Rate My Professor Gabrielle Raley-Karlin

Gabrielle Raley-Karlin serves as Associate Professor of Anthropology-Sociology at Knox College, a position she has held since 2010. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2010, following her M.A. in Sociology from UCLA in 2002, and a B.A. in Interdisciplinary Social Science from The Evergreen State College in 1995. Her research focuses on the sociology of culture and art, exploring how large-scale social elements—such as markets, power, price, beauty, and love—intersect with everyday processes of meaning-making. In particular, she examines commercial art worlds, investigating the ways graphic artists negotiate between artistic expression and the demands of marketability to produce both aesthetically compelling and commercially viable products. Additional research interests encompass inequality, work, and qualitative methods.

Raley-Karlin's teaching connects macro-level structural forces to micro-level experiences, delving into everyday talk and interaction, institutional processes, and inequalities pertaining to race/ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. Her teaching interests include sociology of culture, sociology of art, work and occupations, social theory, inequality, and qualitative methods. She is a member of the Program Committee for Arts Administration and the Peace and Justice Minor Program Committee. Among her publications are a book review titled "Review of Creative Labour: Media Work in Three Cultural Industries, by David Hesmondhalgh and Sarah Baker," published in Contemporary Sociology 41.1 (2012): 87-88. She co-edited chapters including "Avenue to Adulthood: Teenage Pregnancy and the Meaning of Motherhood in Poor Communities" in American Families: A Multicultural Reader, 2nd Edition (Routledge, 2007), which was reprinted in Sociology: Exploring the Architecture of Everyday Life Readings, 8th Edition (Pine Forge Press, 2010), and "No Good Choices: Teenage Childbearing, Concentrated Poverty, and Welfare Reform" in the same 1999 volume. She instructs courses such as AADM 221 / ANSO 221: Art Work: Culture, Power, and Meaning in Aesthetic Practice.