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Karen V. Hansen

Karen V. Hansen joined Brandeis in 1989 after finishing her Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley. She teaches courses in gender, class and race; families and kinship; biography and society; historical methods; and feminist theory.

Hansen has just published a new collection, At the Heart of Work and Family: Engaging the Ideas of Arlie Hochschild, in collaboration with Anita Ilta Garey. These essays present original research on cutting-edge topics by leading scholars who engage the conceptual framework developed by the well-known sociologist Arlie Hochschild. They connect micro-level interaction to larger social and economic forces. At the Heart illustrates the power of linking economic structures to emotional life for understanding contemporary work–family dilemmas.

Hansen is currently working on Encounter on the Great Plains: Scandinavian Immigrants and Dakota Indians at Spirit Lake, 1890-1930, an historical project for which she received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. Encounter on the Great Plains begins on the Spirit Lake Dakota Indian Reservation, where Scandinavian homesteaders took land in the early twentieth century, and became both the neighbors of the Dakota Sioux and the usurpers of the land. Until now, no one has written about the origins and experiences of the ethnically mixed communities that coexisted on reservations. Encounter on the Great Plains explores a thirty-year period of landtaking, documents the Dakota response to the encroaching settlers, and shows how the Scandinavians disproportionately came to benefit. It chronicles the mingled and separate stories of the Dakotas and the immigrants—women and men, farmers, domestic servants, and day laborers—and their shared and contrasting struggles to maintain a language, practice a culture, and honor loyalties to more than one nation.

Read an interview with Hansen in the Network News: A Work-Family News Publication.

Hansen's 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 American Sociological Association 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 argues for the importance of studying families embedded in kinship and community contexts in order to fully understand how working parents manage the crisis of care that is structurally produced and individually experienced.

Research for this project was conducted while 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), 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 19th century. In addition to writing numerous articles exploring the themes of friendship, sexuality, 19th century masculinity, and the household division of labor, she has edited two anthologies: Families in the U.S.: Kinship and Domestic Politics, (with Anita Ilta Garey, Temple University Press, 1998) and Women, Class, and the Feminist Imagination (with Ilene J. Philipson, Temple University Press, 1990).

Hansen has received generous institutional support for her research, most unfailingly from Brandeis in the form of Theodore and Jane Norman Fund for Faculty Research grants. A John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, 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 facilitated time and travel to conduct research for Encounter on the Great Plains. For earlier projects, Hansen 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. She has been a Bunting Institute Fellow, 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

	"At the Heart of Work and Family: Engaging the Ideas of Arlie Hochschild"
	"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. (PDF)

"Changing Definitions of Families," Sloan Work and Family Research Network, Boston College. Posted, October, 2005.

"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.

"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.

"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.