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Department of

Sociology

Michelle Madsen Camacho, Ph.D.

Professor of Sociology

Michelle Madsen Camacho is Associate Professor of the Sociology Department at the University of San Diego.  She formerly held two postdoctoral fellowships at the University of California, San Diego, at the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies and in the Department of Ethnic Studies. She is fluent in both quantitative and qualitative research methodologies and uses theories from interdisciplinary sources including cultural studies, critical race, gender and feminist theories. Her research examines questions of culture, power and inequality through both macro and micro lenses. She is affiliated faculty with the Ethnic Studies program and also teaches courses for the Gender Studies and Honors Programs.

Interests
Other interests include: technological innovations in teaching, community-based learning, participatory action research, public sociology and cultural studies.  She is also a mother of three children, an avid salsa dancer, and is currently training for a half-marathon.

Education

Michelle Madsen Camacho’s Ph.D. is from the University of California, Irvine in the interdisciplinary fields of Sociology and Cultural Anthropology (Program in Social Relations).  She studied Quechua language and Andean area studies at Cornell University and later received a Fulbright Fellowship to Bolivia.  Her B.A. is from Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles.

Scholarly and Creative Work

Professor Camacho has presented and published her research on: the paradox of “modernization” via state-led development projects in Oaxaca Mexico; critical inquiry of material culture and symbolism as they relate to “official” and “popular” religion; narratives of pedagogy and the application of community service learning; inequalities in education, particularly persistence of women and people of color in engineering education. Her work has been published in Human Organization, Michigan Journal for Community Service Learning, Sociology of Religion, Catholic Historical Review, and the proceedings for the American Society of Engineering Education and Frontiers in Education. 

Most recently, as co-Principal Investigator on a Collaborative National Science Foundation research grant, she investigates inequities within the field of engineering education through a lens of intersectionality.  She is also working on two book manuscripts, one titled, The Paradox of Paradise: Elite Enclaves and Economic Development in Mexico.  The other is an examination of subjectivity in the process of fieldwork, tentatively called, The Underbelly of Ethnographic Research: Confessions from the Field

Teaching Interests

Using diverse, “active-learning” teaching techniques, Professor Camacho encourages students to generate/analyze/critique data and to unearth their taken-for-granted assumptions about the social construction of knowledge.  Students learn the importance of composing critical questions, the value of comparative research, and the skills necessary to engage in participatory research.  She teaches “Quantitative/Qualitative Research Methodologies”, “Statistics”, “Contemporary Social Issues” and has designed a number of classes cross-listed with Gender and Ethnic Studies including “Critical Perspectives in Ethnic Studies”, “Sociology of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands”, “Comparative/Historical Sociology of Chicanos and Latinos”, “Gender through the Prism of Difference”, “The Woman in the Body”, “Tourism, Travelers, Pilgrims:  Constructions of Self/Other”.