Warmest congratulations go out to Rhiannon Powers who recently completed two major milestones in her graduate career: she successfully passed her preliminary exams and defended her dissertation proposal titled "The Roots of Sociology: An Indigenous Perspective". Rhiannon's chair is Dr. Stjepan Meštrović. Dr. Holly Foster, Dr. Robert Mackin, and Dr. Adam Seipp (history) serve on Rhiannon's committee.
The issue of cultural identity among Indigenous people in the United States has gained a lot of attention in academia in recent years, however, most of this research tends to be atheoretical. Rhiannon's dissertation will recontextualize and apply neglected classical as well as contemporary social theorists in order to analyze the issue of how Indigenous people can create and maintain cultural identity in appose to the modern age. Classical theorists who will be applied to this problem include but are not limited to William James, Thorstein Veblen, George Herbert Mead, and Max Webber. Contemporary theorists include but are not limited to David Riesman, Stjepan Meštrović, Robert Park, Ernest Burgess, and Talcott Parson. The method used will be Hermeneutics, which seeks meaning and social context in connecting social theory to interpreting empirical data.
Congratulations, Rhiannon, on this double success!