Jennifer Myhre holds a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, Davis. Her primary research experience was as a qualitative interviewer, which turns out to be excellent training for documentary filmmaking and radio journalism. She interviewed community college students, faculty and staff as part of a multi-site ethnographic study of urban community colleges with higher than average transfer rates. She interviewed breast cancer activists for her dissertation on women's health activism. Her areas of focus within sociology include schooling and inequality, popular education, race/class/gender inequality, and social movements. She completed a public sociology podcast about American attitudes about class and economic inequality, based on qualitative data analysis of in-depth interviews collected for the 1500 Stories project.
Jennifer Myhre taught introductory sociology courses for over twenty years. This means she has a lot of practice in translating complicated and often off-putting sociological concepts into ideas that people find engaging and entertaining. Teachers are storytellers. She often jokes that her job was to deliver the "bad news" about social suffering and finds humor an invaluable tool in helping people make sense of the structural sources of social suffering.
Dr. Myhre was a tenured faculty member at De Anza College from 2000-2021. During that time, she also served as the Interim Director of Staff and Organizational Development, Chair of the Sociology Department, Faculty Chair of the Developmental and Readiness Education Taskforce, and Instructional Liaison to Student Success and Retention Services. She taught in the First Year Experience program, a learning community for first generation college students that emphasizes social justice and expression through art, from 2007-2015.
To view her curriculum vitae, click here.
If you are a teacher and sociologist, please check out her teaching resource Recovering the Lost Canon in Sociology, an annotated bibliography designed to help teachers move beyond the so-called "dead white males" and restore the contributions of white women and men and women of color to their rightful place in the history of sociology as a discipline.
For an additional sampling of her academic work and nonfiction writing available online, please visit the following links:
The De Anza College Results of the District Student Diversity Climate Survey
Breast Cancer Activism: A True Political Movement? Breast Cancer Action Newsletter
Traveling the Transfer Path: Student Experiences at City College of San Francisco
Sociological, digital photograph, Jennifer R. Myhre, 2008