Dr. Bright has nearly ten years experience as a social science researcher. She came to ETSU in 2018 from The University of Southern Mississippi where she spent 7 years specializing in social/cultural development with a focus on community health and race, with much of her time devoted to the work of the Gulf States Health Policy Center. She specializes in both quantitative and qualitatively methodologies, including social network analysis.
Dr. Bright is also a faculty researcher at the Applied Social Research Lab (ASRL) at ETSU. Visit ASRL's website to learn more about ASRL and it's research.
- COURSES TAUGHT
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Undergraduate:
- Social Statistics
- Data Analysis
Graduate:
- Applied Sociology
- Applied Data Analysis
- Social Network Analysis
- Social Media
- Current Research
- My research focuses on social/cultural development and more specifically, on social learning processes. This had led me to researching the role of social networks and social capital in health disparities and quality of life, as well as an emphasis on the how culture is interpreted at racialized geographies. Methodologically, I am interested in the advancement of social network analysis for understanding social/cultural processes.
- Selected Publications
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Books:
2016 Conceptualizing Deviance: A Cross-Cultural Social Network Approach to Comparing Relational and Attribute Data, Lexington Books (Rowman & Littlefield).
Peer-Reviewed Articles:
- 2018 “Librarians as Facilitators of Collaboration: Implications from a Social Network Analysis of Academic Co-Authorship,” with Emma Fontenot, Mississippi Libraries Journal, 80(4) Winter 2017 (forthcoming).
- 2018 “Social Representational Communities in the Imagined Antebellum South,” with Perry Carter, Sociological Spectrum (forthcoming).
- 2017 “The Value of Social Network Analysis for Evaluating Community-Academic Partnerships and Collaborations for Addressing Social Determinants of Health,” with Eboni Edmonson, Danny Patterson, and Maria Pisu, Ethnicity & Disease, 27: 337-346.
- 2017 “Elections, News Cycles, and Attention to Disasters,” with Braden Bagley, Disaster Prevention and Management, 26(4): 471-478.
- 2017 “Evacuating the Mississippi Gulf Coast from Hurricane Katrina: The Role and Risk of Socioeconomic Factors” with Edward Sayre, David Butler, and Michael Webb, The Mississippi Economic Review, 1: 13-23.
- 2016 “Tourist Plantation Owners and Slavery: A Complex Relationship,” with Derek Alderman and David Butler, Current Issues in Tourism
- 2016 “Who are They? Visitors to Louisiana’s River Road Plantations,” with Perry Carter, Journal of Heritage Tourism, 11(3): 262-274.
Peer-Reviewed Book Chapters:
- 2018 “From Celebratory Landscapes to Dark Tourism Sites? Exploring the Design of Southern Plantation Museums,” with Stephen P. Hanna and Derek H. Alderman, in The Palgrave Handbook of Dark Tourism Studies, Edited by Philip Stone, Rudi Hartman, Tony Seaton, Richard Sharpley, and Leanne White. Palgrave.
- 2015 “Webwashing the Tourism Plantation: Using Historic Websites to View Changes in the Representation of Slavery at Tourism Plantations,” with David Butler, in Methodologies in Social Memory and Heritage Tourism Research, Edited book with Perry Carter, Stephen P. Hanna, E. Arnold Modlin, and Amy E. Potter. Routledge.
- Memberships
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- American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR)
- Generational Fellow, USA Center for Generational Studies
- Race, Ethnicity, and Social Equity in Tourism (RESET)
- Southeast Division of the Association of American Geographers
- Services
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- 2019 Sociological Spectrum Journal: Editorial Board Memeber
- 2019 Committee Chair, ETSU Appalachian Student Research Forum
- Sociology Career Advisor