2022-2023 Minority Fellowship Program Fellows

Luis Flores, Jr.

Graduate Institution: University of Michigan—Ann Arbor

Midwest Sociological Society MFP

Luis Flores, Jr. is a PhD candidate in sociology and affiliate at the Stone Center for Inequality Dynamics at the University of Michigan. He earned his BA in political economy and history from the University of California, Berkeley. A historical sociologist specializing in urban, economic, and stratification research, Flores studies how the shifting regulatory boundaries separating home and market shape labor, wealth, and inequality. His dissertation, The Informal Oeconomy: Home-Based Moneymaking after the Family Wage, traces household efforts to transform the home into a space for moneymaking—with practices ranging from multi-tier marketing (i.e., Avon, Herbalife), renting out rooms to tenants, producing piecework from home, and extracting home equity in new ways. Flores argues that experiments in home-based moneymaking emerged from households excluded or unaccounted for by 20th century “breadwinner liberalism”—housewives, immigrants, workers of color, and the elderly. As labor market restructuring broadened experiences of precarity, the appeal of once-marginal moneymaking practices spread. These practices quickly came into conflict with regulatory boundaries, in land-use zoning, tax codes, labor law, and mortgage law, that enforced the postwar separation between home and market. Their contested incorporation remade gendered divisions between home and market, and regulatory and racialized constructions of economic informality. In addition to his academic work, Flores engages in community-based efforts to advance environmental, health, and social justice along the U.S./Mexico borderlands.

Edwin Grimsley

Graduate Institution: The Graduate Center, CUNY

Alpha Kappa Delta MFP

Edwin Grimsley is a PhD candidate in sociology at the City University of New York (CUNY), The Graduate Center. He earned his BA in biology from Wesleyan University. Broadly, Grimsley studies the intersection of race and racism, economic inequality, urban sociology, and criminology. His dissertation, Colorblind Racism in Marijuana Possession Laws: A Sociological Approach from Development to Implementation, applies mixed methods to examine the development, implementation, and impact of marijuana possession laws in the United States, and in New York state specifically. In this work, Grimsley utilizes archival research to decipher how public and private legal exceptions in the development of marijuana possession laws created and reproduced existing inequalities. Using quantitative methods, he takes particular interest in understanding the effects of race and class-based criminalized policing for public marijuana possession offenses, specifically in employment domains. Grimsley’s research has been supported by a NIH predoctoral award funded by the National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA) via the Behavioral Sciences Training program at New York University. Prior to his training as a sociologist, he worked as a case analyst for The Innocence Project, where he investigated cases of prisoners convicted of serious crimes they did not commit, ultimately helping free seven innocent people from prison. During his graduate studies, Grimsley has worked as a qualitative research assistant for the Yale Law School Justice Collaboratory where he interviewed criminal justice actors and community residents across New York City, and as a quantitative research assistant for the Data Collaborative of Justice where he wrote public facing reports on misdemeanor arrests. He is from Brooklyn, New York, and enjoys playing tennis in his free time.

Theresa Hice-Fromille

Graduate Institution: University of California, Santa Cruz

Sociologists for Women in Society MFP

Theresa Hice-Fromille is a PhD candidate in sociology with designated emphases in critical race and ethnic studies and feminist studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC). She graduated from Lock Haven University in 2016 with a BA in political science and Spanish. At UCSC she developed a transdisciplinary scholarship and dissertation project titled Black Feminist Leadership, Black Girlhood, and Community-Based Education in the Global Black Imaginary. Within this study, Hice-Fromille examines the complex processes of teaching, learning, and imagining within the African diaspora by centering the experiences of Black women leaders and Black girl participants of two community-based educational organizations that incorporate travel abroad. She utilizes community-engaged methods, including youth participatory action research (YPAR) projects. Her work draws on literature that centers diasporic travel, community-based education, and Black girlhood to frame her investigation into the ways that Black girls’ experiences and imaginations for the future are oriented within a global context, and how Black women empower girls to take their social positions as starting points of solidarity and advance the struggle for liberation. She has published preliminary analyses of her dissertation research in Sociological Perspectives and Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy. In her forthcoming open-source book chapter, “Teaching for Black Girls: What Every Graduate Student Instructor Can Learn from Black Girlhood Studies,” Hice-Fromille discusses curricular approaches that early career university instructors can use to cultivate a pro-Black pedagogical praxis that centers care for Black girls. Outside of teaching, researching, and leading Pathways to Research—a UCSC research mentorship program—Hice-Fromille enjoys traveling, gardening, baking, and finding the best Bay Area boba spots with her daughter.

Carla Salazar Gonzalez

Graduate Institution: University of California, Los Angeles

Sociologists for Women in Society MFP

Carla Salazar Gonzalez is a PhD candidate in the sociology department at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She earned her MA in social sciences with a concentration on demographic and social analysis and BA in sociology from the University of California, Irvine. Gonzalez’s research interests include immigration, asylum law, race/ethnicity, inequality, family, and gender. Born in Los Angeles (unceded Tongva lands). She was raised by her Mexican immigrant grandmother, and she spent part of her childhood in Tijuana, Mexico, where she now conducts research. Broadly, her mixed-methods research agenda seeks to generate greater understandings of the implications and consequences of immigration border policies and laws on immigrant populations and their families within and outside of the U.S. Gonzalez’s dissertation, Race and Gender in U.S. Immigration Policy: Mothers Seeking Asylum at the U.S.-Mexico Border, examines how asylum-seeking women and their children from Central America, along with their attorneys and advocates, negotiate and are affected by the laws and immigration policies surrounding borders and asylum. Her research leverages insight from 14 months of participant observations at an immigrant-serving organization, Al Otro Lado (AOL), and 125 interviews with Honduran, Guatemalan, and Salvadoran mothers in Tijuana seeking asylum in the U.S. Gonzalez’s research has been supported by the Fulbright Fellowship, the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, UC San Diego’s Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, and various fellowships from research centers at UCLA. She looks forward to becoming a professor who will empower the next generation of race, immigration, and legal scholars. In addition to conducting research, she enjoys spending time with her partner and two spirited children and engaging in activities in her local community.

Korey Tillman

Graduate Institution: University of New Mexico

Association of Black Sociologists MFP

Korey Tillman is a PhD Candidate in the sociology department at the University of New Mexico. He earned his MA in sociology from University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and his BS in computer science from Syracuse University. His research sits at the nexus of race, policing, and empire. Tillman’s dissertation traces a human-Black racial hierarchy that informs modernity and examines how in moments when Blackness is policed, this racial hierarchy is reified and challenged. As an abolitionist, the goal of his work is to build upon the legacies of the Black feminist and radical traditions to assert Black humanity and move toward a world where African diasporic communities receive care, not criminalization. Tillman’s research has been supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship and the Fulbright Fellowship. His scholarship has been published in Social Problems, Sociology Compass, and Oxford University Handbook on Ethnographies of Crime and Criminal Justice. In addition, his sociological fiction has appeared in The Sociological Review. He is one of three editors on the forthcoming book, Neglected Social Theorists of Color: Deconstructing the Margins with Lexington Books. Currently, Tillman is the student representative for the Association of Black Sociologists and ASA’s Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities. In the community he supported the creation of an annual Mother’s Day bailout, helped facilitate community listening sessions, and works on an abolitionist curriculum for a nonprofit in collaboration with formerly incarcerated organizers. Online, Tillman is the co-creator of the #SocAF hashtag aimed to eradicate imposture syndrome and foster an inclusive academe through communal love and affirmation. In his spare time, he plays the guitar and piano, watches films, and spends time with loved ones.