Alix’s work is focused on illuminating the taken-for-granted, and helping others share community around healing, creative process, and intellectual engagement.

Her research and creative practice for over the last decade has focused the social- and emotional connection to clothing. Her current study, Clothing The Self, draws together audiences of climate advocacy, body positivity movements, and theorists of identity. In this work, she argues that a sustainable consumption movement ought to address the social- and emotional needs of people to deepen the interrogation of fashion and its discontents.

Alix has researched the social- and emotional relationship to both work and unemployment; clothing and consumption; childbearing practices; health- and stigma; and sexualities. She wrote her dissertation on mismatched work among college educated professionals, as well as conducted ground-breaking research on how long-term unemployment spells can be relieved. She created an MIT-based nonprofit to help those impacted with a team of researchers led by sociologist, Ofer Sharone. Her work on long-term unemployment has been heralded by former President Barack Obama and was impactful to the signing of a pledge by over 300 corporations.

Under her mentor, medical sociologist, Peter Conrad, she co-authored a number of papers on health, stigma and social connection on the Internet. She also had written about the medicalization of women’s sexuality, and conducted research on elective cesarean section delivery among women: Choosing Surgical Birth: Personal Choice and Medical Jurisdiction.

She teaches in the Sociology Department at The University of San Francisco and has a creative practice for clothing design and craft under studio name, Herderin. She is a producer and member of Fibershed, and has worked to develop the governance structure for the Northern California members.

You won’t find Alix much on social media these days, but you may come across her giving a talk at the annual American Sociology Association meeting, presenting her latest work from Herderin at West Coast Craft, and giving a talk or presenting an exhibition as part of SF Design Week, SF Climate Week, and Fibershed’s annual design challenges.