Distinguished Lecturers
Each year, Alpha Kappa Delta holds a Distinguished Lecture session at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association.
Dr. Mary Romero
Reimagining Domestic Work Through an Intersectional Lens
Intersectionality has been vital to examining how different families, communities, and countries’ hierarchies impact the social relationships between domestics and employers, as well as their families. These social relationships are further shaped by different types of national and international employment agencies and countries legislation mandate working conditions, pay, length of employment and terms of the contracts that are shaped by gender, race/ethnicity, educational level, religion, citizenship status, age, sexuality, nationality and other factors that influence one’s social position in the hierarchy.
Understanding the power relations resented in an intersectionality analysis offers a strategy to identify the ways that domestics and employers have attempted to reimagine the future of domestic service, and the challenges domestic organizations and campaigns have faced in fighting for dignity, better working conditions, and a living wage.
Alpha Kappa Delta Distinguished Lecturers throughout the years:
2025 – Dr. Mary Romero, Arizona State University
“Reimagining Domestic Work Through an Intersectional Lens”
2024 – Dr. Jennifer Sherman, Washington State University
“Dividing Paradise: Inequality and Class Blindness in Rural America”
2023 – Dr. C.J. Pascoe, University of Oregon
“Nice is Not Enough: How A Regime of Kindness Won’t Solve Inequality“
2022 – Dr. David Embrick, University of Connecticut
“White Sanctuaries: Considering HWCUs and their Role in Maintaining the Status Quo”
2020 & 2021 – No Distinguished Lecture due to COVID-19 pandemic
2019 – Dr. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Duke University
“Feeling Race, Feeling Trump: Racialized Emotions in Trump’s America”
2018 – Dr. Kathleen Gerson, New York University
“Different Ways of Not Having It All: Fashioning Strategies of Gender, Work, and Care in an Age of Insecurity”
2017 – Dr. Barbara Risman, University of Illinois at Chicago
“Where Will the Millennials Take Us? Transforming the Gender Structure”
2016 – Dr. Annette Lareau, University of Pennsylvania
“Unequal Childhoods, Unequal Adulthoods: Small Moments and Large Consequences”
2015 – Dr. Brian Powell, Indiana University
“Changing Counts, Counting Change: Toward a More Inclusive Definition of Family”
2014 – Dr. Cecilia Ridgeway, Stanford University
“How Does Gender Inequality Persist in the Modern World?”
2013 – Dr. Teresa Sullivan, University of Virginia
“Greedy Institutions”
2012 – Dr. David Takeuchi, University of Washington
“Bringing Boundaries to Reach Real Utopias”
2011 – Dr. Frances Fox Piven, CUNY Graduate Center
“The Resurgence of Corporate Power in the United States and the Implications for Democracy as We Know It”
2010 – Dr. Michael Messner, University of South California
“Stopping Gender Violence: Two Generations of Male Activists”
2009 – Dr. Cecilia Menjivar, Arizona State University
“Immigration, Citizenship, and Exclusion: Latin-American Immigrants and the Contemporary Regime”