Friday, April 25 2025, 10 - 11:30am Miller Learning Center 214 Sponsored by the Sociology Graduate Student Society, please join us as we welcome Dr. Lisa Wade from the University of Tulane for her talk titled "Tested: Life with Covid at an American Party School" What is the value of social science to STEM? Dr. Lisa Wade argues that knowledge based in the STEM fields—science, tech, engineering, and math—cannot be successfully deployed in a vacuum. Using a case study of students navigating co-residence, friendship, sex, love, and parties while attending college in person during the pre-vaccine Covid-19 pandemic, she shows how the science of disease prevention was stymied by a failure to attend to the social, cultural, and moral forces that roiled students’ decision-making. Her conclusions are important for future public health crises, but also extend to all STEM-based interventions that simultaneously hold promise for and imperil our future. Biography Lisa Wade is Associate Professor of Sociology. She is also a core faculty member in the Gender and Sexuality Studies Program and an affiliate of the Newcomb Institute. Research Interests Dr. Wade's publication record includes work on college hookup culture, the sociology of the body, and U.S. discourse about female genital cutting, all of which reflect her theoretical interest in gender and its intersections, sexuality, culture, and the body. In 2017, she published American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus. The text situates collegiate hookup culture within the history of sexuality, the evolution of higher education, and the unfinished feminist revolution. Wade maps out a punishing emotional landscape marked by unequal pleasures, competition for status, and sexual violence. She discovers that privileged students tend to enjoy hookup culture the most, and considers its effects on racial and sexual minorities, students who “opt out,” and those who participate ambivalently. Dr. Wade’s current research project documents undergraduate life during COVID-19, revealing how institutional forces and interpersonal dynamics shaped students’ capacities to make more and less cautious decisions regarding the virus. In addition to publishing academic research, Dr. Wade is well-known for delivering conversational yet compelling translations of sociological theory and research. She is the co-author of Gender: Ideas, Interactions, Institutions (with Myra Marx Ferree) and the author of Terrible Magnificent Sociology, an introduction to sociology text. As a public-facing scholar, Lisa works to make her and others’ scholarship engaging to a public audience. She specializes, in other words, in being as comfortable “in the weeds” as she is “in the clouds.” In 2007, she founded Sociological Images, a website for which she earned several awards, including the Distinguished Contributions to Teaching Award from the American Sociological Association. Today, she regularly informs journalism and writes for the general public, occasionally appearing on television and radio. You can find Lisa online at lisa-wade.com, on Twitter at @lisawade, and at Threads and Instagram T @lisawadephd. Sociology Graduate Student Society Type of Event: Colloquia
