Ella McCalidaine graduated from Eastern Washington University in 2017, with a major in Sociology and minor focuses in Criminology and Psychology. She obtained her Associate of Arts with a Presidential Honor Roll record and Phi Theta Kappa membership at Spokane Falls Community College, with an emphasis on Social Sciences. In the fall of 2017 she began Washington State University's PhD program in Sociology with full funding. She earned an MA in 2020.
"I am interested in the circular impact between collective behavior and stratification, shaped through race, class, and gender. My life-path has wound through moments that included both poverty and surviving domestic violence, and well as complex experiences involving class and gender conformity. These have given me a subjective insight for foreground-interpretive research arguments, to understand and explore the forces that shape our lives through reinforced social institutions. Cultural capital and its dramatic influence on higher education is a topic of academic curiosity as well, particularly with regard to concepts such as resource deprivation, authority difference and 'New World anxiety'. I also intend to engage in research analyzing intra-cultural conflict and contradictory motivations found in gender non-conforming social groups.
Other areas of interest include altruism, morality and social solidarity from a secular-humanist perspective, viewed through a lens informed by Durkheim's concepts such as social facts and Anomie. I have experienced a range of religious institutions throughout the entirety of my life, including Tibetan Buddhism, fundamentalist Evangelical Christianity, and Neo-Paganism. These experiences have manifested into a curiosity for how philosophies and religions inform seemingly contradictory views on others and self."
McNair Faculty Research Mentor 2016: Dr. Todd Hechtman - Sociology and Justice Studies
Research Title: Communication Dynamics with Intimate Partner Violence
Abstract: Intimate Partner Violence has generated a vast quantity of research over the last several decades, resulting in an occasionally-conflicting array of findings. This article attempts to contribute to the existing literature by offering a case-study involving three generations of omen within the same family line, who have experienced some form of intimate partner violence, child abuse, or both. This research is framed by institutional ethnography in order to justify the methodology, and includes ethnography and auto-ethnography of participants in order to draw from strong objectivity. Analysis is conducted utilizing feminist standpoint theory so that insight is oriented from lived experiences rather than abstract, calculated analysis. Johnson's typology of domestic violence is utilized in order to distinguish the specific instances discussed across generations and patterns of violence, including negotiation of acceptable norms and transmission from parent to child are explored. Themes uncovered lead to the proposal of a concept referred to as the "Gaze of Morality," which describes the pressure felt by both the enactor and receiver of intimate partner violence to deny or obscure the reality in order to conform to social expectations of behavior. Enactors of violence hide their behavior in order to avoid moral condemnation of engaging in patriarchal violence beyond acceptable levels of plausible deniability.
Receivers of violence may negotiate levels of it in order to provide for their children when they perceive no other recourse, rather than risk condemnation from the gaze of morality for not selflessly providing for their children, regardless of the personal cost.
