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...
Using the context of the oil and natural gas boom of North Dakota and Montana brought on by advances in hydraulic fracturing technology, this dissertation studies how changing economic conditions affect basic social well-being in a rural setting. Using methods of causal inference, specifically difference-in-differences regressions and comparative interrupted time-series...
Although research has shown LGBTQ+ youth are overrepresented in counts of homeless youth, scholars have yet to investigate whether this trend exists among adults experiencing homelessness. This dissertation uses an organizational analysis of four Chicago homeless centers that cater to young adults to argue that most LGBTQ+ youth are not...
The purpose of this multiple-case study was to examine the lived experiences of current collegiate music education majors, both students from under-represented minorities and their well-represented peers, with attention to racial/ethnic identity and social class. Dyads of current music education students at 8 separate colleges/universities—a student from an under-represented racial...
Today’s romance fiction landscape is drastically different than the early 1980s when its community of readers and writers formalized in the Romance Writers of America and Romantic Times fan magazine. Then, romance fiction was understood to focus on “the interaction between male and female.” Today, romance depicts a variety of...
In this dissertation I leverage new data from the global music recording industry to study the social foundations of creativity and the relationship between product novelty, gender, and commercial success. In Chapter 1, I investigate how different kinds of social connection influence the creation of novel cultural products. Using data...
This dissertation examines the interactional mechanisms that undergird exercises of regulatory authority in expert work settings. In the first chapter, I argue that, in the aftermath of a crisis (in this case, induced by a major regulatory event), organizational actors face environments of high uncertainty which challenge rational models of...
The study of digital inequality has advanced our understanding of how existing socioeconomic disadvantage – such as by income, education, age, gender, and race – translates into disadvantage in the digital realm. Yet, our understanding of the relationships between the diffusion of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and broader processes...
Broadly speaking, this dissertation project seeks to address the following question: how do religious people think about the cultural authority of science, and to what extent does this vary across different contexts? Despite the predictions of classical modernization theorists, religious institutions continue to significantly shape public discourse—and rule-making—in the vast...
The societies of the former Yugoslavia are only a quarter-century removed from extensive warfare, yet collectively represent one of the fastest-growing tourism destinations in the world. This dissertation employs a global and relational lens to examine how contested narratives of recent conflict history are marketed, performed, and narrativized in settings...
This dissertation explores the experience of violence and precarity among Central American youth as they travel through Mexico to the United States. Based on a multi-sited ethnographic study conducted across Mexico from 2015 to 2019, I illustrate how the journey of these youth migrants is, in its basic expression, an...
Bias pervades all stages of the American criminal justice system. The system is a human creation, run by fallible people who bring prejudices and biases to their work just like everyone else. The first step to ridding the system of those biases is to fully understand the way they manifest...
A growing body of research analyzes how corporate social responsibility programs are used to absorb and neutralize the social criticisms coming from social and environmental movements and to superficially respond to the ensuing new regulations. If companies have powerful tools to resist changes and blunt the meaning of the law,...
What is the role of entrepreneurship – a predominantly market-based approach – in addressing social problems such as inequality and social exclusion? How do entrepreneurial organizations with a distinctly social purpose (often referred to as hybrid organizations) manage additional imperatives, such as those related to democratic governance? Based on 70...
In this dissertation, I combine quasi-experiments and computational tools with large-scale data in new ways to address questions that revolve around the Matthew Effect of status. My dissertation is a collection of four empirical papers on status at both the organizational and the individual levels. I employ two distinct empirical...
Over the last decade, a rising trend of corporations publicly acting on social and political issues has come to the fore. The issues and methods have both varied widely—from immigration to abortion, and from advertisements to boycotts. This introduces an interesting puzzle in the realm of strategy research: Where does...
From visualizing thousands of social relationships, operationalizing measures that offer us insight into our theories, to characterizing cultural change over the span of centuries, computational methods appear to provide sociology a means to reveal patterns otherwise unknowable. While these methods are persistently critiqued for their inability to generate social theory,...
The escalating climate crisis is a global social problem requiring multidisciplinary and multi-institutional coordination to solve. In recent years, health practitioners and institutions have become increasingly involved in the climate crisis, recognizing that climate change poses a serious public health threat across a range of health issues. This dissertation draws...
The dissertation’s topic is the creation of quotidian judgements and practices related to food, amid the enduring social and spatial stratification of everyday life. The sites are two large and diverse cities: Paris and Chicago. The method is ethnographic and contextual.Chapter 1 documents the dietary tastes and culinary practices of...
This dissertation examines the birth and rise of orthorexia nervosa, a proposed psychiatric diagnosis described as a pathological fixation with healthy eating. Orthorexia made its first public appearance in the pages of a popular magazine for yoga practitioners in 1997, and later in a self-help book on the subject. Despite...
This dissertation analyzes how suburban school districts made sense of and planned to reduce inequality between 2019–2021. Previous literature has found that suburban schools, despite their reputation as the best in the country, are deeply unequal (Lewis and Diamond 2015; Lewis-McCoy 2014). Building on this previous scholarship, I ask: How...