About Craig
A musician who became an advisor, an advisor who became a professor, and a professor who never quite stopped being either.
I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Special Education, Counseling, and Student Affairs at Kansas State University. Specifically, I am in our Academic Advising master's and PhD programs and I teach qualitative research methods. My scholarship examines identity, professionalization, and the production of knowledge, with academic advising serving as a central context for much of this work.
Across my research, I am interested in how occupations develop into professions, how people construct professional identities, and how organizations and fields understand themselves. My scholarship on academic advising has examined professionalization, professional socialization, workplace learning, professional development, career trajectories, conceptions of advising, and the emergence of advising as a scholarly field. This work is informed by nearly a decade I spent as a primary-role academic advisor at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and Florida International University before entering the professoriate.
A second strand of my scholarship examines social identity and the ways identities are understood, negotiated, and experienced within educational, professional, and cultural contexts. My work has addressed sexuality and queer identity, gender and masculinities, feminist identity, privilege, belonging, and the intersections of personal and professional selves. Rather than treating identity as separate from professional life, much of my scholarship considers how people bring their histories, social locations, and ways of understanding themselves into institutions and workplaces.
I also write about scholarly inquiry itself. As a qualitative researcher and methodologist, I have published on grounded theory, structured literature review, institutional ethnography, autoethnography, collaborative autoethnography, and the complexities of researcher participation. I am particularly interested in methodological coherence and in how researchers make defensible choices about the questions they ask, the forms of evidence they engage, and the claims they make. My scholarship also addresses writing, publication, and the development of scholarly practice.
My route to this work was interdisciplinary. I earned my first graduate degree in music theory at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, where my research examined Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd. I later earned an MS in Academic Advising from Kansas State University and an EdD in Adult Education and Human Resource Development from Florida International University. I have never entirely left my interests in music and cultural texts behind; they continue to surface in my scholarship, particularly where popular culture intersects with sexuality, identity, representation, and learning.
At Kansas State, I teach in the master's and doctoral programs in Academic Advising and in qualitative research. My work with graduate students, practitioners, and emerging scholars extends many of the same questions that animate my research: How do professions take shape? How do people come to understand who they are within them? How does identity shape experience and practice? And how can scholarship strengthen the fields it seeks to understand?