Madeline Burdine is the Marketing and Communication Coordinator for Pride of Tupelo. She is a Research Associate at Mississippi State University’s Social Science Research Center, where she spends her days working towards the missions of the Gender Impacts Lab, the Evaluation and Research Group, and Mississippi Tobacco Data. While completing her master’s degree in Sociology from the University of Mississippi, Madeline worked within several spaces that are working towards a more united and equitable Mississippi. She served as a Graduate Assistant for the Sarah Isom Center for Women and Gender Studies and went on to serve as a Research Assistant for the “Whiteness in Crisis” project (funded by the National Science Foundation and the Russell Sage Foundation). She conducted 100+ interviews with White southerners to explore how they view themselves in the racial hierarchy today, and her team’s paper was recently published in the esteemed sociological journal Social Problems. She also recently completed her master’s thesis in which she conducted interviews with Mississippians who are deemed as “supportive” of LGBTQ+ friends and family in order to explore how the group navigates the anti-LGBTQ+ climate of the state. Madeline has also conducted interviews for the Queer Mississippi Oral History Project. She lives in Tupelo with her wife, Ashley, and their two children.