Maleah Fekete

(Sociology, May 2024)
Thesis Title: Meaning-making in Contexts of Despair
Committee: Peter V. Marsden (Chair), Michèle Lamont, Brea L. Perry (Indiana University), and Mario L. Small (Columbia University)
Initial Placement: Postdoctoral Fellow in the Irsay Institute at Indiana University, Bloomington
Maleah Fekete's website: https://www.maleahfekete.com/

Bio:
Maleah's research agenda seeks to understand the social processes surrounding mental disorder. Her research considers how social factors like gender, close relationships, and culture contribute to disparities in mental health—especially despair, depression, PTSD, and loneliness. Substantively, this work contributes to understanding of social patterns in mental health, so that interventions may be tailored more precisely to the most proximate social factors influencing mental health outcomes. Theoretically, it enhances understanding of the invisible social processes that reproduce inequalities in the distribution of mental health outcomes. By focusing on meaning-making processes, her research is positioned to advance theory by considering how individuals’ learned methods of interpreting their experiences influence their vulnerability to mental disorder. Over the next several years, Maleah plans to develop her research in ways that extend knowledge of the gender- and class-based meaning-making processes that shape both individuals’ internal experiences as well as their methods for managing the stress, trauma, and emotional pain to which they are exposed.

Dissertation abstract:
Maleah's dissertation examines the empirical problem at the center of the “deaths of despair” epidemic: how are the declining social positions of working-class rural Americans connected to their psychological distress and ultimately, their higher rates of preventable midlife mortality? While prior research shows that declining social position is connected to negative mental health outcomes in this population, it does not explore the meanings that precede and comprise affected individuals’ experience. Maleah's research extends this scholarship by examining the ways that middle- and working-class people living in areas said to be affected by this epidemic of low mental health—one that is almost entirely confined to low-skilled, low-educated midlife adults—make sense of their social worlds, and how class-based meaning-making processes relate to differential mental health outcomes. Using data from in-depth interviews with 79 people living in rural central-southwestern Pennsylvania over a five-month period, this research compares how people of different socio-economic standing understand their stressful past experiences, their methods of coping with stress, and their close relationships. It considers how social position “gets under people’s skin” and shapes the way that respondents draw meaning from their experience, and proposes an explanation of the meaning-making process that connects people’s social position and their mental health.