Leonard G. Berkey

Professor of Sociology

 

Office: 311 Robinson
Phone: (517) 629-0420
Fax:     (517) 629-0991
Home: (517) 332-1308

Email:  lberkey@albion.edu

 

 

My long-term interests have been in racial and ethnic relations, inequality and globalization, and the emergence of multiculturalism across a range of societies.  In 1998, I received, along with Dr. Barbara Keyes in the Psychology Department, a large grant from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation for a project that paired Albion College women students as researchers/mentors with at-risk girls at our local middle school.  That project was entitled Building Assets in Middle School Girls and was intended to demonstrate the mutual benefits of a closer partnership between the College and the town of Albion.  In addition to serving as critical mentors for middle school girls, those students used ethnographic methods that they learned in our seminar to explore the lives and struggles of girls growing up in our community, and many subsequently presented papers on their work at national professional meetings.  This project, then, also illustrated Albion College's interest in supporting serious undergraduate research.  Last year, this project moved to the Washington Gardner Elementary School in Albion and was rechristened Jessie's Gift in honor of an earlier participant and one of Albion's finest human beings, Jessie Longhurst, who was killed in a traffic accident in 2005 while studying in Australia. 

In addition to the above, I am currently collaborating with Dr. Diana Ariza, Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies, on an analysis of identity formation and peer group culture among African American students and alumni at Albion College.  We presented initial results from this research at the National Conference on Race & Ethnicity in Higher Education (NCORE) Annual Meetings in Miami in June of 2004, and additional findings at the National Association for Ethnic Studies (NAES) Annual Meetings in San Francisco last March.  We have also begun work on a longer term project on the settlement of Puerto Rican migrants to central Florida that focuses especially on the adaptation of the "second generation" to life in the United States.