Emily W. Kane

Emily W. Kane is a Professor of Sociology at Bates College, with affiliations to the Gender and Sexuality Studies program. Her work bridges sociology, gender studies, and community-based research, focusing on inequalities and poverty policy.

• Education: BA from Oberlin College; MA and PhD from the University of Michigan.

Her research spans gender and family dynamics, sociology of childhood, social psychology, and public sociology. She emphasizes community-engaged learning and publicly-engaged scholarship, integrating race and class in the U.S. with poverty and social policy.

Recent publications analyze decentralized poverty governance, feminism in community research, and neoliberalism’s role in poverty beliefs. Her books, The Gender Trap (2012) and Rethinking Gender and Sexuality in Childhood (2013), explore gendered socialization in early life.

Scientific Awards:

• Whitehouse Professor of Sociology (2007)
• Maine Campus Compact award recipient (2013)

She contributes to public sociology, research methods, and scholarship on community-engaged pedagogy. Her work often addresses structuralist vs. individualist explanations for poverty and paternalism in social programs.