A: Community, Democracy, and Organizations
Amanda Barrett Cox is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at Bryn Mawr College. Her research examines how organizations transform and reproduce social inequality. Her specific areas of interest include organizations and power, economic elites and philanthropy, education and social mobility, social networks, and emotions. Cox’s current work includes an ethnographic study of two organizations attempting to redistribute power across institutional roles—a philanthropic foundation seeking to transfer control over a portion of its grant-making to a community-based board, and a democratic school in which students and teachers have equal voice (one vote per person) in decisions. Additionally, she is working on a computational text analysis of pledge letters written by philanthropists, and she is collaborating on a project with colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania and Dickinson College that investigates the school- and neighborhood-based social networks of parents sending their children to a school of choice. Her prior work includes an ethnographic study of the summer session of a program that prepares low-income students of color to attend elite boarding schools.
Cox’s work has received awards from several sections of the American Sociological Association, and her work has appeared in American Journal of Sociology, Sociology of Education, Sociological Forum, Symbolic Interaction, and Du Bois Review. She has co-authored pieces that appear in Teachers College Record, Educational Researcher, The New York Times, and The Hechinger Report.
Before pursuing her PhD, Cox worked as a community organizer and a high-school Latin teacher. She holds a PhD in sociology and education from the University of Pennsylvania, an MA in Sociology of Education from Stanford University, an MSEd in Education, Culture, and Society from the University of Pennsylvania, and a BA in Classical Civilizations from Wellesley College.