Dan Morrison, Ph.D. joined the department last year and is already making strides in his new role. This year, he has been working on a number of projects in and outside of the classroom. This semester Dr. Morrison taught Social Problems, and conducted a population health simulation which was developed out of a 2020 grant and allowed students to participate in gamification in a sociology course. In the classroom, this allowed students to throw bean bags, take on different personas, decide which public health interventions they wanted for their community, for kahoots, teams and included a competitive point system- sounds like a class we would want to be a part of!
Additionally, Dr. Morrison has been making strides outside of the classroom. He currently has two papers under review and is working on several projects. Just recently, a textbook was released in which Dr. Morrison wrote a chapter. This textbook, Sociocultural Examinations of Sports Concussions, takes a look at the current social phenomena surrounding sports concussions and the controversies surrounding youth participation in sports, concussions, and the risks that athletes should be allowed to take in sports at a professional and collegiate level. In August, Dr. Morrison gave a talk over this chapter to the American Psychological Association in New York.
Right now, Dr. Morrison also has a Cullen Grant funded project that will allow him to interview hospice providers about their emotional labor and their uses of empathy on the job. This is a collaborative project with Natalia Ruiz-Junco at Auburn University and Patrick McGinty at Western Illinois. This is a theory project, and they are studying pragmatic interactionism which is an attempt to recover some of the roots of the interactions expected in pragmatist philosophy. This paper was presented in New York at the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction Meetings in August.
Dr. Morrison currently has other projects going on including a joint project with Johnathan Coley from Oklahoma Christian University, author of Gay on God’s Campus. They are hoping to do more systematic data collection and planning to look at housing policies on Christian colleges and universities to identify the diversity of housing policies and visitation policies. Additionally, Dr. Morrison is working on with Greg Brooks, who is an ACU professor of Family and Christian Ministry. They are interested in gathering data on the social lives and sexual behaviors of ACU students to identify the disconnect between student behavior and student education. This project will help identify potential risky behavior in students and will advocate for public health.