ASA is pleased to announce the 2024 ASA Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grants (ASA DDRIG) Research Scholars:
Elif Birced (Boston University), Rethinking Control and Autonomy in the Age of Platforms: The Case of Sponsored Content Creation in Turkey.
Platforms were celebrated as “the future of work,” with more autonomy for workers. However, critics stress that platform work drives overwork, and less autonomy in practice. In this research, I investigate more closely how autonomy does or does not become a means of labor control. To do so, I focus on sponsored content creation on social media platforms in which creators promote brands in return for receiving paid sponsorships. I use sponsored content creation as a strategic case of platform work, as neither platform nor other actors have full control over the processes of production, evaluation, dissemination, payment and intermediation. Based on 60 interviews with creator economy actors, and participant observation in Turkey, I ask 1) How do content creators deal with control of audiences, brands, agencies and platforms over their creative decisions? and 2) How do they utilize the conflicting interests between different actors to enhance their creative autonomy? As platforms, including social media, transform how we work, we need to refine our understanding of labor. This research extends the literature on work and social media studies by bringing a new perspective on the relationship between labor control and autonomy in a fast growing segment of workers.
Caroline V. Brooks (Indiana University-Bloomington), Invisible Illness, the Self, and the Role of Social Networks.
What is the role of social connectedness in the process by which chronic illness influences the self? Research has documented chronic illness negatively influences one’s social relationships and, because identities are based on social relationships, one’s sense of self. This impact is amplified when symptoms are invisible, and the degree of burden is questioned or underestimated by others. But social relationships are also key sources of support that may relieve the negative impact of stressors on the self. Using the case of migraine, a common, chronic, yet misunderstood illness, my project explores how social connectedness may buffer or exacerbate the negative influence of illness on an individual’s identities and psychological wellbeing. To do so, my project uses multiple methods, including in-depth interviews and a survey on social networks, identities, and wellbeing of individuals with migraine. I sample both individuals who are integrated into the migraine patient community and those who are disconnected from such spaces and supplement these data with participant observations of migraine patient conferences. This research will make important contributions to the fields of social psychology, medical sociology, and headache medicine. Findings will be used to develop community programming tailored towards improving patient quality of life.
Jason Azriel Campos (Texas A&M University), The Barrio Lives On: Mapping the Social Constructions of Criminality and Resistance in a Gentrified San Diego Community.
As the largest minority group in the United States, Latinas/os have been stigmatized by stereotypes that position them as more criminally inclined and hostile towards police. Few studies have considered how these perceptions are built and sustained within the neighborhood context. This dissertation project aims to investigate what factors influence the perceptions of Latina/o criminality and how it shapes criminal outcomes. To better understand these patterns, this study uses Logan Heights (also known as Barrio Logan), a mostly Mexican-American neighborhood in San Diego, CA, to examine how the experiences of residents in a community are impacted by perceived criminality and contact with police. Drawing on interviews with neighborhood residents, ethnographic fieldwork, and aggregate crime and victimization data, this study advances our understanding of Latina/os in the criminal justice system by examining the relationship between: 1) community member perceptions and experiences with police; 2) neighborhood crime histories and policing practices; and 3) resistance strategies for community identity and survival. Insights gained from this project will be shared with community members, academics, and practitioners to deepen understanding on the influence that local and state officials have when enforcing criminal laws on Latinas/os and on the neighborhoods where racial and ethnic minorities live.
Eunchong Cho (University of California-San Diego), A Generation in Search of Hope: Youth Social Movements and Youth Identity in Post-2010 South Korea.
While young people are often significant participants in social movements, the prominence of youth as a collective identity remains underexplored. South Korea’s post-2010 youth movements, ignited by the 1997 Asian economic crisis and subsequent neoliberal reforms, offer a compelling case study to address this gap. My research delves into how and why “youth” as a collective identity for mobilization has gained political prominence in South Korea’s neoliberal era. Specifically, it examines how neoliberalism reshaped youth issues, identities, and activism, and how young people initially mobilized across the political spectrum to advocate for recognition of their age-specific needs and rights. The study also explores the emergence of gender dynamics and conflicts within these movements in later stages. The research utilizes in-depth interviews, archival research, and topic modeling. I will develop historical counterfactuals and then test them using process tracing methodology. This research unpacks the struggles and hopes of the young generation in South Korea, who are grappling with a precarious and uncertain future. These movements underscore the transformative potential of sustained activism in effecting change. This project will contribute to the literature on social movements and expand sociological theories of boundary-making and identity formation.
