Associate Professor, BSW Program Director
Binghamton University
Melissa Hardesty is an Associate Professor of Social Work at Binghamton University and the current BSW Program Director; prior to this, she was the MSW Program Director. She completed her MSW at Indiana University and her PhD in Social Welfare at The University of Chicago. Her research falls into two broad topic areas, projects that explore gender norms in intimate relationships and qualitative methodological research analyzing the relationships among epistemology, methods, and ethics. Much of her independent social work scholarship uses ethnographic research methods to explore a handful of related topics: conceptions of professional expertise in the feminine-coded field of child welfare casework; the relationship between American ideas about money and intimate ties and how these inform workers’ assessments of parents; and the relationship between self-representation in everyday life and the mediated world of internet communication. Since 2017, she has co-led the Binghamton University Human Sexualities Research lab (HSRL)—a collaborative effort between faculty from social work, psychology, and Women & Gender Studies—to study college students’ romantic and sexual relationships. Recent HRSL projects include studies of affirmative sexual consent policies and their uptake on college campuses, an analysis of changes in self-reported sexual orientation among college students, and a multi-phase study of the contemporary courtship strategy known as “talking” or “just talking.”
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