Laura Hamilton is Professor and Chair of Sociology at the University of California, Merced. Broadly, her interests include higher education, organizations, social class, gender, intersectionality, family, and mixed research methods. Hamilton earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in sociology from Indiana University in 2003 and 2010, respectively, and her B.A. in sociology from DePauw University in 2001. She is co-founder of the DataHub and the Higher Education Race & the Economy (HERE) Lab with colleague Charlie Eaton.
Hamilton's first book, equally-authored with Elizabeth A. Armstrong, Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality uses an ethnographic and longitudinal case study of a moderately selective public university to gain insight into why so many students leave college with so little to show for it, and for whom this is most likely to be the case. This book was awarded the 2015 American Sociological Association (ASA) Distinguished Book Award, the Sociology of Education Section Pierre Bourdieu Book Award, and numerous other regional and sectional awards.
Hamilton’s second, solo-authored, book, Parenting to a Degree: How Family Matters for College and Beyond, vividly captures the parenting approaches of the mothers and fathers of women featured in Paying for the Party as their daughters move through college and into the workforce. Hamilton finds that successfully navigating a large public university without involved parents is near impossible. Unfortunately, very few parents can play this role. Parenting to a Degree offers an incisive look into a new—and profoundly problematic—relationship between universities and parents. The book was awarded the 2018 Sociology of Education Section Pierre Bourdieu Book Award.
Hamilton's third book, equally-authored with Kelly Nielsen Broke: The Racial Consequences of Underfunding Public Universitiestells an organizational story about two “new universities” with high research ambitions serving low-income students of color in California. The term “broke” has a triple meaning. We refer to the “broken” postsecondary system that segregates students by both race and social class, the extent to which new universities—far more than predominately white research institutions—are fiscally “broke” in a country that has defunded public higher education, and the promise of new universities to “break” the mold for a research university by challenging status hierarchies based on student background. BROKE has been awarded the 2022 Sociology of Education Section Pierre Bourdieu Book Award, the 2022 Organizations, Occupations, and Work Max Weber Award for Distinguished Scholarship Honorable Mention, and is a finalist for the 2021 Society for the Study of Social Problems C. Wright Mills Award.
Courses
This course introduces students to the doing of qualitative research, primarily participant observation and in-depth interviewing, through a variety of activities. We will focus primarily on being “in the field,” that is, on the collection of data, while also learning about analyzing and presenting the data. In this course, we will learn from reading others’ accounts of fieldwork, “how-to” books on qualitative work, and published exemplars as well as from doing qualitative research and talking to each other about our research practices.
In this class we explore how external forces (like politics, financial support, and demographics of the population) shape how schools work, how internal institutional arrangements sort and channel students in different directions, what factors shape student achievement and behavior, and how schooling influences where individuals end up in society. The course is designed around a number of case studies of K-12 schools, as well as post-secondary institutions.
This upper-level course is designed for a small group of students, up to 35. In the class, I seek to build studentsí knowledge of sociological perspectives on the family while strengthening their written and oral communication skills. The class is discussion based, and driven by student participation. I encourage critical thinking about how data on the family are collected, analyzed, and presented as "fact." Students also employ critical thinking skills in a final term paper project that is developed over the course of the semester, on a topic of their choice.
This upper-level course is designed for between 50-75 students. The class provides the students with empirical evidence and theoretical frameworks necessary to understand the K-12 and postsecondary educational systems in the United States. The class is discussion based, and focused on honing students’ critical thinking skills. Students must complete two mini-paper assignments designed to build their writing skills.
I have taught this introductory survey course to large groups ranging from 75 to 120 students. In the classroom, I use structured class discussions to promote student engagement, assign in-class writing on weekly readings, utilize small groups to involve even the most reserved students in class activities, and bring research and media familiar to students' lives as a way of illustrating key sociological concepts. I often incorporate my own research on collegiate cultures to demonstrate both how to do research and ways that sociology intersects with their own worlds.