Alejandra Cueto (Brown University), The Power of Classification: The Role of Social Movements in State Knowledge Production in Argentina.
How do governments gather data on social phenomena that fall beyond the scope of state regulation, such as informal settlements? How does the process of collaboration between state agencies and non-state actors in the construction of this type of data change state agencies and public policies? In this project, I investigate how different state bureaucracies produce data about informal settlements and its residents. I argue that the state often needs to collect and produce this data with social movements that have access to informal settlements, a process which requires states to adapt their public policies, and institutions. Simultaneously, social movements can use this information to advance their political agenda. I will explore this process by comparing two state institutions in Argentina that collect data on informal settlements, the National Institute of Statistics (INDEC) and the National Registry of Informal Settlements (RENABAP). This study will combine interviews, participant observation, archival analysis, survey data, and spatial analysis to study how knowledge production between institutions and social movements shape both public policies and state agencies. The findings of this research will yield insights into the effects of the collaboration between civil society and the state in making more visible neglected populations within the context of global urban crises.
Irene Del Mastro N. (University of California-Los Angeles), Street Medicine: Coaching, Sorting, and Healing the Unhoused.
A growing number of doctors are turning the streets of the city into their office. They practice street medicine, a low-barrier healthcare model aimed at addressing the medical and social needs of the unhoused directly where they live. Despite existing for over 30 years, street medicine has recently but rapidly become part of both the government and the private sector responses to homelessness in California. Yet little is known about (1) how street medicine providers decide to whom among the large and widespread homeless population they offer their services, (2) what services they offer and why, considering the multiple social and medical needs of the unhoused and the limitations of practicing medicine on the streets, and (3) how they engage the unhoused—a population known for distrusting the medical system—in medical care. To investigate this, I am conducting 24 months of participant observation of street medicine teams in Los Angeles. I triangulate this data with semi-structured interviews, participant observations of street medicine workshops, and policy and training documents. This project contributes to the scholarship on patient-doctor interactions, health disparities, and poverty governance, and informs advocates and policymakers about street medicine’s benefits and unintended consequences.
Julia Dessauer (University of Virginia), Power in Hollywood: Work, Agency, and Authorship in the Era of #MeToo.
Hollywood is a primary site for the production and distribution of cultural representations of gender, race, sex, and power. These representations are crafted within a highly competitive and opaque work environment, and as a result, there is a significant gap in scholarly knowledge regarding exactly how laborers in Hollywood are hired and perform their work. Additionally, Hollywood as a workplace is in the midst of transformation as recent social movements have exposed pervasive inequalities and abuses, and new technologies have upended contractual norms between studios, networks, and laborers. My dissertation examines the intersection of changes in work and employment relations with representational struggles over how narratives of gender, race, and sex are created. I show how power operates in Hollywood, and I ask: whose stories are told, and who gets to tell them? How have recent social and labor movements impacted hiring policies, workplace norms, and race and gender inequality? I draw on 80+ interviews with Hollywood insiders to answer these questions and others. This project will contribute to sociology of culture, gender, labor, and elites, and have broader implications for the future of creative industries and diversity and equity in workplaces.
Alexandra Eleazar (University of California-Santa Barbara), Digital Labor, Colonial Landscapes, and Privileged Migrations to Guatemala.
The population of “digital nomads,” individuals who travel and live leisure-motivated lifestyles while working online, has increased dramatically and is expected to continue to grow. Guatemala is a top destination for digital nomads. My dissertation focuses on two largely understudied groups–mobile remote workers and European and North American migrants in Central America– and the consequences of their migration to the region. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and both comparative historical and visual methods, my project explores: 1) the increasing mobility of European and North American digital nomads, migrants, and expatriates in Guatemala, 2) the structural and social impacts of these migration journeys on both local and national levels, and 3) the ways this migration is rooted in, or shaped by, previous migration patterns and colonial legacies in the region. My project is both a documentation project of the possibilities of digital labor and an exploration of the realities of European and North American migration, inequality, and tensions within Guatemala. The proposed research illuminates the dynamic and shifting relationships between digital labor, migration, social-environmental responses, and unequal mobility. As increasing numbers of individuals from privileged nations gain access to remote work, migration studies will need to understand the impact on destination countries.
Madison Garcia (University of Wisconsin-Madison), “We Can Get You More Money:” The Opportunities and Challenges of Nonprofit-Based Solutions for Inequities in the Transition to College.
