University of Kentucky alumna Nicole Lally says her interest in sociology was sparked at an early age.

When she was seven years old, Lally’s family moved from Cleveland to Elizabethtown. The change in environment was shocking, Lally said.

“On the street we lived on in Cleveland, there was so much diversity,” she said. “Elizabethtown just didn’t have those same demographics and even though I was a kid, I noticed. Some of my new friends at school would make comments about other groups of people and it just didn’t make any sense to me.”

In a high school English class, Lally was assigned an argument paper and began researching gay rights.

“I was immediately interested in anything to do with human rights,” she said. “All of the papers I was using for my research were written by sociologists and I just knew that’s what I wanted to study then.”

UK

Erin Pullen, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology, has received the institutional nomination for the Midwestern Association of Graduate Students (MAGS) Distinguished Master’s Thesis Award. Pullen's thesis will represent the University of Kentucky in the regional competition, which is open to theses from all disciplines.     

Pullen's thesis, “Rethinking the Cultural Cartography of Appalachia: Region as a Fundamental Social Cause of Drug Use”, was also awarded an the 2010 Outstanding Graduate Student Paper Award by the Section on Alcohol, Drugs, and Tobacco of the American Sociological Association.   

As a current board member of a company she boycotted during apartheid, Zohra Ebrahim is a dynamic testament to the New South Africa.

Ebrahim draws on her past of political activism, as well as a wealth of experience on corporate boards, to assess the role of women in contemporary South Africa.

Women have gained a great deal in the new South Africa. It is the third most equitable government in the world. Forty-five percent of parliament ministers are women.

Unfortunately, women have not entered the ranks of business in the same way. There are only 12 women on corporate boards of listed companies and only one female CEO in the whole country. Violence against women and children occurs frequently as well, due in part to the legacy of families destroyed by apartheid policies.

"South Africa has come so far so fast," Ebrahim said, "But these changes bring new

Ph.D. Student

by Saraya Brewer

photos by Mark Cornelison

With both a Master’s and a doctoral degree under her belt in the past eight years, you’d probably be safe to call Jenny Mooney an academic. Much of Mooney’s time over the past decade has been spent not in the classroom or library, however, but in various prisons and drug and alcohol treatment and research centers. For the most part, Mooney’s work – academic work and career work intertwined – has been centered at the University of Kentucky Center on Drug and Alcohol Research (CDAR), where she has conducted what she estimates to be thousands of interviews with research participants who identify themselves as substance users, most of them inmates. Mooney currently serves as a study director at CDAR for two studies funded by the

1) How long does it take to get to work on average for Lexington residents as compared to the rest of Kentucky?

2) How densely populated in Lexington compared to the rest of the state?

3) What is the percentage of female-owned businesses in Kentucky compared to the rest of the country?

These are the types of questions that the U.S. Census Bureau is able to provide when they work with the information they compile every 10 years. The first population census was taken in 1790 under the general direction of Thomas Jefferson, who was then Secretary of State.

Today, a University of Kentucky alumnus is the new director of the U.S. Census Bureau. Steven Murdock, who holds a masters and a doctorate in sociologyfrom UK, is currently the Texas state demographer and will head the 2010 census.

Ph.D. Student

Whether it has been in the fields of Guatemala, the rural landscape of Kentucky, or as a government official in Japan, Kiyo Sakamoto’s interest in the social aspects of agriculture has been the one constant that has propelled his work over the past 15 years.

After receiving his Bachelor of Science in Agriculture from Chiba University in his homeland of Japan, Sakamoto then worked with the Japan Overseas Cooperation Volunteers – a group “which is similar to the U.S. Peace Corps,” he said.

That landed him in Guatemala where he worked on agricultural recommendations and management issues for fruit cultivation in the developing Central American economy.

When he returned home two and a half years later, he took a position in the Japanese government  as a technical officer in the