This dissertation aims to understand the ways that the social, specifically race, ethnicity, and neighborhood, intersects with the religious identity, beliefs, and practices of early-generation Americans in Chicago. This dissertation asks at the most general level: What is the relationship of race, ethnicity, and religion for early-generation Americans? More specifically,...
In college, high levels of student engagement, including the formation of relationships with faculty and staff, are positively associated with learning and development. Faculty and staff, known as institutional agents, can provide critical forms of institutional knowledge, resources, and services that can enhance the college experience and encourage student success....
This dissertation is a mixed-methods study of municipal building inspections in Chicago. Existing literature demonstrates links between housing, urban governance, perceptions of dilapidated buildings, and racial and economic stratification. Less is known, however, about the intermediary actors who work at the nexus of on-the-ground interpretative processes and city-wide regulation. Building...
This dissertation examines how the experience of migration and the context of reception influences religious ideas and practices. Using the experience of two branches of a Colombian Evangelical church, one in Miami, Florida and one in Madrid, Spain, I explore the extent to which context of reception and the experiences...
This dissertation uses the case of Putin’s Russia to examine how authoritarian regimes build relationships with their societies in a way that strengthens authoritarian rule. In contrast to the existing scholarship, which concentrates on redistributive politics, that is, on the autocrat’s capacities to buy the loyalty of the masses, I...
How do creative producers make their works, and how do their social interactions within creative industries shape the creative process? This study addresses these questions by drawing upon two years of ethnographic fieldwork and over 100 interviews with artists, dealers, curators, collectors, and art advisers in the New York City...
Using interviews and friendship mapping with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and ally (LGBTQ+) community members as well as ethnographic observations, this dissertation analyzes post-gay LGBTQ community in River City, a small, Midwestern city. My findings reveal a formation I call ambivalent community: even as participants express a desire for...
This is a study of the conduct and consumption of statistical medical research HIV/AIDS clinics in the context of the expansion of domestic and international clinical research and evidence-based medicine. Evidence-based medicine is the most recent and most successful attempt at subjecting medical decisions to statistical measurement and control. The...
Classifying patients to diagnose and treat disease, ensure access to medical care, adhere to standards of quality, contain costs, and fulfill contractual obligations is critical to the delivery of healthcare. While classification is a fundamental standardizing process in healthcare, as a social process it is the product of negotiations, organizational...
Over the last 35 years, discourse on "diversity" has become commonplace in many U.S. institutions. My research interrogates diversity as a racialized political project, focusing on the organizational uses of diversity discourse. I base my analysis on case studies of a public university, a Fortune 500 company, and a city...
Drawing on seven years of ethnographic fieldwork, as well as interviews, crime statistics, and census data, this study documents the demolition and redevelopment of a predominately African-American housing development in Chicago. I describe how living in a hypersegregated, high crime neighborhood affects the way residents use, affectively feel, and navigate...
This dissertation develops a war-centered theory of collectivist regimes. I argue that in a large-scale industrial war of coalition alliances, belligerent nations launch extensive programs of economic mobilization and establish centralized bureaucratic institutions of economic regulation. Because exterior states are likely to restrict interior states in their access to the...
This dissertation studies the organizing local approach to labor renewal, a union model centered on organizing new workers. I examine the role of activists and what motivates them to participate beyond a rational evaluation of gains. Additionally, I establish the conditions for successful union reform, specifically, how to overcome inertial...
This dissertation is a multi-method study of the relocation process under the Chicago Housing Authority's implementation of federal redevelopment policies intended to decrease the racial and economic isolation of public housing tenants. It combines quantitative and spatial analysis of program administrative data, interviews with 'expert respondents,' and qualitative semi-structured interviews...
Education researchers have recently highlighted income achievement and behavior gaps – differences between children from high versus low income families in achievement scores and teacher-rated behavior. To date, scholars in this research stream have not considered the possibility that, compared to white students, non-white students may receive differential returns to...
In the last twenty years, memory entrepreneurs have proliferated memories of Communism from Central and Eastern Europe transnationally across Europe, but for some an invisible Iron Curtain persists. How has the European memory field changed in the last two decades, and more broadly, what determines which mnemonic actors are successful...
This dissertation examines the situated and interactional nature of cultural experiences. Drawing on the literature on materiality, place, and space, the study analyzes how the physical and spatial characteristics of art galleries and art museums in Accra, Ghana, and Johannesburg, South Africa, lead people to engage with culture, and derive...
Recent scholarship in critical urban theory, urban political ecology, and related fields has emphasized the "hybridity" of urban-environmental systems. This argument is contrasted with the socially constructed "binary" relationship between "city" and "nature" that dominated historical understandings of urban-environmental connections. Despite wide agreement on these issues, the trajectories that precipitated...
After 9/11 there was a shift in the rhetoric surrounding counter-terrorism. Suddenly, the language of risk, security and prevention was being utilized to justify a new set of global financial regulations headed up by international organizations such as the United Nations, The Financial Action Task Force, and the IMF/World Bank....
This dissertation explores the relationship between institutions of political participation and environmental protection. What is the relationship and how is it constituted? How are participatory institutions put into motion, and how do they operate? What are the effects of these institutions? Are participatory institutions desirable from an environmental perspective and...