Works in Progress

Cycles of Violence: Social Mobility as a Predictor of Violent Crime and Homicide (with Kathy Edin and Luke Shaefer)

In this paper, we build on Sharkey and Torrats-Espinosa's (2017) finding that violence depresses community social mobility by providing preliminary evidence that depressed social mobility is associated with later community violence. Our findings provide evidence for a positive feedback loop wherein violence depresses social mobility and social mobility produces further community violence. This feedback loop has the potential to trap communities in cycles of deep disadvantage.

“Southern trees bear a strange fruit”: The Economic and Public Health Legacies of Slavery and Lynching

Research on the legacies of slavery has yet to take a serious holistic look at the implications of enslavement for modern-day community disadvantage. Similarly, research on lynching has been more concerned with its causes than with its lasting impacts. Our paper is the first to analyze the effects of these violent forms of oppression on multidimensional disadvantage today. We use the multidimensional index of deep disadvantage, a new measure of county well-being, to study the economic and public-health legacies of both slavery and lynching. We find that both have a substantial lasting impact on Southern counties, and that Black communities in particular continue to bear the burden of historical violent oppression.

Criminals-as-Consumers: Shoplifting and the Sociology of Consumption

Criminologists have yet to draw on insights from the sociology of consumption. I argue that adopting a consumption lens in criminological research offers additional insight into the origins of acquisitive crime. To explore the utility of this perspective, I conduct a detailed qualitative analysis of an online shoplifting forum to assess the extent to which shoplifters’ motives reflect shoppers’ motivations as identified in the sociology of consumption. I find that shoplifters’ motives resemble those of shoppers generally, and that adopting a criminals-as-consumers perspective allows for a more complex and holistic understanding shoplifting.  

Teaching and Learning Crime Online: A Study of Online Shoplifting Forums

Online shoplifting forums offer a unique opportunity to explore the ways people teach and learn crime in an online setting. While pevious research has extensively explored online peer effects using quantitative methods, I aim to conduct a qualitative content analysis of forum posts to explore how shoplifters learn from and teach each other in an online setting and how the unique characteristics of the online world reshape the teaching and learning of crime. 

Journal Articles

Mann, Olivia and Bridget K. Diamond-Welch. 2018. “Sharing Gender, Shifting Blame: The Effects of Victim Gender and Observer Sexuality on Victim Blame.” Sexual Assault Report 22(1): 1-13.

Diamond-Welch, Bridget K., Julia Marin Hellwege, and Olivia Mann. 2018. “Blame avoidance & transgender individuals’ attributions about rape: Unpacking gendered assumptions in defensive attribution research.” Journal of Interpersonal Violence.

Kosloski, Anna, Bridget Diamond-Welch, and Olivia Mann. 2018. “The Presence of Rape Myths in the Virtual World: A Qualitative Textual Analysis of the Steubenville Sexual Assault Case.” Violence and Gender, doi:10.1089/vio.2017.0067.

Diamond-Welch, Bridget K., Olivia Mann, Melissa L. Bass, and Craig Tollini. 2017. “The Interaction Between Observer Sex and Sexual Identity on Attributions of Blame With a Heterosexual Female Victim.” Journal of Interpersonal Violence, doi:10.1177/0886260517733281.

Other Works

Mann, Olivia. 2021. "Reflections on the Field: Fieldwork and Vicarious Trauma in Graduate School." The Criminologist, American Society of Criminology.

Mann, Olivia. 2020. "Disinvestment in rural Kentucky leaves 'nothing to do' but  drugs." University of Michigan Poverty Solutions: Understanding Communities of Deep Disadvantage.