Abe Neis-Eldridge

Abe is a fourth-year PhD Candidate in the Sociology Department. He came to the University of Kentucky in 2023 after having completed his masters studies at East Tennessee State University. There, he studied how political movements and fringe ideologies circulate via social media, and in the fall of 2022, laid the foundation for what will become his dissertation research. Currently, his research investigates guns in society, using theoretical framing through masculinity, rurality, and democratic theory. He is expecting to return to his fieldwork in the summer of 2027, where he will continue a participatory ethnography of a rural shooting range and interviews with those who attend it. 

Abe has worked in academic and nonacademic settings, and utilizes mixed methods to investigate complicated questions about the contemporary US. During his masters studies, he developed a sampling and coding protocol to investigate Facebook's content and group recommendation algorithm, even after Facebook (now Meta) terminated its independent research initiatives. Alongside this work, he was the head graduate research assistant at East Tennessee State University's Applied Social Research Laboratory. In that role, he assisted with inter-state research on post-Dobbs Decision contraception access, COVID-19 Pandemic student support, nonprofit grant writing, and community engaged program evaluation for Appalachian electrical utility providers.

Since coming to the University of Kentucky, he has supported research outreach to farmers in the rural Midwest, assisted facilitating democratic organizing for marginalized farmers in the Southeastern US, given planning and research support for international union organizing in and out of academia, and written collaborative work on research teams spanning from the departments of Communications, Community Leadership and Development, Sociology, and UK Cooperative Extension. He has also been an assistant to the historian for the Rural Sociological Society for three years, and from the winter of 2023-2025 has compiled archival submissions for the RSS national archives at the University of Missouri. In the summer of 2026, he completed a paid internship with EcoMetric Consulting, LLC.. There, he interviewed professional trades workers from across the US, consulted on energy efficiency programs, and assisted with data collection for Colorado and Minnesota state regulations. As a PhD student, Abe has also taught as a guest lecturer for research methods and criminology, and is currently is the instructor of record for SOC 101-201 in Fall 2026, and SOC 101-202 in Spring 2027.