfield-Abrams, Jennifer L., Thomas Corcoran, & Jonathan Wynn. 2023. “The (Culture) War of the Worlds: ‘Terraforming’ as a Language for Urban Redevelopment” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 48(1): 53-73.

Garfield-Abrams, Jennifer L. 2023. “The Art of ‘Everyday Resistance:’ Small City Cultural Actors’ Disruption of Extralocal Growth Politics.” Journal of Urban Affairs: 1–18.

Garfield-Abrams, Jennifer L. 2022 “Mapping the Organizational Field of Social Welfare.” TRAILS: Teaching Resources and Innovations Library for Sociology, February. Washington DC: American Sociological Association.

Corcoran, Thomas, Jennifer Abrams, & Jonathan Wynn. 2019. “Place Exploration: Six Tensions to Better Conceptualize Place as a Social Actor in Urban Ethnography.” Pp. 91-111 in Research in Urban Sociology, Volume 16, Urban Ethnography: Legacies and Challenges, edited by Richard E. Ocejo. Leeds: Emerald Publishing.