Over the past four decades, the rate of incarceration for women has risen significantly. Black women are disproportionately represented among incarcerated women. Formerly incarcerated women and men face similar barriers upon release from incarceration, such as obtaining stable and gainful employment, securing safe and affordable housing, and reconnecting with children...
In three empirical chapters, this dissertation examines the field of sustainability over time, specifically uncovering the processes by which contentious interactions between movements and organizations can shift to the development of shared meaning and the creation of new organizational positions. The dissertation utilizes the analyses strategies of text analysis, field...
This dissertation examines the following puzzle: Why have antitrust (competition) laws and policies failed in their mission to prevent concentrations of economic power globally? Corporate monopolization has grown more acute in the last three decades and created serious problems in consumer and worker protection, economic stability, and democratic representation worldwide....
Prisoner reentry has become an increasingly popular topic of research in the past few decades due to the phenomenon of mass return as a result of the era of mass incarceration. While research has been done on the experiences of the returning population before mass incarceration, few contemporary researchers have...
In an 18-month ethnographic and interview-based study of Afghan Americans in the greater Bay Area, California, I explore the relationship of culture and religion amongst this refugee community. As a majority of refugees in the past decade have been Muslim, it is important to understand what their process of integration...
This study is the first to chart the national scope of the criminal prosecution of incarcerated people and to investigate the consequences of this social process. Using an interlocking set of data sources and methods, including interviews, ethnographic observations, and administrative records, I provide answers to some basic questions about...
Viral Verses investigates the influence of social media publication on the relationship between poetry and community formation in southeastern Africa. As more artists in the global South reach wider audiences through online publication, poetic form has shifted to reflect social media’s aesthetic norms, embracing urgency, contemporaneity, and populism. Digital media...
Theoretical and empirical inquiries into queer geographies have focused primarily on how white gay subjects navigate urban landscapes. Consequently, there has been little empirical work that examines (1) queer placemaking within Black and brown urban spaces; (2) placemaking among queer women of color; and (3) the relationship and interplay between...
This dissertation seeks to explain the discursive origin, development, and transformation of “Republican anticommunism,” and how and why this state-originated ideology continues to shape Vietnamese exile communities today. The dissertation focuses on examining mechanisms that allows certain narratives produced by the Republic of Vietnam to persist, despite the regime changes,...
This dissertation starts with the question of what the global resurgence of authoritarianism means for the welfare states affected by it. The inadequacies of the dominant partisan and institutionalist paradigms within the welfare state literature suggest, however, that a new paradigm for understanding welfare state development is necessary to answer...
“Speculative Justice” asks how U.S. terrorism cases with numerous indicators of entrapment prevail in federal court despite case law designed to prevent these very policing practices. Drawing on a combination of two case studies, an original archive of digital court filings from over 250 defendants, and a collection of over...
This dissertation contributes to the theory of segregation and methodologies to measure it. The first two chapters focus on the traditional problem of quantifying segregation in traditional survey data through segregation indices. Segregation indices describe the segregation of an environment with one number – usually from 0 to 1. The...
While the scholarship on policing and surveillance suggests that police departments have and use a wide array of sophisticated tools, the literature has largely focused on only a handful of the largest departments. Moreover, these studies tend to be qualitative, so it is difficult to pinpoint what factors might be...
Standard-based accountability policies have profoundly shaped the landscape of public education in the United States. At the heart of these policies are standardized assessments, administered annually, which are used to evaluate schools and, at times, teachers. While always controversial, opposition to these policies increased following the widespread adoption of the...
Sleep is affected by social relationships and institutions, but much research has studied sleep within an individualized framework. In this dissertation, I analyze sleep in a series of specific social contexts to examine how these contexts shape gender and socioeconomic differences in sleep. Given prior findings suggesting the importance of...
This dissertation uses the case of Colombia to examine the causes and reproductive mechanisms of civil wars that last more than fifty years, which I call perpetual civil wars. It draws on network analysis of violent events and political claims, content analysis of official archival documents and historical records of...
Over the past four decades, the rate of incarceration for women has risen significantly. Black women are disproportionately represented among incarcerated women. Formerly incarcerated women and men face similar barriers upon release from incarceration, such as obtaining stable and gainful employment, securing safe and affordable housing, and reconnecting with children...
The political history of late twentieth-century Southern Africa was dominated by violent liberation struggles against settler-colonial domination in Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. All five countries experienced prolonged settler colonialism, followed by conflicts in which revolutionary national liberation movements (NLMs) sought to both end settler-colonial domination and build...
Automobile transportation is among the leading sources of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, and reducing vehicle miles traveled must be part of our climate change mitigation efforts. One recent trend that, if accelerated, could aid in this effort is the increase in bicycling for transportation in large US...
This thesis studies inter vivos transfers in twenty European countries during the years 2004 to 2017. Inter vivos transfers are transfers made during the lifetime of the donor and the donee. They participate in the intergenerational transmission of inequality and they are an expression of familial values of solidarity and...