Applied Sociology

Increasing Women’s Participation in Trades

Posted on Tuesday, 22 November, 2022Thursday, 4 May, 2023 by Dr Zuleyka Zevallos

A white woman is gesturing with her hands while an Asian woman listens. They are in an engineering lab with a white machine and laptop in front of them

I lead the Women in Trades project. Our team investigates the behavioural barriers and solutions to women’s recruitment in traditionally male-dominated trades, such as construction, engineering and electrotechnology. In the state of New South Wales, women make up only 9% of all apprentices, and 2% of qualified tradespeople in these industries. Our first research report has been published by our partners. The Women in Trades Promising Practice Review presents an overview of best practice in vocational training and employment in Australia and internationally.

Career Planning in the Research Sector

Posted on Thursday, 9 July, 2020Thursday, 9 July, 2020 by Dr Zuleyka Zevallos

Crowd of people at a Latin American festival in Melbourne

I’m sharing the resource I created for the Association of Iberian and Latin American Studies of Australasia (AILASA) Conference. I am leading a workshop on ‘Career Planning in the Research Sector.’ This presentation is intended for early career researchers who may be near completion of a postgraduate degree, or recently completed a Masters or PhD. Specifically, I look at how Latin American Studies scholars can market their skills, especially in current times following the bushfire disaster in late 2019 to early 2020, and the Coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic, which led to significant restrictions and socio-economic disruption from the end of March 2020 to the present day in July (and ongoing). The job market poses many challenges. The lessons here are applicable for other early career researchers.

You can flick through my slides below, or download my slides as a PDF. Further down, there are links to resources for how to look for work, preparing a CV and interview. Accessible descriptions of slides at the end.

Running a research project as an applied sociologist

Posted on Wednesday, 24 June, 2020Wednesday, 24 June, 2020 by Dr Zuleyka Zevallos

Drawing of me sitting at a desk in front of my laptop. I'm wearing a bright multicoloured jacket and headband

Let’s chat about what it’s like to run a typical personal research project as an applied social scientist. Outside of my paid work, I laboured on a resource on equity and diversity, which began a couple of years ago. I let you know I published this a couple of months back, but I wanted to reflect on the journey.

Part of the reason why I’m sharing this is so that you can get to know me a little better, but also because many people don’t realise what it’s like to be an applied sociologist. It means all my scholarship needs to happen outside of my paid work. It is exhausting but incredibly important to my sociological practice.

Blogging Stocktake

Posted on Saturday, 15 June, 2019Saturday, 15 June, 2019 by Dr Zuleyka Zevallos

I’ve been busy the past few months consolidating all of my writing onto my blog. It’s been a humongous undertaking, but the task was designed to help me save my work in future. My blog has proven to be the most reliable way to preserve my content. The consolidation project began because, late last year, Google+ announced it was shutting down in April 2019. Long-time readers would know that, outside of this research blog, much of my public scholarship emerged from Google+. From my involvement in a community run by multidisciplinary scientists, Science on Google+, to my co-management of STEM Women (a community and website supporting the careers of women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics), as well as my own sociology posts, much of my public sociology and outreach happened thanks to Google+.

Google+ held over 3,000 (!) of my public posts on my personal profile, let alone hundreds of private community and interpersonal messages. Importing my content to my blog was the easy part – editing has been a massive effort.

Google+ is much like other microblogging sites like Facebook or Twitter, where you can make original posts, or simply share things you find interesting. In the early days, I reshared a lot of content, which I now only privately consume. For example, I read and commented on a lot of news, but nowadays, I mostly publicly discuss specific issues tied to my professional life, rather than comment on everything that captivates my attention. It was a massive task to re-read every G+ post and decide their past and future value. It was also a kick to see how my sociological social media ‘voice’ has changed over the past few years. You can see a little of that on my blog; I rarely nowadays post just for fun, but I did this in the early days.

Having already faced the shut-down of Vine and Storify, I couldn’t go through the potential loss of my content all over again. After I finished importing not just my personal posts, but another three G+ pages I managed, I started to import, and curate, my Tumblr. This was yet another 3,000 public posts and a few hundred drafts to organise. Phew! The process was both fun and it also brought dejection along the way. Continue reading Blogging Stocktake

Off to Kiwi Foo in Beautiful Aotearoa New Zealand

Posted on Friday, 2 March, 2018Thursday, 25 April, 2019 by Dr Zuleyka Zevallos

I’m off to beautiful Auckland in Aotearoa (New Zealand) for Kiwi Foo! My second time Fooing. Last time was wonderful. I was very apprehensive before arriving, because while I’ve lectured, done dozens of conferences, and led hundreds of presentations and workshops, Kiwi Foo is an “unconference,” which I’ve never experienced. It is a unstructured event where none of the day talks are pre-organised. Instead, the 150 participants arrive on Friday night, introduce themselves to everyone else one by one and then together negotiate individual talks and panels. The idea is to put your idea for your talk on the wall (newbies first) and then see if others are talking on a similar theme and try to collaborate. A broad aim of the conference is to bring together people from many fields to work together on a better future. Continue reading Off to Kiwi Foo in Beautiful Aotearoa New Zealand

Indigenous Sociology for Social Impact

Posted on Saturday, 6 January, 2018Tuesday, 23 April, 2019 by Dr Zuleyka Zevallos

The history of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander social justice activism to destabilise and overcome colonial practices in Australia began with the British invasion in 1788 and has continued to the present-day. These acts of social and political organisation have strong sociological resonance that should centrally inform sociological inquiry in Australia. Yet Indigenous knowledges are peripheral to the discipline of sociology. This post is the first in a series exploring ways to decolonise sociology, through the leadership of Associate Professor Kathleen Butler, sociologist and Aboriginal woman belonging to the Bundjalung and Worimi peoples of coastal New South Wales.

