Karen V. Hansen
Degrees
University of California, Berkeley, Ph.D.University of California, Santa Barbara, M.A.
University of California, Santa Barbara, B.A.
Expertise
Professor Hansen's research and teaching focus on the interplay of gender, class & race/ethnic inequalities; families and kinship; and historical sociology.Profile
Please visit my new faculty profile page.
Karen V. Hansen is leading a collaborative investigation of downward mobility. The project, “Cascading Lives: Stories of Loss, Resilience and Resistance,” has just been awarded funding by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in partnership with the Raikes Foundation. Together with her Co-PI, Nazli Kibria of Boston University, they are exploring the process of falling from a particular social location in ways that precipitate additional declines. Economic and social status often flows unevenly over a lifetime. However, most studies on social mobility focus on a specific moment in time. As an alternative approach, they are conducting life history interviews with those from diverse backgrounds who have experienced an economic shock to assess their personal, familial, and neighborhood settings; their emotions and key events; and how they relate to their economic circumstances. They will also harness the capacity of young people to change public opinions to develop effective strategies to disseminate the stories to their peers.
In another project, Learning and Teacher Leadership in a California High School, Professor Hansen studies the successful resurgence of a struggling, multiracial, working-class high school during a period of heightened interracial tensions. In the 1960s and early 1970s, as communities across the country violently and vociferously resisted school integration, the multiracial student body and racially diversifying staff of Sunnyvale High School reduced violence, nurtured student leaders, improved academics, and increased girls’ access to sports. Professor Hansen asks how – well before Title IX and other policy interventions – adults and youth created a culture of involvement, respectful inquiry, and mutual responsibility that forged lasting relationships between students and faculty across lines of race and ethnicity, long after the school itself closed.
Hansen’s most recent book, Encounter on the Great Plains: Scandinavian Settlers and the Dispossession of Dakota Indians, 1890-1930, won the 2016 Gita Chaudhuri Book Prize from the Western Association of Women Historians. Webpage
Courses Taught
| HIST/SOC | 216a | Migration, Dislocation and Dispossession in North American History |
| SOC | 130a | Families, Kinship and Sexuality |
| SOC | 140a | Investigating the Past: Historical Methods in Sociology |
| SOC | 300a | Approaches to Sociological Research |
Awards and Honors
Grand Challenges: Voices for Economic Opportunity Grant, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation & Raikes Foundation (2020 - 2021)
Honorary Doctorate of Philosophy, Doctorem Philosophiae Honoris Causa, University of Southern Denmark (2020)
Eastern Sociological Society Merit Award (2019 - 2020)
Book of the Month, Center for Great Plains Studies (2017)
Associate Fellow, Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska (2016 - 2017)
Gita Chaudhuri Prize, Western Association of Women Historians (2016 - 2017)
Fulbright "Distinguished Chair in American Studies," Uppsala University, Sweden (2015 - 2016)
Finalist, Great Plains Distinguished Book Award (2014)
Visiting Scholar, Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, Harvard University (2013 - 2015)
Fellow, Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, Harvard University (2012 - 2013)
Faculty Scholar, Student-Scholar Partnership Program (2009 - 2010)
John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2006 - 2007)
William J. Goode Book Award, Honorable Mention, American Sociological Association, Family Section (2006)
Dean of Arts and Sciences Mentoring Award for outstanding mentoring of students in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (2005)
Finalist, C.Wright Mills Award for Not-So-Nuclear Families: Class, Gender, and Networks of Care (2005)
Associate Senior Researcher, Berkeley Center for Working Families, University of California, Berkeley (1999 - 2000)
National Endowment for Humanities Fellowship (1999)
Norwegian Royal Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Emigration Fund of 1975 (1998)
Visiting Scholar, Henry A. Murray Research Center, Radcliffe College (1994 - 1996)
American Philosophical Society Grant (1992)
Marver and Sheva Bernstein Faculty Fellowship (1992 - 1993)
Andrew W. Mellon Faculty Fellowship in the Humanities, Harvard University (1991 - 1992)
Bunting Institute Fellow, Radcliffe College (1991 - 1992)
National Endowment for Humanities (summer) (1991)
Woodrow Wilson Research Grant in Women's Stuides (1988)
Gertrude Jaeger Prize, Most Outstanding Graduate Student Essay Written by a Woman in Sociology, University of California, Berkeley (1987 - 1988)
University of California-Berkeley Distinguished Teaching Assistant Award (1984 - 1985)
Scholarship
Hansen, Karen V.. "Reservation Borderlands: Gender and Scandinavian Land Taking on Native American Land." Swedish-American Borderlands: New Histories of Transatlantic Relations. Ed. Dag Blanck and Adam Hjorthén. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021. 1-19.
