RESEARCH INTERESTS:

I am an organizational and development sociologist; I study organizations to better understand how they shape our perceptions, our values, and our behaviors. My research agenda looks at organizational forms and how they intersect with ethics, politics, innovation, and inequality in various ways. I focus on organizations because social, political, and educational justice cannot be achieved without organizations and processes that are also in some measure just.

In 2022 I was an inaugural recipient of the Public Sociology Award from the Eastern Sociological Society.

POSITIONS

• Associate Professor, School for Global Inclusion and Social Development, Affiliated Faculty, Department of Sociology, UMASS Boston, 2022-Current

• Assistant Professor, School for Global Inclusion and Social Development, Affiliated Faculty, Department of Sociology, UMASS Boston, 2017-2022

• Faculty, IE Brown Executive MBA Program, School of Professional Studies, Brown University, 2016-current

• Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Institute at Brown for Environment & Society, Brown University, 2016-2017

 BOOKS

• Kallman, Meghan Elizabeth, and Josephine Ferorelli. 2024. The Conceivable Future: Planning Families and Taking Action in the Age of Climate Change. Rowman & Littlefield.

  • First Place winner of the Nellie Bly Book Award for journalistic nonfiction, 2024

  • Starred by ALA Booklist, February 2024

  • One of the Top 10 environmental books of 2024, by ALA Booklist

• Malin, Stephanie, and Meghan Elizabeth Kallman. 2022. Building Something Better: Environmental Crises and the Promise of Community Change. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

• Kallman, Meghan Elizabeth. 2020. The Death of Idealism: Development and Anti-Politics in the Peace Corps. New York: Columbia University Press.

• Kallman, Meghan Elizabeth, and Terry N. Clark. “The Third Sector”. 2016. Champaign: University of Illinois Press.

• Clark, Terry N. and Meghan Elizabeth Kallman. “The Global Transformation of Organized Groups: New Roles for Community Service Organizations, Non-Profits, and the New Political Culture” (2011). Policy report commissioned by the China International Center for Economic and Technical Exchanges, Ministry of Commerce, Beijing.

SELECT REFEREED JOURNAL ARTICLES AND BOOK CHAPTERS

• Kallman, Meghan Elizabeth. “Why Believing Others Makes Us Better (Public) Sociologists”. Forthcoming, Sociological Forum.

• Kallman, Meghan Elizabeth, and Scott Frickel. 2023. “Making the ‘Business Case’: Vocabularies of Motive and Clean Tech Innovation in the Hidden Developmental State.” Socio-Economic Review 21 (1):571–592

• Stephanie A. Malin and Meghan Elizabeth Kallman. 2022. ‘Complicity, Dependence, and Organizing Potential in Frontline Oil and Gas Communities’. Social Problems. doi: 10.1093/socpro/spac032.

• Kallman, Meghan Elizabeth. 2022. “Autonomous Leadership and Organizational Practice in Leaderless Street Bands.” Pp. 347–66 in Research Handbook on the Sociology of Organizations, edited by M. Godwyn. Cheltenham, UK ; Northampton, MA, USA; Edward Elgar Publishing.

• Kallman, Meghan Elizabeth. 2020. “Leadership, Inclusion, and Group Decision-Making in HONK! Bands.” in HONK!: A Street Band Renaissance of Music and Activism, edited by R. Garofalo, E. T. Allen, and A. Snyder. New York: Routledge.

• Kallman, Meghan Elizabeth. 2019. “Encapsulation, Professionalization and Managerialism in the Peace Corps”. International Public Management Journal, 24 (6), pp. 943-972

• Kallman, Meghan Elizabeth. 2019. “‘Living More Through Knowing More’: College Education in Prison Classrooms” Adult Education Quarterly 70(4):321–39.

• Kallman, Meghan Elizabeth and Scott Frickel. 2019. ‘Nested Logics and Smart Meter Adoption: Institutional Processes and Organizational Change in the Diffusion of Smart Meters in the United States’. Energy Research & Social Science, 57.