To redress the problematic racial dynamics of sociological theory and practice, Associate Professor Butler convened the first Indigenous Sociology for Social Impact Workshop at the University of Newcastle, Ourimbah campus, on Darkinjung land. Held on 27-28 October 2016, Professor Butler invited Indigenous and non-Indigenous sociologists from different parts of Australia to consider gaps and opportunities in addressing the ongoing impact of colonialism in our theories, methods and practice.

Today’s post places the workshop in historic context and summarises the discussion. I also include reflections by Associate Professor Butler about the outcomes from the workshop. I end with a set of questions that emerged from the workshop that we should now face as a discipline in order to centre Indigenous knowledges and methods in sociology.

https://twitter.com/OtherSociology/status/791441601570627585

Continue reading Indigenous Sociology for Social Impact

Out in the Field

Posted on Sunday, 5 November, 2017Sunday, 14 April, 2019 by Dr Zuleyka Zevallos

Visual sociology of my travels around the North and South Coast of New South Wales for fieldwork and some overnight training, from early October to the end of November 2017.

During the week, I was doing fieldwork research and look at all the trolleys I saw in one day! It was a Sociology Of Trolleys bonanza. 7 October 2017

Continue reading Out in the Field

Marketing Sociology

Posted on Wednesday, 31 May, 2017Wednesday, 3 May, 2023 by Dr Zuleyka Zevallos

I’ve being managing communications and media for research organisations and not for profits for many years. In general, the social sciences don’t do marketing well. This is especially the case in my field of sociology.

A study of teaching sociology in Australia led by Helen Marshall found that our “sociology” brand is weak including through the names of our courses and how we promote them. Economics and psychology excelled at marketing early in their history (not without internal controversies) particularly by elevating their likeness to physical and natural sciences. Sociology does not need to take this appeal. Instead, we can focus on our unique and valuable contribution to social policy, welfare, and other sectors. This is why I founded Sociology at Work, to support practitioners, including helping graduate understand their career options. It would be helpful to increase efforts to promote sociology more broadly.

Turning Social Science Into a Business

Posted on Thursday, 6 April, 2017Saturday, 4 May, 2019 by Dr Zuleyka Zevallos

In mid-2015, I was featured on the University College London Researchers about my time running my consultancy. Read more below about my career transition and how I use social science when working with not-for-profit organisations and businesses.

Dr Zuleyka Zevallos earned a PhD in Sociology from Swinburne University, Melbourne, where she remains an Adjunct Research Fellow. She currently runs her own business, Social Science Insights, a Research and Social Media Consultancy working with small to medium businesses, government, and not-for-profits who require social research, training and policy advice. She also provides research-driven social media content to help public education and health campaigns. Here Zuleyka shares her career journey, and offers tips to researchers thinking of moving out of academia.How did you move from studying for a PhD to starting your own consultancy?

After completing my PhD at the end of 2004, I continued to work as a lecturer. I left in 2006 because there was no job security in academia. I found it difficult to find full-time academic work in my field, but once I started looking in business and policy sectors, the job choices were surprisingly abundant. I’ve reflected on the fact that, at first, it was very disheartening to give up on my dream job in academia, but once I realised the multiple career possibilities in other industries, the decision to leave was empowering.

A career beyond academia leads to diverse experiences, and the work will likely take you to places you may not have expected. Having had little luck for months trying to get an academic job, I decided to apply for unconventional roles that sounded interesting. I received a number of different offers, which showed me how valuable my PhD degree was to non-academic employers. I took a job in federal government as a Social Scientist. I moved interstate to take the position. Within five years, I had led two interdisciplinary team projects working on social modeling and intercultural communication, and I also conducted research on a range of topics, from political violence to media analysis to the socio-economic outcomes of migrants and refugees. The role was varied so that I worked with many different clients, and I also attended conferences and published articles, which kept me engaged with my academic peers.

In late 2011, I decided to move back to my home state permanently. I worked as a Senior Analyst on an environmental health and safety investigation. I led a team of 23 researchers examining 30 years worth of reports and company data, as well as analysing interviews with 300 emergency service workers. We evaluated the connections between training and environmental practices, the chemicals used during exercises, and the high rate of cancer and other illnesses amongst emergency service workers.

After the investigation ended, I decided to set up my business. I had plenty of leadership experience, and had worked autonomously in setting up various projects in my previous roles, plus I had worked with many different client groups. Setting up the business required a lot of research, and I also took a business management course. I’ve been working as a consultant for the past couple of years.
Continue reading Turning Social Science Into a Business