Rachel Austin

Areas of Study: Social Movements, Identity Formation, Social Psychology, Race and the American Criminal Justice System, Counter-culture, Social Deviance, and Pedagogy.

Rachel Austin earned her M.A. in Sociology at UNC Charlotte and her M.A. in Psychology at UND-Grand Forks. Her research concentrations broadly examine ideological paradigms and subversive frameworks in social movements and counter-culture, including how this impacts identity formation. She also examines social psychology, legal (forensic) psychology and juror decision making with regard to race, and pedagogical methods. She has been awarded grants for presenting original research, positional works, and pedagogical methods at a variety of conferences across the U.S. and abroad, including webinar format. Her work has been presented at the annual conferences of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI), the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics (Oxford, U.K.), the Conference for Higher Education Pedagogy at Virginia Tech, a number of Annual Meeting(s) of the Southern Sociological Society, and the North Carolina Community College Sociology and Psychology Association (NCCCSPA). She is actively involved in these and other professional and academic associations such as the American Sociological Association (ASA) and the American Psychology-Law Society (AP-LS), among others. Recently, her work has focused on integration of the humanities as a methodological tool for teaching social sciences.

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Recent Publications:

Austin, R.L., & Fitzgerald, S. 2018. “’I Come Back a Better Person’: Identity Construction and Maintenance at a Regional Burn Festival.” Sociological Inquiry, 88(4): 599–625. https://doi.org/10.1111/soin.12226

Austin, R. L., & Koretsky, S. 2018. “Ethics in Online Learning Environments” [White paper]. Published May 1, 2018 and retrieved from the Virtual Learning Community for the North Carolina Community College System: https://vic.configio.com/documentlibrary

Austin, R., & Flynn, C. (2015). Traversing the Gap between Religion and Animal Rights: Framing and Networks as a Conceptual Bridge. Journal of Animal Ethics, 5(2): 144–158. https://doi.org/10.5406/janimalethics.5.2.0144

Recent Media Consultation:

Janes, Théoden. 2020. “Even after the pandemic is over, will handshakes and hugs remain a thing of the past?” The Charlotte Observer, March 25. https://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/coronavirus/article241461731.html

Waugh, Rob. 2020. “Coronavirus: Could Hugs and Handshakes die out in Wake of Pandemic?” Yahoo News UK, March 30. https://sports.yahoo.com/coronavirus-hugs-handshakes-174208597.html