Professional Activities

I have been the sole author or coauthor of several successful extramural grants. At the University of Arizona, I wrote sections of multi-year U.S. Department of Education Title VI Foreign Language and Area Studies and Rockefeller Foundation grants.

At Grand Valley State University, I coauthored (with Peter Winn, Tufts University) a Ford Foundation-Latin American Studies Association Special Projects Fund grant to organize a Mini-Conference on Labor in Latin America resulting in two edited publications. I also received Fulbright-CIES (declined) and U.S. Department of Education Fulbright-Hayes Faculty Research Abroad grants for research on the middle classes in Santiago, Chile. I am currently co-PI on a three-year grant funded by the Chilean National Science and Technology Fund (FONDECYT) to study shopping mall visitors in Santiago, Chile.

I served for two years as Director of the Latin American Studies Program at Grand Valley State University, where I wrote the program's strategic and assessment plans. I also worked for one year as Chair of the Sociology Department at Universidad Diego Portales, where I lead a successful revision of the Sociology major curriculum. I have participated on numerous departmental, college, and university-wide committees at all of the institutions where I have worked.

In the American Sociology Association, I served on the Council of the Labor and Labor Movements section, the Publications Committee of the Community and Urban Sociology Section, as well as program and awards committees in the Labor and Labor Movements, Consumers and Consumption, and Community and Urban Sociology Sections. In the Latin American Studies Association, I served as chair of the Labor Studies Section and was appointed by the association's president to lead a Labor Relations Task Force that drafted a policy (later approved) that insures that the Association holds its congresses at hotels whose managers respect basic labor rights.

I have reviewed manuscripts for numerous journals and presses and sat on the editorial board of the Chile-based urban studies Journal, Estudios Urbanos y Regionales, EURE, which is indexed by the ISI Web of Knowledge.