• Kallman, Meghan Elizabeth. 2019. ‘The “male” privilege of White women, the “White” privilege of Black women, and vulnerability to violence: an intersectional analysis of Peace Corps workers in host countries’. Vol. 21 (4), pp. 566-594

• Kallman, Meghan Elizabeth and Scott Frickel. 2018. “Power to the People: Industrial Transition Movements and Energy Populism.” Environmental Sociology Vol. 5 (3), pp. 255-268

• Kallman, Meghan Elizabeth. 2018. “Dimensions of Cosmopolitanism: Patriotism and Disaffection among US Peace Corps Volunteers.” International Journal of Sociology Vol. 48 (3), pp. 189–215.

• Kallman, Meghan Elizabeth. 2018. “Teaching Sociology in a Men’s Prison: How Total Institutions Shape Pedagogy and Engagement with Content.” Teaching Sociology, Vol. 46 (4), pp. 295-308

• Frickel, Scott, Daniela Wühr, Christine Horne and Meghan Elizabeth Kallman. 2017. “Field of Visions: Inter-organizational Challenges to Smart Energy Transition in Washington State”. Brooklyn Law Review, 82.

• Kallman, Meghan Elizabeth. 2017. “Allocative failures: networks and institutions in international grantmaking relationships”. VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations, Vol. 28 (2), pp. 745-772

• Kallman, Meghan Elizabeth. 2015. ‘Technical, Emotional, Professional: Idealism and Commitment in the Peace Corps’ in Materiality, Rules, and Regulation, François-Xavier du Vaujany & Nathalie Mitev, eds. London: Palgrave.

• Kallman, Meghan Elizabeth. 2015. ‘Making the Cosmopolitan Canopy in Boston’s Haymarket Square’ Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol. 38 (5), pp. 759-774

TRADE PUBLICATIONS

• Malin, Stephanie, and Meghan Elizabeth Kallman. 2022. “Building something better: How community organizing helps people thrive in challenging times”. The Conversation. September 8.

• Kallman, Meghan Elizabeth, 2019. “Turning Towards Each Other”. Part of the Uncertain Futures Forum, hosted by the Post-Carbon Institute.

• Kallman, Meghan Elizabeth, 2019. “Three Practices for a Time of Crisis”. Part of the Uncertain Futures Forum, hosted by the Post-Carbon Institute.

• Kallman, Meghan Elizabeth, and Josephine Ferorelli. 2018. ‘On the Future: a Harsh Climate for Motherhood’, in Motherhood in Precarious Times, A. Dolman, B. Schwartz-Bechet, and DJ Davis, eds. Bradford, ON: Demeter Press.

WHITEPAPERS

• Horn, Keren, and Meghan Elizabeth Kallman. 2021. ‘What the Next Mayor of Boston Needs to Do about the Affordable Housing Crisis in Boston’. Commissioned by the Boston Area Research Initiative (BARI), an inter-university partnership that pursues original urban research on the cutting edge of scholarship and public policy.

BOOK REVIEWS

• Kallman, Meghan Elizabeth. 2023. ‘Spiritualizing Politics without Politicizing Religion: The Example of Sargent Shriver’, University of Toronto Press, forthcoming Journal of Church and State.

• Kallman, Meghan Elizabeth. 2021. ‘Allison Schnable. Amateurs without Borders: The Aspirations and Limits of Global Compassion' University of California Press, 2021'. Social Forces.

AWARDS

• 2022 Public Sociology Award for Early Career Scholars, Eastern Sociological Society (ESS). The Award recognizes pre-tenure scholars whose sociological work and practice has demonstrated a commitment and contribution to public sociology that improves public welfare, broadly understood, or the lives of research participants, or helps organizations with which they work.

• 2021 Pacesetter Award, WiLL (Women Legislators Lobby). The national Pacesetter award recognizes state legislators for their noteworthy legislative service, their contributions to sound, progressive policy, and their groundbreaking leadership in their respective states

EDUCATION

2016 Brown University, PhD, Sociology
2009 University of Chicago, MA, Social Science
2005 Smith College, BA Sociology, minor Studio Art