In the U.S. context of declining public education funding, legal attacks on affirmative action, and persistent inequities in higher education, college access nonprofit organizations (CANs) have stepped in to support the transition to college among students from systematically marginalized groups. CANs have had varied success in overcoming college-going barriers. Less is known, however, about why they work and how the challenges they face– as nonprofits supporting multiply marginalized youth– influence their operation and, thereby, success. Using multi-level data from 15 months of ethnographic observations and interviews at one site, Pathways–South L.A. (PSLA; a pseudonym) that is part of a larger college access nonprofit organization, I examine how the organization’s staff attempt to promote college-going among low income, first-generation Latinx youth of varying citizenship and immigrant statuses. I also examine how the organizational challenges PSLA faces influence their work and ability to achieve their goals. This research has implications for addressing inequalities in college attendance and persistence. This work furthers understanding of what’s working in CANs, the constraints that undermine their impact, and more broadly, advances understanding of the implications of leaving nonprofit organizations to fill gaps in promoting college-going among systematically and multiply marginalized groups.
Courtney Marciá Gardner (University of Central Florida), Advancing Beyond Deficit Models: How Joy is Cultivated among Black Transgender and Nonbinary Young Adults in Florida.
Joy is a key element of people’s everyday lives and is a crucial part of people’s overall health and well-being, yet it is understudied in academic literature. This research aims to investigate the specific processes through which joy is cultivated and maintained among Black transgender and nonbinary young adults in Florida. Data, derived from a larger, multidisciplinary project, will consist of in-depth interviews with Black trans and nonbinary people aged 18-26. Analysis will assess similarities and differences among the processes for joy cultivation among Black transmasculine/transmen, Black transfeminine/ transwomen, and Black nonbinary people. Studying how joy is cultivated and maintained among Black transgender and nonbinary young adults in Florida is novel. Given the rise of anti-trans legislation in Florida, this research will contribute to the development of a model for understanding how joy is cultivated under specific oppressive regimes, advancing the sociology of social inequalities. It will also help sociology advance beyond deficit frameworks and provide a new model for understanding an aspect of social life that is not well-understood, but that has significant consequences for people’s well-being. Studying how people who are intersectionally oppressed cultivate joy can inform social policies and practices that produce actionable interventions that enhance well-being among these groups.
Hana Gebremariam (Temple University), A Study of Black and White Students’ Experiences with the Climate and Organization of College Mental Health Services.
While college students use mental health services more than in previous decades, inequalities in service use between Black and White students persist. My study considers how institutional-level factors may shape racial inequities despite the increased availability of college mental health services. I use quantitative and qualitative methods to examine how the organizational context and campus climate affect Black and White students’ engagement with mental health services and how colleges respond to students’ needs. First, I take a bottom-up approach to ask how do Black and White students perceive their college, its climate, and mental health services? How do these perceptions impact their service use? I answer these questions through quantitative analysis of the Healthy Minds Study and 50 in-depth student interviews. Second, I take a top-down approach to explore how do college mental health programs serve students of different races? How do considerations of racial diversity shape the delivery of mental health services? I investigate these questions through in-depth interviews with administrators and mental health providers. My findings contribute to the literature on mental health and racial inequalities and have practical implications for how colleges can better organize resources to meet diverse students’ needs.
Erin Ice (University of Michigan), The Making of the Family Caregiver.
In the U.S., a debate is underway about who should care for aging and disabled adults, and where this care should take place. This debate is urgent because the aging population has created a growing number of people needing daily assistance, with a shrinking number of available caregivers. My dissertation examines the consequences of families providing medically-intensive care at home. Combining an interview and ethnographic case study of stroke caregiving with a national longitudinal survey on older adults with various disabling health conditions, I argue that most caregiving falls on lone caregivers because sharing is disincentivized by the structure of medical care and family relationships. These lone caregivers, often lay, struggle to bridge family expectations and medical responsibilities, hindering their ability to provide high-quality care. Because it is all-encompassing and requires new relationships to kin, the caregiving role is also sticky. Caregivers have trouble leaving it, leading to long caregiving careers. Recent policies, like the 2018 RAISE Family Caregiving Act, aim to integrate the family into the medical team, reshaping a traditional family role into a healthcare role. This study addresses the potential inequalities arising from such initiatives and implications for the resulting quality of care for recipients.
