Wednesday, November 28, 2018 // The Statement
4B
Wednesday, November 28, 2018 // The Statement 
 
5B

I 

remember it vividly. It was summer 
of 2015 and I was receiving emails 
from the University of Michigan 
about something called the “Undergradu-
ate Research Opportunity.” I had no idea 
what this meant, nor did I take the time 
to care. I was excited to be attending the 
University in just a few months, but was 
not one to open seemingly-superfluous 
emails. It was probably spam or a solicita-
tion for funding, but certainly not some-
thing that required attention from me 
— an incoming freshman with absolutely 
no idea what was going on.
Fast forward to the winter semester 
of my sophomore year, I took a class on 
sociological research methods and fell 
in love. I ultimately majored in Sociol-
ogy and Political Science, and became 
involved with the Sociology Depart-
ment’s research programs. By conducting 
research, mostly under the supervision of 
Sociology graduate students, I glanced a 
simple, yet significant, window into aca-
demia.
In my time reading academic arti-
cles for classes and conducting my own 
research, I have learned a lot. If you were 
to ask me about the difference between 
big “G” and little “g” globalization; or 
about why philosopher John Locke 
would support gun rights; or about what 
influences where college students want 
to live in the future; or about how gender 
and sexual orientation relate to one’s feel-
ings on the environment, I could talk your 
ear off. Though this knowledge doesn’t 
serve any immediate practical function, it 
has piqued my interest for the past three 
years,, and for that reason, I value it.
The University has been ranked the 
number one public research university 
in the country by the National Science 
Foundation. It spends nearly $1.5 billion 
annually on research. And its Under-
graduate Research Opportunity Program 
alone allows more than 1,300 undergrad-
uates to work with more than 800 faculty 
members on research projects each year.
But why, I wondered, does one come 
to dedicate their life to research? Where 
does this research go once it leaves the 
University? And how does it function in 
the everyday world?
To answer these questions, I spoke 
with four professors in the humanities 
and social sciences about their work and 
came to the realization that what profes-
sors lecture about in their courses is just 
the tip of the iceberg in terms of their 
knowledge and experience. Entering 

academia from a variety of backgrounds, 
they explore the nuances of their fields. 
They engage with colleagues across the 
world, and they face challenges, such as 
how their work fits into the public sphere.
F

or Fatma Müge Göçek, a profes-
sor of Sociology and Women’s 
Studies, a career in academia 
was not her original course in life. She 
was born and raised in Istanbul, Turkey. 
Like her family, she planned to go into 
business. But, as she finished high school 
and started college, student movements 
broke out in Turkey, which brought with 
them a wave of violence and political 
repression.
“I couldn’t, I decided, in good con-
science, make money when the whole 
society was crumbling around me,” she 
said. “As a consequence, I switched from 
being a business major to social sciences, 
and eventually to sociology.”
She was initially interested in why Tur-
key could not transition from an empire 
to a republic and sustainable democracy. 
While researching the topic, she wrote 
several books. She said she believed that 
for Turkey to have normalized violence, 
there must have been violence in its past 
that was never accounted for and that is 
what became normalized.
She looked at the Armenian genocide, 
which occurred between 1915 and 1917, 
and said she was able to understand why 
a heartless government was able to com-
mit such a massacre, but she was unable 
to understand why the Turkish people 
put up with it. In Turkey, there is still 
denial of the genocide and, in fact, its rec-
ognition is legally punishable. After the 
assassination of one of her good friends — 
an Armenian journalist — in 2007, Göçek 
fully devoted herself to the topic.
“From that point onward, I’ve been 
very active,” she said. “But as a conse-
quence — as I was working on this, giv-
ing talks — people wanted to, they think, 
slander me… (by) saying that I was Arme-
nian. There were these awful things. I 
received death threats.”
Nevertheless, Göçek has continued her 
work, although she doesn’t travel to Tur-
key but anymore. After completing her 
most recent book on the Armenian geno-
cide, “Denial of Violence,” she moved on 
to exploring Turkish violence aimed at 
the Kurdish people.
L

ike Göçek, Mai Hassan didn’t 
initially intend to pursue a 
career in academia. 
When she was a third-year undergrad-

