Heather Cleary, Ph.D.
- Assistant Professor Anthropology, Criminology, & Sociology
I am broadly interested in the intersections of race, gender, and emotion, in relation to social constructions of crime and deviance. My work links micro and macro-conceptions of culture to better understand identity and the “felt” experience of/engagement with the state.
My current project examines race and gender in the production and consumption of true crime, a genre that typically features and is engaged by white college educated women between the ages of 18 and 35. Here, I examine how raced and gendered subject positions inform “dark leisure” practices (such as dark tourism), as well as perceptions of risk and vulnerability, crime and violence, and criminal justice more broadly. My other ongoing project examines the relationship between care and control-based interventions to addiction and overdose, a condition that is simultaneously medicalized and criminalized.
I am also interested in qualitative methods, participant action research, collective trauma and memory, theoretical and cultural criminology, affect theory, death and dying, as well as sociological, critical race and whiteness studies, and feminist theories.
Areas of Specialization
Race and Ethnicity, Crime and Deviance, Gender and Sexuality, Affect and Emotion, Culture and Media
Qualitative Research (Interviews, Ethnography), Feminist, Content and Discourse
Analysis
Awards and Honors
Keith Roberts Teaching Innovations Award, SAGE Publications, 2023
Edwin S. and Ruth M. White Prize for innovative interdisciplinary work, Boston University, Boston University Center for Humanities, 2022
Angela J. and James J. Rallis Memorial Award for innovative interdisciplinary work, Boston University, Boston University Center for Humanities, 2022
Susan K. Jackson Award for creating and nurturing community, Boston University, College of Arts and Sciences, 2022
Outstanding Teaching Fellow Award, Boston University, Sociology Department, 2019
Fiat Lux Honors Society for excellence in academics and community involvement, Clark University, 2011
Unsung Hero Award for anti-violence efforts, Clark University, 2011
Cynthia Enloe Award for excellence in academics and activism, Clark University, 2011
Publications
2024. Mears, Ashley, and Heather Mooney. “College Parties as a Social Field: An
Ethnography of Symbolic Domination.” Forthcoming at Qualitative Sociology.
2022. Scoville, Caleb, and Heather Mooney. “So You’ve Provincialized the Canon. Now What?” Teaching Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1177/0092055X221096658
2021. Frederick, Brittany Lee,* and Heather Mooney.* “16 Miles: New Users, Stock Dealers, and Racialization in Small Cities.” Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and the City, 10.1080/26884674.2021.1908099.
2021 Carr, Deborah and Heather Mooney. “Bereavement in Later Life.” Pp. 240-254 in Handbook of Aging and the Social Sciences, 9th ed., edited by Kenneth F. Ferraro and Deborah Carr. New York: Academic Press.
2019 Mooney, Heather. “White Futures: Reproduction and Labor in Biopolitical Times.” Pp. 61-81 in Mad, Bad, and Dangerous: Reproduction in the Age of Neoliberalism, edited by Mary Thompson and Modhumita Roy. Oregon: Oregon State University Press.
2018. Guseva, Alya, and Heather Mooney. “Review of Imagined Futures by Jens Beckert.” Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory 19(3): 336-340.
2018. Mooney, Heather. “Sad Girls and #CarefreeBlackGirls: Affect, Race, Dispossession, and Protest.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 46(3/4): 174-194.
