Editorial Note:
This blog feature was created by the Alpha Kappa Delta (AKD) Media Editor, Stephanie Wilson, in celebration of the third place winner in AKD’s 2025 undergraduate student paper competition, Kendall Coney.
Each year AKD sponsors an undergraduate student paper competition. Winners are eligible to win cash prizes and travel money to attend the American Sociological Association annual conference. The third place winner received $100 and up to $1,000 in travel expenses to the 2025 annual meeting of the American Sociological Association.
Continue reading to learn more about Kendall Coney’s winning paper!
Meet Kendall Coney
Kendall Coney recently graduated with her BA in Sociology and Philosophy from Macalester College and will be joining the University of Texas School of Law for their Juris Doctor (J.D.) Program this Fall. Her paper titled “Death and Inheritance: How Meanings of Money are Drawn from Everyday Life“ earned her a third place prize in our 2025 Undergraduate Student Paper Competition.
To learn more about Kendall and her research, we reached out for a brief interview. Continue reading below to learn more about Kendall, her award-winning paper, and her experiences as a sociology student! You can also connect with Kendall on Instagram.
Can you briefly summarize your award-winning paper?
Through interviews, I found that personal representatives in the probate process understand and navigate the process differently depending on their dissimilar understandings of the meaning of the inheritance money. I argue that inheritance’s social and legal meanings draw from each other to culminate in a dominating social meaning of inheritance as a legitimate and necessary procedure, despite its inconveniences, to accommodate the non-linear nature of complex social relationships and how inheritance money helps to define these relationships.
What motivated you to write on the topic of your paper?
I became interested in the broad topic of estate matters after working for a financial advising company, where I was invited to attend a company seminar that discussed the importance of coordinating estate planning matters between professionals such as financial advisors, CPAs, and estate planners and the quasi-legal power given to the FAs tasked with designating account beneficiaries. This opened my eyes to the lack of streamlined planning on the side of professionals that contributes to difficulties in estate planning matters.
From there, I became intrigued in how individuals on the other side of the process deal with the challenges caused by the lack of a streamlined system. Because probate is public record which made it accessible for me to study and is a characteristically long, challenging, and exhaustive process to navigate, I focused my topic on the experience of personal representatives in the estate planning process.
As a sociology student, what has been your favorite class and why?
My favorite class was Law and Society because I found it interesting to look into the everyday, mundane features of social life and understand the deeper phenomenon happening by which institutions and society are continually shaping each other according to our everyday, fluid relationships with and understandings of the law. Thinking in this way led me to enjoy exploring these seemingly mundane topics and the many levels at play that go into constructing our everyday life.
What have been your biggest “aha” moments while studying sociology?
The biggest aha moment for me studying sociology was in my Interpretive Social Research course. We conducted ethnographies in groups under the topic of Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s theory of racial grammar. My group focused on the racial grammar present in grocery stores, which truly opened my eyes to how deeply embedded racial grammar and the invisible weight of whiteness are in our communities. Now that I have done an ethnography that focused on this theory, my eyes have been open to the racial grammar present in every setting that I notice more than I did before learning about this and since I have learned to use the skill of ethnography.
If you had to choose one concept, theory, or idea from sociology that has had the biggest impact on how you view the world around you, what would it be and why?
The theory that has had the biggest impact on my worldview is Patricia Ewick and Susan Silbey’s theory of legal consciousness – specifically as told through their book The Common Place of Law. This has allowed me to see just how permeating that legal ideas are in shaping aspects of our life, both legal and not, and vice versa. This theory has also given me a better understanding of the fluid way that legal understandings are created, shaped, and legitimated on both individual and collective levels. This theory has given me a rich understanding of how the fluid, everyday contexts of our lives and the law are not separate entities, but rather are deeply intertwined with one another on a co-constituted level. This has given me a better foundation for understanding legal institutions as well as how other institutions do not stand separate from, but are also deeply intertwined with social life.