Lindsay Heldreth

Cohort

2019

Subfields

Cultural Sociology, Inequality, Theory

Profile

Lindsay Heldreth is a Dean’s Fellow in the Department of Sociology and a graduate of Youngstown State University (2018), holding a BA in Philosophy. While at her previous institution, she did work with psychologists and economists on social stigma, poverty, and resilience. Additionally, she conducted two ethnographic projects pertaining to religion, one looking at trauma and the other looking at assimilation.

Her current MA research focuses on sexuality labels and identity, assessing the work that goes into distinguishing less common labels that are emerging in popularity from labels that are more well understood. For this project, she has conducted interviews and used content analysis from online platforms and hopes to do related work in the future assessing what the popularization of labels beyond “LGB” means for sociologists who study sexuality and how we measure it, as well as for professionals who work with the Queer community.

Lindsay is also interested in theory, in particular how classical social theory is taught to up-and-coming generations of scholars and the impact it has on their career trajectory, feelings of belongingness in the discipline, and their self-esteem as scholars. Lindsay and Sehrazat Mart, a member of the 2018 cohort, have collected survey data from sociology graduate students, and preliminary results suggest that experiences graduate students have in Classical Sociological Theory classes vary greatly on the basis of gender, race, class background, and sexual identity.

Additionally, using interview data collected from early in the COVID-19 pandemic, Lindsay is going to be working this summer on assessing the impact COVID has had on couple-level conflict, particularly for couples who have children and were both working from home.