Faculty / Staff
Sonya Salamon
Professor of Community Studies, Emeritus
233 Bevier Hall, MC-180
905 South Goodwin Avenue
Urbana, Illinois 61801
Phone: (217) 333-3829
Fax: (217)244-7877
E-mail: ssalamon@uiuc.edu
Education
Ph.D. 1974, University of Illinois, Anthropology
M.A. 1965, University of California at Berkeley, Anthropology
B.F.A. 1961, Carnegie Institute of Technology, Painting & Design
Research Interests
Small-town change; family farming; rural trailer parks; families and community qualitative methods.
Communities as the context for daily life, matter to families. My research focuses on small-towns, an ideal laboratory for studying how neighborhood and community affect family well-being. Small town America are experiencing rapid change due to people choosing to live there but work elsewhere, and the continuing concentration of family farms. I am interested in the social consequences for communities of newcomers moving and fewer people being engaged in agriculture. How newcomers, farmers, and oldtimers forge a new sense of community under these conditions is important to our maintaining vital small towns in rural America.
I am currently working on a book about the community effect of living in a rural trailer park on families and children. The book will incorporate year-long ethnographic studies of trailer parks in Illinois (European-American) and New Mexico (Mexican-American), and in a North Carolina African American park jointly authored with two former doctoral students. Although rural trailer parks are an increasingly common as the affordable housing for rural lower-income families almost no research, until this study, looked at the impact of this often stigmatizing community type on the well-being of families and the development of children and youth of residents.
Books
Salamon, S. Newcomers to old Towns: Suburbanization of the heartland. University of Chicago Press, 2003. Winner 2004 Robert E. Park Prize, Community & Urban Sociology Section, American Sociological Association.
Salamon, S. (1992) Prairie patrimony: Family, farming and community in the midwest. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992.
Selected Articles
MacTavish, K., & Salamon, S. “ Mobile Home Park on the Prairie: A New Rural Community Form.” Rural Sociology, 66(4): 487-506, 2001.
Perry-Jenkins, M. and S. Salamon. “Blue-collar Kin and Community in Small-Town America. ” Journal of Family Issues 23(8): 927-949, 2002.
MacTavish, K. and S. Salamon. What Do Rural Families Look Like Today? Pp. 73-85 In D. L. Brown and L. E. Swanson (eds.) Challenges for Rural America in the Twenty-First Century. Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003.
Salamon, S. “From Hometown to Nontown: Rural Community Effects of Suburbanization.” Rural Sociology 68 (1): 1-24, 2003.
Salamon, S. “The Rural Household as a Consumption Site.” Pp. 330-339 In P. Cloke, T. Marsden and P. Mooney, (eds.) Handbook of Rural Studies. Sage UK, 2005.
Salamon, S. and K. MacTavish. “Quasi-Homelessness Among Rural Trailer-Park Households in the United States. ” In P. Cloke and P. Milbourne,(eds), International Perspectives on Rural Homelessness. Routledge, 2005.
MacTavish, K. A. and S. Salamon. “Pathways of Youth Development in a Rural Trailer Park.” Family Relations, in press.
Awards and Honors
2005-2008 Editorial Board, Rural Studies Series, Rural Sociological Society and Penn State University Press
2003 Editorial Board, Encyclopedia of Community
2002-2007 Board on Agriculture and Natural Resources, National Research Council
2001-2002 President, Rural Sociological Society
1999 Rural Sociological Society Excellence in Research Award
1998 Paul A. Funk Recognition Award, College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences, University of Illinois