Duke Austin
Duke Austin is a Postdoctoral Associate working with Prof. Elijah Anderson and the Urban Ethnography Project. In this capacity, he studies the intersection of racial caste, class, and gender in the southern United States. Specifically, Dr. Austin’s research revisits the concept of race as a caste system as it was presented in the classic ethnographies Caste and Class in a Southern Town (Dollard 1937) and Deep South (Davis, Gardner, and Gardner 1941).
Dr. Austin received his Ph.D. from the University of Colorado in Spring 2010. His dissertation, Surviving the Next Disaster: Assessing the Preparedness of Community-Based Organizations, uses mixed methods to explain variation in the levels of disaster preparedness amongst community-based organizations (CBOs). His research assists CBOs–and the clients they serve–by helping them become better prepared for disasters. While at the University of Colorado, he received multiple awards for outstanding teaching as well as the 2008 President’s Diversity Award for his efforts to improve diversity on campus.
Dr. Austin’s research interests include: Stratification of Race, Class, and Gender; Stratification in the Context of Disaster; Community-Based Organizations; Homelessness; Ethnographic Methods; and Mixed Methods. His teaching specialties include: U.S. Race and Ethnic Relations; Sex, Gender, and Society; Social Construction of Sexuality; Qualitative Methods; Social Statistics; Introduction to Sociology; Violence in U.S. Society; and Deviance in U.S. Society.
Selected Publications
- Anderson, Elijah, Dana Asbury, Duke W. Austin, Esther Kim, and Vani Kulkarni, editors. 2012. “Bringing Fieldwork Back In: Contemporary Ethnographic Research,” a special edition of The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 642(1). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
- Austin, Duke, 2012. “Preparedness Clusters: A Research Note on the Disaster Readiness of Community-Based Organizations,” in Sociological Perspectives, 55(2):383-393, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
- Anderson, Elijah, Duke W. Austin, Craig Holloway, and Vani Kulkarni. 2012. “The Legacy of Racial Caste: An Exploratory Ethnography,” in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 682(1):25-42, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
- Austin, Duke. 2008. “Robert E. Park,” in Encyclopedia of Race, Ethnicity, and Society, edited by Richard Schaefer. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
- Miles, Michelle, and Duke Austin. 2007. “The Color(s) of Crisis: How Race, Rumor, and Collective Memory Shape the Legacy of Katrina.” Pp. 33-49 in Racing the Storm: Racial Implications and Lessons Learned from Hurricane Katrina, edited by Hillary Potter. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
- Austin, Duke, and Michelle Miles. 2006. “Crisis in Black and White: Katrina, Rita, and the Construction of Reality.” Pp. 151-173 in Learning from Catastrophe: Quick Response Research in the Wake of Hurricane Katrina. Natural Hazards Center at the Institute of Behavioral Science, University of Colorado at Boulder.