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Carroll D. Clark
Sociology Lecture Series for 2005

Professor Kathleen Blee

"Voyeurism, Ethics, and the Lure of the Extraordinary:
Lessons from Studying America's Racist Underground"

Wednesday, September 21, 2005 - 4 p.m.
Alderson Auditorium, Kansas Union

Kathleen Blee, Professor of Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh, has spent most of her scholarly life thinking about the paradoxes of class, gender, and race in the US. In Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920s, she examined how the Ku Klux Klan was able to mobilize millions of women and men in its vicious racist crusade by claiming to represent the interests of women's rights and family values and in Inside Organized Racism: Women in the Hate Movement, she has focused on the rank and file of modern organized racism such as Ku Klux Klans, white power skinheads, and neo-Nazis. In The Road to Poverty: The Making of Wealth and Hardship in Appalachia, Kathy studied one of America’s poorest counties to understand the economic and social forces created by poverty and isolation in an area that a century before had been one of the country's most prosperous and politically connected. Kathy currently is involved in two projects: a study of new and emerging social movement groups in Pittsburgh and a project on racial violence that does not appear in official hate crime statistics.