Kayla M. Kemp (Pennsylvania State University), Making Private School Mainstream: A Comparative/Historical Study of Religion and Race in Segregation Academies and Christian Schools.
In the mid-twentieth century, two private school movements emerged, transforming K-12 education in the U.S. by making non-elite private schooling mainstream. First, following Brown v. Board of Education, white supremacists launched segregation academies, flouting federal demands for public school desegregation. Soon after, Conservative Protestants formed the Christian school movement in response to secularization. Since organizations from both movements arose simultaneously and still exist, these are apt cases for comparative/historical study on race and religion in organizations. This project addresses two questions: First, how do the roles of religion and racial ideologies differ in organizations with and without explicitly religious or racist roots, and how do these roles change in response to societal change? Second, how has the relationship between religion and racial ideologies shaped U.S. education? I will use multiple methods: descriptive quantitative analysis, archival analysis of periodicals and government documents, content analysis of school websites, and interviews with school administrators. My findings will contribute to extensions of racialized organizations theory and theorizations of the relationship between race, religion, and education. This project will also contribute to knowledge about educational equity through increasing understanding of segregation academies, an understudied mechanism of systemic racism in U.S. education.
Kristina E. Lee (Northwestern University), The Transnational Racial State: Afro-descendant Inclusion and Shifting Antiracist Frameworks in Latin America after the World Conference Against Racism.
In 2001, the UN World Conference Against Racism (WCAR) urged states around the world to recommit to combatting racism by facilitating the political, economic, social, and cultural inclusion of their Afrodescendant populations. For Latin American states, compliance meant a shift from multiculturalism to a racial equality framework capable of accounting for historically erased and disenfranchised Afrodescendant populations. Drawing on federal policy, legislation, and correspondence regarding Afrodescendants and racism, I ask: (1) How did Latin American states respond to the WCAR’s call to formally include Afrodescendant populations? (2) How and why might states have been affected by their regional peers in shifting to a racial equality framework? and (3) What do Afrodescendant inclusion efforts throughout Latin America since 2001 tell us about the state’s role in shifting transnational frameworks of race and antiracism? Using computational text analysis, I empirically examine the cases of Mexico and Peru in relation to their broader regional context from 2001 and 2021 to shift how we think about race and the state beyond the scale of nation. This research will provide valuable insight regarding the impact of antiracist interventions from supranational organizations, especially as the UN’s International Decade for People of African Descent ends in 2024.
Catharina O’Donnell (Harvard University) Locally Polarized Mobilization: How Partisan Segregation Shapes Conservative and Progressive Mobilization.
How do local contexts shape political mobilization? The United States’ political geography is strongly segregated by partisanship, with Democrats clustered together in “blue” states and cities and Republicans in “red” regions. Republican activists in strongly Democratic states therefore face very different constraints and opportunities than those in Republican or swing states. How do grassroots party activists adapt their strategies to different electoral and organizational landscapes? Though swing states and party strongholds matter most for immediate election outcomes, even activists who are severely outnumbered in their local environments can considerably influence the national party’s ideological direction through shaping political discourse, engaging in non-electoral movement mobilization, and incubating personnel. In this mixed-method project, I explore how local environments shape political activism, with an emphasis on understanding Republican-aligned mobilization. I collect new quantitative data mapping local variation in political organization, political mobilization, and political discourse across the country. I also conduct participant observation and interviewing in two states with different partisan makeups and electoral environments. This project contributes to our understandings of polarization and group boundaries, political mobilization and participation, and the role of place in national movements.
Keitaro Okura (Yale University), Americanness and Inequality: Boundaries of Deservingness, Legitimacy, and Trust.
The sociodemographic landscape of the United States is in the midst of a rapid and momentous transformation. Meanwhile, partisan and ideological polarization have continued to worsen, with Americans more primed than ever to view those ideologically opposed to them as an existential threat to their nation. These social transformations spotlight an increasingly salient question: what does it mean to be an American? I conceptualize U.S. national membership – i.e., perceived Americanness – as simultaneously shaped by citizenship status and cultural belonging. This theoretical framework integrates the existing literature that emphasizes the significance of formally prescribed criteria (notably, legal status) relative to less tangible demarcations of national identity. I will use descriptive and experimental surveys that examine the social and symbolic boundaries of U.S. national membership. I will draw on a large sample of American participants to examine how they demarcate concrete social boundaries such as deservingness for citizenship and social welfare. My research aims to contribute to interdisciplinary research on immigrant assimilation, race/ethnic relations, and stratification in the United States. The study poses key implications for how and when boundaries of national membership relate to social stratification and inequality in the United States.
