Highlights
Student Profile: Melissa Swauger
Pitt Sociologist Uses Research Findings to Empower Women and Girls
by Gina McDonell
While working on her bachelor’s degree at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Melissa Swauger (A&S ’09 G) volunteered for a few organizations that served at-risk populations. During these opportunities, she was disturbed by the reproduction of social class; she found that the resources children have—economic, social, and cultural—influence the ability to reach their goals more than their individual capabilities and motivation. This led her to the field of sociology. Her choice was affirmed during her senior year, when she interviewed a youth in a gang as part of a school project and saw the value of understanding sociological theories to affect positive change.
Since her first glimpse at sociology in practice, Swauger has obtained two master’s degrees and will soon get her PhD from the University of Pittsburgh’s Department of Sociology. During her academic career, Swauger has used her research and scholarship to empower, rather than simply report on, marginalized populations of women and girls.
“While doing research for my master’s thesis, I found that so much career advice in schools is geared to the lives of middle class children, such as the suggestion that parents seek out a female scientist friend to speak with their daughters about science careers,” notes Swauger. Instead of merely incorporating that observation into a research paper, she worked with middle school counselors and teachers to prepare a more appropriate booklet for young teens on career planning that is sensitive to the particular issues faced by working class children and their parents.
She has continued this effort on a larger scale in her PhD studies, working with local and regional workforce development agencies and school districts in the poor and working class “Mon Valley” area to re-orient their career planning workshops and guidance practices to better address the needs of working class and poor women and girls.
Other community agencies that Swauger has worked with include, among others, the Girls Math and Science Partnership, Working America, the Girls Coalition of Southwest Pennsylvania, and the Three Rivers Investment Board.
Swauger’s ethical principles are evidenced in her commitment to research designs that allow those she is studying to articulate their own ideas and visions, rather than be passively observed. An example of this is her insistence on interviewing teenage girls directly, thereby capturing their understanding of themselves in their own voices rather than as mediated through adults.
Swauger also works to empower women and disadvantaged groups through teaching and mentoring. Since 2003, she has taught classes at Carlow University, first as an adjunct faculty member and then as a full-time instructor. Upon completion of her PhD, she will become a tenure-track faculty member.
To complement her career in the classroom, Swauger has been instrumental in developing service-learning opportunities in her courses and through the student Sociology Club. She has sponsored many campus speakers and developed students projects related to the “working poor” population. Through her interests and efforts, Duquesne Light has provided a summer internship during the past two summers that gives a Carlow student the opportunity to work and learn about assistance programs for needy families. Swauger has also accompanied students on Carlow’s Alternative Spring Break program, through which students travel to another region to provide service for communities in need. She has also been involved in establishing guidelines and developing projects for Carlow’s recently established Institute for Social Responsibility and Justice.
