Susan Cozzens has a long pedigree of working for social change through public policy research and advocacy. Her Ph.D.

One of the issues we face in dealing with problems in the USA is the frequent divide between “the common folk” - rural, often farm folks - and the urban populace, often dismissed from the other side as “ivory tower intellectuals”.

Amanda Udis-Kessler is a music-creation fountain whose recent project is QueerSacredMusic.com, 60-plus songs beginning with sacred music relative to LGBTQ concerns, but enriched by the spiritual experiences relative to the arrival of COVID-19 and the nationwide uprising against racism and other injustices. Amanda's theology is open, accepting, and rooted in a universal love, and is enriched by the training and talents of her Ph.D. in Sociology, her time in seminary, and her wide and deep lyrical and musical creativity. Raised as a secular Jew, her never-ending spiritual pilgrimage has included sojourns and enrichment with the UU, Quakers, UCC, Buddhism, Bahá'í, and much more.

In Keeping It Halal: The Everyday Lives of Muslim American Teenage Boys, John O'Brien looks at the lives of the Legendz, a small group of members of the Muslim Youth Program of a mosque John worked with. The tensions of be a member of a too-often-feared religion and to be accepted as a teenager in the USA can be a real challenge, and John explores the way it works. John is Assistant Professor of Sociology at NY University - Abu Dhabi.

Rachel MacNair is the author of Religions and Nonviolence: The Rise of Effective Advocacy for Peace, an enthralling look inside a number of religions. Rachel's interdisciplinary Ph.D. is in Psychology & Sociology, and her BA was in Peace & Conflict Studies.

A visit with Nels Paulson, sociologist in the Social Science Department of UW-Stout about his research & presentations on Old Ideas, New Knowledge, Sustainable Communities, on trophy hunting, and on influences of religious/spirituality in disaster relief.

In his memoir, Not From Here, sociologist & author Allan G. Johnson takes us on an odyssey of introspection about our unrootedness and the symptoms of that dysfunction in our personal and national identities, things like the native genocide, slavery, but also the holes in our lives because we don't belong.