Michelle Dietert Profile
Dr. Michelle Dietert
- Department: Social Sciences
- Associate Professor
- Room: HH-204a
Michelle Dietert Michelle Dietert is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Texas A&M University Central Texas (TAMUCT). Throughout her career, teaching, mentoring, and advising has centered on the importance of supporting diverse populations. Sociology is the perfect discipline in which to achieve this goal. Students not only learn how to recognize the links between their personal experiences and social worlds, they are encouraged to think outside of the box. Dr. Dietert helps students to advance these skills through class discussions, group work, film, and writing assignments. Some of the courses that she currently teaches include Sociology of the Body, Military Family, Sociology of Sexuality, Gender in Society, Sociological Theory, Methods of Social Research, and Social Psychology.
Dr. Dietert has engaged in many service opportunities throughout her career at TAMUCT. With the help of a Social Work colleague, she created the first LGBTQ student group on campus. Her student group, GSAW, conducted Safe Space trainings for faculty, staff and students, engaged in fundraising activities to help children of domestic violence, donated LGBTQ children’s books to local libraries, brought various speakers to campus, and attended the Austin Pride parades, to name a few. For seven years, she directed the American Democracy Project (ADP) on campus. In this capacity, she organized three years of faculty lectures on important social issues, and many other events that contributed to an inclusive campus culture. Currently, Dr. Dietert is responsible for the Alpha Kappa Delta (AKD) chapter, Alpha Pi of Texas, where she inducts students into the international sociology honor society. Finally, Dr. Dietert serves as the Chair of the Institutional Review Board (IRB) at TAMUCT.
Her research interests focus on gender and sexuality. Currently, Dr. Dietert has six publications, all within the area of gender studies, particularly focusing on the experiences of transgender individuals. She has covered topics such as workplace discrimination, the socialization experiences of transgender youth, the experiences of transgender veterans and active duty service members, and developed theoretical papers as these apply to the social construction of gender. In 2019, Dr. Dietert published a book chapter with her colleague in Neither Here nor There: The Many Voices of Liminality, edited by T. Carson and published by Lutterworth Press. She recently completed another research project where she collected survey data from 26 transgender active duty service members, with the goal of exploring their experiences before the Trump administration’s transgender ban. This study entitled, “The Opinions and Experiences of Transgender Military Service Members during a Time of Uncertainty: A Research Note,” was recently presented in November 2019 at the International Biennial Conference of the Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society (IUS) in Reston, Virginia. Her future research will examine the views of peers and Commanding Officers regarding experiences working with their transgender counterparts.