Elizabeth A Williamson
Elizabeth earned her PhD in Sociology from Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in 2012. She also holds an MA in Sociology from the University of Virginia and a BS in Psychology and BA in Sociology from the University of Georgia. Elizabeth’s research interests include Emotions, Collective Behavior and Social Movements, Religion, the Body and Embodiment, Research Methods, Theory, Social Psychology, Organizations, and Culture. Elizabeth is currently working on a book manuscript entitled "Witches for a Week: Crafting an Emotion Counterculture." Her dissertation “Fostering Flexibility: Emotions, Power, and Framing Processes in a Socio-Religious Movement” investigated how framing processes, emotional shifts, and power exchanges affect the adoption of flexible patterns of feeling and thinking among participants in Reclaiming tradition witchcraft and activism. Drawing on extensive ethnographic observations of nine movement training and recruitment events in the U.S. and Canada as well as in-depth interviews and longitudinal surveys of participants, Elizabeth argued that cognitive, emotional, and somatic flexibility – which this case relates to the capability to shift between aspects of “magical activist” and scientific-rational worldviews in a sustainable manner – affects commitment to Reclaiming’s values as well as to the movement itself. Alongside the main argument about flexibility, Elizabeth developed a “temporal structural” approach to shifts in emotions which examines how emotional intensity changes across time for individuals and groups, and how particular emotions are linked together into structures she calls “chains” across points in time such as confusion to despair to hope. Emotion chain analysis is a new tool for systematically examining cascades among emotions that have been neglected in the past because they have been challenging to observe and theorize. During her time at Rutgers, Elizabeth received a Dissertation Improvement Grant from the National Science Foundation and served as a research assistant for the Urban Communes Project, a longitudinal, multi-group study consisting of data collected at the group, individual, and dyadic level (Benjamin Zablocki, principal investigator). Elizabeth is also currently working on publishing teaching-related materials in the TRAILS database and creating article-length projects based on data from her work with the Reclaiming movement or from the Urban Communes Project dataset.
Supervisors: Benjamin Zablocki and Ann Mische
Phone: 732-207-4368
Address: Chicago, Illinois, United States
Supervisors: Benjamin Zablocki and Ann Mische
Phone: 732-207-4368
Address: Chicago, Illinois, United States
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