Background: Chris is an adjunct professor of sociology at NMSU. He is also a research analyst and founding member of the Center for Community Research and Evaluation at the The University of Memphis.

Research

Chris's research focuses on collective autonomy and empowerment of exploited groups and resistance to the structures that exploit. Being an applied researcher, most of his particular projects and publications have highlighted specific inequities and disparate outcomes, such as perinatal morbidity, teen sexual health, and literacy education among Black residents of the Mississippi Delta. Understanding these specific issues often involves local, regional, or even global processes of race and ethnicity, gender, sexuality, political economy, place and space, etc., and increasingly ecological and environmental change as well. Chris's work often uses mixed methodologies: quantitative methods to demonstrate the existence and extent of relationships, and qualitative methods to understand how people are affected by them and, in the applied sense, how to best participate in changing them.