uate at the University of Virginia in the 
mid-2000s, she learned about the Ralph 
Bunche Summer Institute. RBSI is named 
for the first African American to receive 
the Nobel Peace Prize for helping with 
mediation efforts between Israel and Pal-
estine.
It is a pipeline program for minority 
students who are interested in pursuing 
careers in academia. As Hassan noted, 
minorities are not well-represented in the 
field.
“I didn’t realize academia was a career 
for me, I (figured I would) go to law 
school, lots of political science majors do 
that,” she said.
Hassan worked on a research project 
through RBSI and conducted research 
with an economics professor at the Uni-
versity of Virginia. Through both oppor-
tunities, she learned about academia. 
When she graduated college in 2008, she 
was accepted into grad school, and since 
2016, she has been an assistant professor 
of political science at the University of 
Michigan, with a focus on African poli-
tics.
Having emigrated from Sudan to the 
United States in the 1990s, Hassan ini-
tially wanted to focus her research on 
Sudan, but found it was extremely chal-
lenging to get access and be taken seri-
ously as a young woman in the field. She 
then turned to sub-Saharan Africa, and 
her initial research focused on decentral-
ization processes in Kenya.
Hassan’s first book project looked at 
the Kenyan bureaucracy, and she is now 
looking at land allocation and registration 
in Kenya and Sudan.
F

or some of the other professors 
I spoke to, their paths into aca-
demia came as a result of their 
upbringings. In the Department of His-
tory, Jonathan Wells’s research interests 
were similarly influenced by his child-
hood in the South. 
A professor of history in the Depart-
ments of Afroamerican and African Stud-
ies and History, as well as the director of 
the Residential College, Wells has always 
been interested in American politics. His 
father was a professor of American litera-
ture, so the life of an academic appealed 
to him.
“In some ways, I grew up with a very 
privileged understanding of what does it 
mean to get a Ph.D., what do you have to 
do to get a doctorate, what does the life 
of a professor look like,” he said. “In that 
sense, I had a really early understanding 

of what it meant to be a researcher, what 
it meant to be an academic, and what it 
meant to teach in colleges.”
Wells grew up in North Carolina, and 
later near the University of South Florida, 
as his father was a professor there. He 
decided to study the history of the Ameri-
can South, as he became interested in the 
cultural and political differences between 
the regions.
His first book, “The Origins of the 
Southern Middle Class,” focused on a 
segment of the white Southern population 
that came to have careers in professional 
fields, as well as in careers as merchants 
and business leaders. 
Over time, Wells became more and 
more interested in African-American his-
tory. He was particularly interested in the 
Fugitive Slave Act, passed by Congress 
in 1850. Wells became interested in the 
implications of the law, and specifically 
the impact it had on the Northern think-
ing about slavery and the Civil War.
O

ther social scientists have 
ended up in their respective 
fields after radically pivoting 
from another area of study, which has 
helped them to engage broader audiences 
with their work. Erin Cech, an assistant 
professor in the Department of Sociol-
ogy, was an electrical engineering major 
in her undergraduate program, where 
she was interested in developing assistive 
technologies for the disabled.
However, she picked up sociology as a 
second major and became interested in 
the broader social issues of STEM educa-
tion and professions. In order to make a 
difference in the fields of STEM, she said, 
she decided to pursue an advanced degree 
in sociology.
“As I was taking my engineering 
courses, I enjoyed them, I thought it was 
interesting, but I found myself asking 
questions that my professors couldn’t 
really answer about issues of access and 
finances and things like that,” she said. 
“I sought out sociology as an intellec-
tual space that had the tools for thinking 
around those things.”
From there, Cech continued to look 
at inequality in STEM, but also at issues 
of inequality across the country broadly. 
Currently, she is interested in the cultural 
mechanisms of inequality reproduction, 
and specifically the way that certain 
taken-for-granted cultural practices and 
beliefs can help to reinforce inequality.
Most of Cech’s networks are outside of 
the University, and she collaborates with 

people across the country. She spends as 
much time on Skype calls as she does in 
in-person meetings.
Her background as an engineer has 
allowed her to engage with audiences 
outside of sociology, setting Cech apart 
from other sociology professors who 
might be only able to connect with their 
fellow social scientists. She has presented 
to chemistry departments and at National 
Academy of Engineering events, among 
other places.
Cech believes bridging this gap will 
become even more crucial in the future. 
She explained that science and engineer-
ing fields have traditionally been resistant 
to the reconciliation of the disciplines, as 
they only look to address technical issues, 
but Cech believes there needs to be more 
engagement now.
“Especially as the technical world 
becomes so much more complicated and 
the technologies that we have in our 
day to day lives are interfacing with us 
at a very high level, at great frequency, 
it means that the people designing and 
managing those technologies are going 
to need more and more knowledge of how 
the social world works,” she said.
C

ech’s multidisciplinary work 
points to a much broader ques-
tion — that of connecting aca-
demia to the public more broadly, an issue 
that is very prevalent among scholars. 
In our interview, Cech expressed that 
academics should do a better job tak-
ing advantage of “translational spaces” 
to make their work more accessible to a 
broader audience.
For 
academic 
historians, 
Wells 
explained, this has always been a chal-
lenge.
“There’s a problem in that so many of 
us write academic history that only sells a 
few hundred copies to the main resource 
libraries at other universities, so that 
means we’re essentially only talking to 
each other,” he said.
Wells pointed to David McCullough, 
who wrote a famous biography on John 
Adams, and described him as an ama-
teur historian, in order to distinguish him 
from academic historians. Wells noted 
that McCullough sells thousands of cop-
ies of his books and thus has a much more 
direct impact on the public perception of 
history than an academic historian.
“Many of us (academic historians) 
have argued that we need to be more con-
cerned about publicizing our work in the 
broader public arenas,” he said. “And the 

