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...
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...
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...
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 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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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....
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...
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...
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...
