Karen V. Hansen

Karen V. Hansen is the Victor and Gwendolyn Beinfield Professor of Sociology at Brandeis University, with appointments in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and History. The author or editor of six landmark books and numerous scholarly articles and chapters, Hansen bridges crucial gaps between gender, class, and kinship embedded within racial hierarchies and bounded communities. Her interdisciplinary practice explores the causes, consequences, and meanings of structural shifts in people’s daily lives. Hansen’s award-winning monograph, Encounter on the Great Plains, built on fifteen years of sustained ethnographic fieldwork, as she fostered relationships with subjects and gathered oral histories. Listening with respect for voice and struggle, she centered the narratives as a way to develop a fresh approach to settler and indigenous coexistence in the context of Native dispossession. Hansen’s investigative journey has also mapped the social interactions of workers in antebellum New England and explored the nature of family support systems across class in contemporary California. Her new focus is on cascading, the process by which downward mobility is triggered and accelerated, or resisted and prevented.