reason is because history, since it’s the 
study of change over time, really helps us 
form a contextual understanding for cur-
rent problems.”
Both Wells and Hassan suggested 
that the public does not necessarily have 
a good understanding of what academ-
ics do, as so much of their work occurs 
behind the scenes.
Hassan also agreed with Wells that 
perhaps academics have not done a good 
enough job conveying their work to the 
public. If an undergraduate at the Univer-
sity were to be a handed an article she has 
written, chances are they wouldn’t really 
understand it, but that isn’t necessarily 
their fault.
“It’s because we’re talking in really pre-
cise terms, there are these really highly-
defined concepts and ideas that we’re all 
trying to build on top of each other,” she 
said. “There’s a requisite level of knowl-
edge that is necessary to be able to make 
advances on some things. So I understand 
why it happens.”
She said that academia may not be 
addressing the most pressing public poli-
cy questions of the day; however, she sug-
gested this isn’t necessarily problematic. 
Many pressing questions are not theo-
retically interesting, and if a question isn’t 
theoretically interesting, it’s not going to 
appeal to academics. She explained that 
it is the role of academics in the arts and 
sciences to create new theory and allow 
people to think about things that they’ve 
never thought about before.
Göçek, on the other hand, feels she has 
been able to engage the broader commu-
nity. She explained that over the years 
she has become very interested not only 
in Turkey, but also in the United States. 
After 9/11, she began giving talks about 
Islam at churches, for instance, and 
became very interested in the perspec-
tives of minorities.
“Being a sociologist enabled me to 
engage much more in the social problems 
here, that I wouldn’t otherwise,” she said.
She has also looked for ways to engage 
students by appealing to topics they are 
interested in, such as making her classes 
relevant to them. One extremely popular 
class she has taught is called Sociology of 
Culture: From the Kennedys to the Kar-
dashians — the title alone is a draw. 
With regard to Sociology, Göçek joked 
that many people may not know the dif-
ference between a socialist and a soci-
ologist, while Cech explained that, by 
nature, people aren’t really interested in 

accepting academic notions of society.
“There’s something about the way that 
Americans tend to think about the world 
that actually, I think, limits the ability for 
social sciences, particularly sociology, 
which focuses on group processes, to 
resonate,” she said. “That’s because peo-
ple tend to think about life and their own 
experiences and the experiences of others 
in a very individualistic way.”
Nevertheless, despite the constraints 
that exist in academia, all four professors 
pointed to alternative outlets, primar-
ily in the media, as ways to communicate 
with the general public — something they 
believe is important. 
For example, Cech would “translate” 
gender research into a less jargon-y form 
for the Stanford Clayman Institute for 
Gender Research during her postdoc 
years and Göçek blogs about Sociology in 
The New York Times in Education, which 
is targeted to K-12 students, as well as col-
leges and universities.
I

f I could go back in time, I abso-
lutely would have opened those 
UROP emails my freshman year. 
I’m not sure if it would have made much of 
a difference in the end, but it would have 
given me two additional years of research 
exploration and experience.
Though I am still unsure if academia is 
the path for me, pursuing social research 
has been crucial to my time at the Univer-
sity. I have discovered that research is an 
excellent way to learn about the world, 
but also to learn about where all of the 
things taught in school originate. Profes-
sors don’t pull information out of thin air, 
despite often seeming that way.
“I think social science research is so 
important, I really feel everyone should 
give it a shot for a semester or a year — 
just to be a good citizen,” Hassan said, 
explaining that by conducting research, 
one can become confident about the infor-
mation they acquire. Otherwise, how can 
people know that what they read in news-
papers and other articles is true?
Cech echoed Hassan on the impor-
tance of the “production of knowledge,” 
but emphasized the importance of also 
making research accessible to the public. 
This type of work, she explained, could be 
extremely important for people who plan 
to pursue careers in activism or nonprofit 
work, among other opportunities.
Coming from such different back-
grounds, it stuck out to me that the four 
individuals ended up in the same place, all 
extremely passionate about what they do.

“I didn’t realize academia was a career for me”: 
Stories of LSA academics
BY JENNIFER MEER, DEPUTY STATEMENT EDITOR

ILLUSTRATION BY MICHELLE FAN

ILLUSTRATION BY CHRISTINE JEGARL

