Department of Sociology

Karen V. Hansen

Karen 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 Professor, Emerita of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Karen V. Hansen’s forthcoming book, Working-Class Kids and Visionary Educators in a Multiracial High School: A Story of Belonging, will be published this fall. It 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

Selected Publications

"A Great Way to Teach," HistoryMakers Digital Archive Newsletter (May 2020).

At the Heart of Work and Family: Engaging the Ideas of Arlie Hochschild. Book Cover"At the Heart of Work and Family: Engaging the Ideas of Arlie Hochschild." (edited with Anita Ilta Garey) Rutgers University Press, 2011.

Families in the U.S.: Kinship and Domestic Politics Book Cover"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. Book Cover"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 Book Cover"Women, Class, and the Feminist Imagination: A Socialist-Feminist Reader" (edited with Ilene J. Philipson). Temple University Press, 1990.

Articles