About the Author

Allison L. Hurst is a Professor of Sociology in the School of Public Policy at Oregon State University, where she teaches courses on theory, qualitative research methods, and class and inequality to both undergraduate and graduate students.   Trained in interviewing methods first and foremost, she has also dabbled in survey construction, mixed methods, and archival research.  This is her second OER textbook – her first is Classical Sociological Theory and Foundations of American Sociology (2019).  Other publications include The Burden of Academic Success: Loyalists, Renegades and Double Agents (2010), College and the Working Class (2012), Working in Class: Recognizing How Social Class Shapes Our Academic Work (2016, co-editor with Sandi Nenga), and Amplified Advantage: Going to a “Good” School in an Era of Inequality (2018).

Her current research focuses on the post-grad trajectories of sociologists from the working class and how class background has affected career outcomes.  She is also exploring the social and economic changes of the postwar period and how our collective experience of that affluent and relatively egalitarian period colors our understanding of how the world works.  She was one of the founders of the Association of Working-Class Academics, an organization composed of college faculty and staff who were the first in their families to graduate from college, for which she also served as president from 2008 to 2014.  She serves on the American Sociological Association (ASA) Taskforce on First-Generation and Working-Class Persons in Sociology, is an original member of the WCSA Class Cultures Caucus, is the past president of the Working-Class Studies Association, and sits on the Board of the Pacific Sociological Association.