Department of Sociology

Karen V. Hansen

Victor and Gwendolyn Beinfield Professor of Sociology,
Emerita Professor, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Core Graduate Faculty, American History
Past Chair, Families Section, American Sociological Association

Victor and Gwendolyn Beinfield Professor of Sociology, Emerita. 

Karen V. Hansen’s new book, "Working-Class Kids and Visionary Educators in a Multiracial High School: A Story of Belonging," co-authored with Nicholas Monroe, PhD '21, centers on a beleaguered working-class high school in California during the 1970s, a decade of heightened interracial tensions. As communities across the country violently and vociferously resisted school integration, the multiracial student body and racially diversifying staff collaborated to reduce violence, nurture student leaders, broaden the curriculum, and increase girls’ access to sports. The book chronicles how adults and youth created a culture of involvement and mutual responsibility, forging lasting relationships between students and faculty across lines of race and ethnicity which have endured to the present, long after the school itself closed in 1981.

Exploring the nexus of gender, class, and racial-ethnic inequality, Hansen is currently co-directing a collaborative investigation of downward mobility. Together with Nazli Kibria of Boston University, she founded "Cascading Lives: Stories of Loss, Resilience, and Resistance," a project funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in partnership with the Raikes Foundation. The project explores “cascading,” the process of experiencing crisis and loss in ways can lead to additional, successive economic declines in the life of an individual or a family.

Hansen’s 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. With Anita Ilta Garey, she co-edited At the Heart of Work and Family: Engaging the Ideas of Arlie Hochschild, and Families in the U.S.: Kinship and Domestic Politics.

Throughout her academic career, Hansen has been fortunate to be supported and challenged by generous foundations, mentors, peers, and rising scholars. Her work has been funded by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the Swedish Fulbright Commission.

Education

• PhD, University of California, Berkeley

• MA, BA, University of California, Santa Barbara

Articles

• " 'Land was One of the Greatest Gift:' Women’s Landownership in Dakota, Scandinavian, and Black Communities" (and Grey Osterud and Valerie Grim), Great Plains Quarterly 38:3 (Summer 2018): 251-272.

• "Gendered Entanglements: Dakotas and Scandinavians at Spirit Lake, 1887-1930," Special Forum on Gender and Indigenous-Immigrant Encounters and Entanglements, Women’s History Review (2017): 1-16.

• "Entangled Encounters and the Oral Archive: Notes from the Field," in Concurrent Imaginaries, Postcolonial Worlds: Toward Revised Histories, edited by Diana Brydon, Peter Forsgen, and Gunlög Fur, pp. 183-202. Leaden, Netherlands: Brill Rodopi, 2017.

• "Immigrants as Settler Colonists: Boundary Work between Dakota Indians and White Immigrant Settlers" (and Ken Chih-Yan Sun and Debra Osnowitz), Ethnic and Racial Studies (2016) DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2016.1213403

• "Landowning, Dispossession, and the Significance of Land among Dakota and Scandinavian Women at Spirit Lake, 1900-29," (with Grey Osterud) Gender & History 26:1 (2014): 105-127.

• "Localizing Transnational Norwegians: Exploring Nationalism, Language, and Labor Markets in Early Twentieth-Century North Dakota," (with Ken Chih-Yan Sun) Norwegian-American Essays, 2011, Oslo: Novus Forlag, (2011):73-107.

• "Land Taking at Spirit Lake: The Competing and Converging Logics of Norwegian and Dakota Women, 1900-1930," in Norwegian American Women: Migration, Communities, and Identities, edited by Betty Berglund and Lori Ann Lahlum. Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2011, pp. 211-245.

• "Mapping the Dispossession: Scandinavian Homesteading at Fort Totten, 1900-30," (with Mignon Duffy), Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences 18 (Spring 2008): 67-80. (PDF)

• "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).

• "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-19th Century," Gender and History 7:2 (August 1995): 153-182.