Elizabeth L. Sweet is an interdisciplinary critical scholar studying sustainable, healthy, and safe economic/community development with marginalized groups, particularly women of color. She received her BA from Boston University in Soviet and East European Studies and a Masters in Urban Planning and Policy as well as a Ph.D. in Public Policy Analysis from the University of Illinois Chicago. Her research is driven by social, spatial and visceral links between economies, identities, and violences, all broadly conceived. Sweet’s work draws from planning, policy, geography, and sociology to examine individual and community-level responses to institutional and global pressures and constraints, such as new immigration policies, economic shifts, changing food systems, increases in unemployment or vulnerability to violence. She comparatively explores Russian, Mexican, Colombian, and US populations and the complicated intersections of sustainability, safety, urbanization and public health. Using body map storytelling and community mapping, she is currently working with Mexican women in Norristown, PA and Yautepec, Morelos, Mexico to document their individual bodily and collective neighborhood experiences of violence as well as trace their community mobilizations to end violence against women. She has a strong and long running interest and publication record on diversity in the Academy. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the American Sociological Association, the George Soros Civic Education Project, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Fulbright Scholars Program, the Illinois Department of Human Services, the Center for Democracy in a Multiracial Society, the Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy, Catholic Charities for Human Development, Temple University-International Affairs, and Temple University-Faculty Senate.
Academic Center on Research in Diversity at Temple University