Hansen, Karen V. "A Great Way to Teach." HistoryMakers Digital Archive Newsletter May, 2020
Hansen, Karen V. and Samantha Leonard. "Reservation Homesteading: Norwegian Immigrant Women and Indian Dispossession, 1887-1934." Norwegian-American Essays 2020: Migration, minorities, and freedom of religion 16. (2020): 21-73.
Hansen, Karen V., Michael Strand, and Samantha Leonard. "Cascading: Gender and Race in an Age of Precarity." June, 2019.
Hansen, Karen V.. "Gendered Entanglements: Dakotas and Scandinavians at Spirit Lake, 1887-1930." Women's History Review 28. 1 (2019): 7-22.
Hansen, Karen V., Grey Osterud, and Valerie Grim. "‘Land was One of the Greatest Gifts’: Women's Landownership in Dakota, Scandinavian, and Black Communities." Great Plains Quarterly 38. 3 (2018): 251-272.
Hansen, Karen V.. "Entangled Encounters and the Oral Archive: Notes from the Field." Concurrent Imaginaries, Postcolonial Worlds: Toward Revised Histories. Ed. Diana Brydon, Peter Forsgen, and Gunlög Fur. Amsterdam: Brill Academic Publishers, 2017. 183-202.
Hansen, Karen V., Ken Chih-Yan Sun, and Debra Osnowitz. "Immigrants as Settler Colonists: Boundary Work between Dakota Indians and White Immigrant Settlers." Ethnic and Racial Studies (2016).
Hansen, Karen V. with Grey Osterud. "Landowning, Dispossession, and Land Use among Dakota and Scandinavian Women at Spirit Lake, 1900-1929." Gender and History 26. 1 (2014): 105-127.
Hansen, Karen V.. "Breaching Boundaries and Dowsing for Stories on the Great Plains." Open to Disruption: Time and Craft in the Practice of Slow Sociology. Ed. Rosanna Hertz, Margaret K. Nelson, and Anita Garey. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2014. 100-117.
Hansen, Karen V. Encounter on the Great Plains: Scandinavian Settlers and the Dispossession of Dakota Indians, 1890-1930. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Anita Ilta Garey and Karen V. Hansen. "Introduction: An Eye on Emotion in the Study of Families and Work." At the Heart of Work and Family: Engaging the Ideas of Arlie Hochschild. Ed. Anita Ilta Garey and Karen V. Hansen. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011. 1-14.
Hansen, Karen V. "Land Taking at Spirit Lake: The Competing and Converging Logics of Norwegian and Dakota Women, 1900-1930." Norwegian-American Women: Migration, Communities, and Identities. Ed. Betty Berglund and Lori Ann Lahlum. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2011. 211-245.
Hansen, Karen V. "The Asking Rules of Reciprocity." At the Heart of Work and Family: Engaging the Ideas of Arlie Hochschild. Ed. Anita Ilta Garey and Karen V. Hansen. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011. 112-123.
Hansen, Karen V. and Ken Chih-Yan Sun. "Localizing Transnational Norwegians: Exploring Nationalism, Language, and Labor Markets in Early Twentieth-Century North Dakota." Norwegian-American Essays, 2011 13. (2011): 73-107.
Hansen, Karen V., co-ed. Anita Ilta Garey, ed. At the Heart of Work and Family: Engaging the Ideas of Arlie Hochschild. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011.
Hansen, Karen V. "The Powers of Parental Observation: Constructing Networks of Care." Who's Watching? Daily Practices of Surveillance Among Contemporary Families. Ed. Margaret K. Nelson and Anita Ilta Garey. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2009. 175-191.
Hansen, Karen V. and Mignon Duffy. "Mapping the Dispossession: Scandinavian Homesteading at Fort Totten, 1900-1930." Great Plains Research 18. Spring (2008): 67-80.
Hansen, Karen V. Not-So-Nuclear Families: Class, Gender, and Networks of Care. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005.
Hansen, Karen V. "The Asking Rules of Reciprocity in Networks of Care for Children." Qualitative Sociology 12. 4 (2004): 421-437.
Hansen, Karen V., co-ed. Anita Garey. Families in the U.S.: Kinship and Domestic Politics. Temple University Press, 1998.
Hansen, Karen V. "‘No Kisses Is Like Youres’: An Erotic Friendship between African-American Women During the Mid-Nineteenth Century." Gender and History 7. 2 (1995): 153-182.
Hansen, Karen V. A Very Social Time: Crafting Community in Antebellum New England. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
Hansen, Karen V., co-ed. Ilene Philpson. Women, Class and the Feminist Imagination: A Socialist-Feminist Reader. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1990.