Karen V. Hansen
Chair, Department of Sociology
Professor of Sociology & Women's and Gender Studies
American History Core Graduate Faculty
email: khansen@brandeis.edu
|
Focus of Research Feminist Theory, Sociology of Families, Comparative and Historical Methods, Networks and Communities, Sociology of Gender. Education Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, 1989. |
Karen V. Hansen, Professor of Sociology & Women's and Gender Studies, came to Brandeis University in 1989 after finishing her Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley. She teaches courses in feminist theory, sociology of families, women's biography and society, and historical methods.
Professor Hansen is currently working on an historical project, Encounter on the Great Plains: Scandinavian Settlers and Spirit Lake Dakota Indians, 1900-1930, for which she received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. Encounter on the Great Plains examines the transcultural exchange between the Dakota and Scandinavian homesteaders who lived at the Fort Totten Indian Reservation at the turn of the twentieth century. With white settlement, the reservation became a “contact zone.” This project explores the effects of land-taking on the community that emerges in its aftermath by using the multiple methods of historical sociology – a combination of statistical analysis, archival research, and oral history. Through analyzing the dynamic changes in one geographic place, it seeks to theorize how legally-encoded and socially-enacted inequality simultaneously produced conflict, mutuality, and cooperation.
Read an Interview with Professor Hansen in the Network News: A Work-Family News Publication: http://wfnetwork.bc.edu/The_Network_News/30/newsletter.shtml
Professor Hansen's most recent book, Not-So-Nuclear Families: Class, Gender, and Networks of Care (Rutgers University Press, 2005), investigates the lives of working families and the networks they construct to help them care for their school-age children. A recipient of the William J. Goode Book Award, Honorable Mention from the ASA Family Section, its stories vividly illustrate the conflicts, hardships, and triumphs of four families that span the economic spectrum (working class, middle class, professional middle class, and upper class). It examines how working parents manage the crisis of care -- the shortage of responsible adults with sufficient time to attend to the needs of their kin -- that is structurally produced and individually experienced. Not-So-Nuclear Families details the complex relationships between the adults in the ways they sustain a safe environment for their children and cultivate emotional and practical support for the parents. A network constructed around care for children quickly broadens to a system of sharing and trading about all aspects of life. Sociological studies of child rearing that focus exclusively on nuclear families assume that they are isolated. Those portraits, so gripping in the U.S. cultural imagination, inadequately capture the ebb and flow of people in and out of children's lives.
Research for this project was conducted while Professor Hansen was an Associate Senior Researcher at the Berkeley Center for Working Families at the University of California. An Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Grant generously supported her time at the Center.
In her first book, A Very Social Time: Crafting Community in Antebellum New England (University of California Press, 1994), Professor Hansen maps the everyday lives of working people in order to theorize their experience and to broaden the scholarly terms of debate regarding social structure in the nineteenth century. In addition to writing numerous articles exploring the themes of visiting, friendship and sexuality, nineteenth century masculinity, and the household division of labor, she has edited two anthologies: Families in the U.S.: Kinship and Domestic Politics, (edited with Anita Ilta Garey, Temple University Press, 1998) and Women, Class, and the Feminist Imagination (edited with Ilene J. Philipson, Temple University Press, 1990).
Professor Hansen has received generous institutional support for her research, most unfailingly from Brandeis University in the form of Theodore and Jane Norman Fund grants for Faculty Research (formerly Mazer Grants). A National Endowment for the Humanities, Fellowship for University Teachers and an "Emigration Fund of 1975" Grant from the Norwegian Royal Ministry of Foreign Affairs have also facilitated time and travel to conduct research for Legacy and Land. In the past Hansen has received an Andrew W. Mellon Faculty Fellowship in the Humanities at Harvard University, and an American Sociological Association/National Science Foundation Small Grant for Advancement of the Discipline. In addition she has been a Bunting Institute Fellow and a Visiting Scholar at the Henry A. Murray Research Center at Radcliffe College, and a Kate B. and Hall J. Peterson Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society.
Recent Publications
Books
 |
Not-So-Nuclear Families: Class, Gender, and Networks of Care. Rutgers University Press, 2005. |
 |
Families in the U.S: Kinship and Domestic Politics (edited with Anita Ilta Garey). Temple University Press, 1998. |
 |
A Very Social Time: Crafting Community in Antebellum New England. University of California Press, 1994. |
 |
Women, Class, and the Feminist Imagination: A Socialist-Feminist Reader (edited with Ilene J. Philipson). Temple University Press, 1990. |
Selected Articles
"Mapping the Dispossession: Scandinavian Homesteading at Fort Totten, 1900-1930," (with Mignon Duffy), _Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences_ 18 (Spring 2008): 67-80.
Changing Definitions of Families," Sloan Work and Family Research Network, Boston College. http://wfnetwork.bc.edu/topic
"The Asking Rules of Reciprocity in Networks of Care for Children," Qualitative Sociology, 27:4 (Winter 2004): 419-435.
"Care and Kinship: An Introduction" (with Anita Garey, Rosanna Hertz, and Cameron Macdonald) Journal of Family Issues, 23:6 (September 2002): 703-715. As part of this project we solicited articles and edited two special issues of Journal of Family Issues on "Care and Kinship," 23:6 (September) and 23:7 (October).
"Staging Reciprocity and Mobilizing Networks in Working Families," Working Paper Series, No. 33, Center for Working Families, University of California, Berkeley, April, 2002. http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/wfnetwork/loppr/bwpaper.html#H
"Expression of Community," (with Nicholas Townsend) International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, edited by Neil J. Smelser and Paul B. Baltes, Elsevier, Oxford, UK, Vol.4, 2001, pp. 2355-9.
Review of Care Work: Gender, Labor, and the Welfare State, edited by Madonna Harrington Meyer. American Journal of Sociology, 107:3 (November 2001): 836-837.
"Class Contingencies in Networks of Care for School-Aged Children," Working Paper Series, No. 27, Center for Working Families, University of California, Berkeley, May, 2001. http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/wfnetwork/loppr/bwpaper.html#H
"Sociability and Gendered Spheres: Visiting Patterns in Nineteenth-Century New England," (with Cameron Macdonald) Social Science History, 25:4 (Winter 2001): 537-563.
"Historical Sociology and the Prism of Biography: Lillian Wineman and the Trade in Dakota Beadwork, 1893-1929," Qualitative Sociology 22:4 (Winter 1999): 353-368.
"Rediscovering the Social: Visiting Practices in Antebellum New England and the Limits of the Public/Private Dichotomy," in Public and Private in Thought and Practice: Perspectives on a Grand Dichotomy, edited by Krishan Kumar and Jeff Weintraub. University of Chicago Press, 1997, pp. 268-302.
"'No Kisses Is Like Youres': An Erotic Friendship between African-American Women During the Mid-Nineteenth Century," Gender and History 7:2 (August 1995): 153-182.
"Surveying the Dead Informant: Quantitative Analysis and Historical Interpretation," (with Cameron Macdonald) Qualitative Sociology 18:2 (May 1995): 227-236.
"Feminist Conceptions of Public and Private: A Critical Analysis," Berkeley Journal of Sociology, 32 (1987): 105-128.
"Women's Unions and the Search for Political Identity," Socialist Review, 86 (March-April, 1986): 67-95.