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  MELISSA OSBORNE

additional research

Homelessness and Housing

Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews with case workers and staff at a homeless shelter and housing non-profit in the Midwest, I examined how the “housing first” approach to homelessness operates in practice.

The first paper from this research demonstrates how cultural expectations and organizational mandates shape unequal outcomes in the housing eligibility determination process. It has been published at the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography and has won best paper awards from the Society for the Study of Social Problems, the Midwest Sociological Society, and the Division of the Social Sciences at the University of Chicago. 

Collaborative Work with Faculty
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In addition to my individual research, I have had the opportunity to work collaboratively with faculty on a number of projects while in graduate school.

I worked with professor Forrest Stuart to produce a review article on the legal control of marginalized groups that was published in 2015 at the Annual Review of Law and Social Sciences.

Since 2016, I have worked with Professor Anna Mueller on her project on gender inequality in emergency medical (EM) education. Our goal with this project was to determine why women fall behind men in terms of their performance ratings during their third year (a previously established gender gap). An article from this research was published in the Journal of Graduate Medical Education in 2017 and has received substantial media attention and is currently being used as a training and pedagogical tool in teaching hospitals. We are currently writing additional manuscripts for publication from this work.

I have co-authored two additional articles with professor Mueller and Professor Seth Abrutyn, working primarily to help develop the theoretical frameworks for these manuscripts. The first of these articles is a Contexts piece that uses The Walking Dead as a case for thinking through Durkheim’s theoretical notions of suicide. The second draws on Goffman’s cultural frames to explain how suicide becomes viewed as an option for teens in a cohesive community. This manuscript is currently under review.


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  • Home
  • Dissertation
    • Additional Research
  • Curriculum Vitae
  • Publications
    • Under Review and In Progress
  • Teaching
  • Engagement
  • Contact