Officers

Kenneth Robinson - Past President
Clemson University
krbnsn@clemson.edu
Bio: Ken Robinson is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Clemson University. He is an Agribusiness Extension Specialist with the Sandhill Research and Education Center, Clemson Cooperative Extension. His teaching, research and outreach interests include rural sociology, entrepreneurship, sustainable development, and African American rural life. He is currently collaborating (or has collaborated) on statewide and regional, research projects, including an assessment of farmer/producer stress and contributing factors to stress and an extension outreach initiative focusing on Controlled Environment Agriculture and stakeholder impacts.
Faculty Page

Council Members

Kevin Alejandrez - Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion
Oregon Health Authority
kevinalejandrez958@gmail.com

Bio: Kevin Alejandrez is the proud son of immigrant farmworkers who instilled in him a passion to address social issues. He holds a PhD in sociology from the University of Kentucky where he specialized in social inequalities. Kevin is currently focused on building and strengthening programs, partnerships, and policies that advance health and education equity in Oregon. In his free time, he enjoys reading, running, hiking, and spending time with loved ones.

Leanne Avery - Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion
Affiliation
leanne.avery@oneonta.edu
Bio: Leanne began her career as a high school science teacher and is now Professor and Chair in the Department of Elementary Education and Reading at SUNY Oneonta. Her research has focused on photodocumenting rural children’s local STEM knowledge, the role of families and intergenerational knowledge in STEM education, and the impacts of critical place-based teacher development on classroom practice.
Leanne is also a rural first-generation college student, and she purposefully integrates her education with her rural roots to pave pathways for rural first-generation students to gain access to STEM higher education and careers. She is changing the urbanormative deficit perspective of the rural to one that honors the cognitive diversity of local rural knowledge and its complex connectivity to place. Her more recent work centers on braiding methodologies of rural Indigenous and rural non-Indigenous knowledge and an eco-centric lens to explore rural positionality.

Ryan Thomson - Program
Auburn University
rwt0012@auburn.edu
Bio: Ryan Thomson is a rural sociologist at Auburn University. His research and extension efforts center around heirs’ property, inheritance, and land justice issues across the South. He is actively engaged in several outreach efforts to support rural landowners, serving as a trainer with the Southern Rural Development Center (SRDC), coordinator of the Alabama Heirs’ Property Alliance, and member of the Gullah/Geechee Sustainability Thinktank.
Faculty Page

Ayse Akyildiz - Student Representative
Pennsylvania State University
aqa6158@psu.edu
Bio: Ayse’s research focuses on the ways climate change and variabilities impact food security and migration, particularly in the rural and Indigenous communities of the U.S. and Canadian Arctic. Ayse has co-authored research on topics such as environment and migration, transportation, and tourism. Her dissertation investigates the impacts of climate change on subsistence and market-based food systems, as well as the complex decisions rural residents face about whether to stay or leave their homes.
University Profile