2025-26 Education & Health Research Hub Speaker Series

"Reimagining Global Education: Shifts in Study Abroad Marketing"

Friday, October 24, 2025 2:00 PM to 3:00 PM EDT
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The CSSR Education & Health Research Hub aims to use this speaker series to leverage connections, spark multidisciplinary dialogue, and bring funded research opportunities to the university community and our community partners.

Join us as Kellie Wilkerson, PhD shares her talk, "Reimagining Global Education: Shifts in Study Abroad Marketing".

Kellie S. Wilkerson recently received her Ph.D. in Sociology from George Mason University. She is currently a Graduate Research Assistant at the Institute for Immigration Research (IIR). Prior to working at the IIR, she worked on projects with the Center for Social Science Research (CSSR) and Next System Studies (NSS). Her primary research interests include applied sociology and evaluation research, globalization, international higher education, statistics, and quantitative methodology.

Kellie earned her MA in Public Sociology at Cal Poly Humboldt with emphases in both practicing and teaching sociology in 2020. There she explored the role study abroad participation played in the creation of "global citizenship" utilizing quantitative, qualitative and geospatial analyses, and plans to continue unpacking experiences with international higher education in her doctoral work. She received her BA in Applied Sociology from the University of Tampa in 2018, where she developed an interest in studying globalization through educational exchanges.

Her current work at the Institute for Immigration Research involves geospatial and quantitative research with Immigration Data on Demand (iDod). As the project manager, she also oversees iDod and provides methodological training for both graduate and undergraduate students.

She successfully defended her dissertation titled Beyond an Adventure: The Transformation of Study Abroad Marketing in the 21st Century in May of 2025. In this research project, she engaged an innovative, mixed-methodological research strategy combining a computational approach to data collection, and analyzing the data using qualitative content analysis to build quantitative regression modeling looking at how the narrative around study abroad programming changed between 60 universities over a 23 year time period.