Kritika Pandey (University of Southern California), Culture(s) of Activism: Investigating Domestic Worker Organizing in India and the US.
While global discourse on domestic worker rights argues for legal recognition, and despite global standards for paid domestic work established by the International Labor Organization convention in 2011, domestic workers continue to grapple with the State to ensure legal protection. Additionally, workers continue to struggle with everyday dehumanization, forcing them to navigate fraught intimacies with their employers. How then, does a worker rights movement emerge and sustain itself amid this precarity? Combining transnational feminist ethnography, interviews and archival data, this comparative study investigates collective action for worker rights across two different national contexts (India and the US). I analyze how women’s worker movements in precarious sectors negotiate between global conversations on standardization of labor rights and everyday issues of inequality in their work conditions. This project advances scholarship on economic sociology, labor movements and transnational sociology by addressing gaps between local and global discourses on worker rights and discussing tensions around professionalization and legal recognition in sectors like paid domestic work. Through centering lived narratives of domestic workers, I aim to discuss how privileging a global worker identity may inadvertently flatten intersectional challenges of racial, caste and class based hierarchies in specific national contexts and impede both mobilization and advocacy for policy changes.
Guangquan Shen (Indiana University-Bloomington), Dealing with Marriage Pressure: Changes and Continuities in Marriage in Urban China.
In China, marriage has long been regarded as a family and social responsibility rather than a personal choice. The cultural emphasis on fulfilling filial piety and perpetuating the patrilineal family line through marriage and reproduction has led to a lack of recognition for non-normative behaviors, such as singlehood and same-sex partnership, within the existing marriage culture and family law. This absence of cultural scripts and institutional support for alternative forms of commitment, combined with the deep-rooted tradition of filial piety, exerts significant pressure on individuals to conform to marital norms, conflicting with the growing pursuit of individualism among the younger generation in China. My project seeks to answer three questions: (1) How do unmarried adults perceive and experience marriage pressure? (2) How does the intersection of gender and sexuality uniquely shape their experiences of marriage pressure? (3) How do different social network ties impact their experiences of marriage pressure and the coping strategies they employ? To answer these questions, the project employs a mixed-method design, integrating in-depth interviews with social network analysis, to assess lived experiences of unmarried individuals and the influences of social network in China. This study has implications for scholarship on gender, sexualities, family, and social networks.
Tyler Smith (University of Washington), Punishment as Labor: The Historical Struggle over Classifying Prison Industries.
The use of prison labor in the United States has consistently raised questions about how to classify prison work and whether incarcerated workers deserve the same protections as non-incarcerated workers. Yet, we lack a clear understanding of how historical actors incorporated ideas of labor into their discussions of prison industries and how these conceptions intersected with ideas of criminality and race. My work addresses this gap by investigating the words and actions of labor organizations around the turn of the twentieth century. Labor organizations played an important role in restricting prison contracts and infused the debate over forced prison labor with ideological relevance in the wake of slavery’s abolition and rapid industrialization. Using archival data and comparative-historical methods, I ask: (1) How did labor actors conceptualize prison work as a form of labor? (2) How did they draw upon broader cultural discourses of free labor, criminality, and racial supremacy? (3) How did the debate over prison labor lead to change in penal policy? Overall, this project helps us understand how symbolic debates can change both the meaning and function of the U.S. penal system and how modern forms of carceral labor were shaped by historical struggles over labor classification.
Summer Sullivan (University of California-Santa Cruz), Leafy Greens and Digital Dreams: Race, Labor, and the Future of California Farm Work.
California’s Salinas Valley is the most prolific lettuce growing region in the United States, known widely as the “salad bowl of the world.” As its lettuce growers face pressing climate-related sustainability challenges and labor shortages, they are turning toward digital harvesting machines to increase efficiency, sustainability, and decrease their reliance on farmworker labor. However, many ‘specialty’ crops like lettuce have long resisted full automation and continue to rely on exploited, racialized immigrant labor. Bringing together longstanding concerns in environmental sociology with theories of racial capitalism, my project fills a gap that overlooks farmworkers’ social conditions and processes of racialization within digital agriculture, or the increased use of data-driven devices like digital harvesters in the sector. Through semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and archival research, I ask: How do growers and agricultural automation experts envision the future of agricultural work? How is the introduction of automated harvesting technologies interfacing with longstanding farmworker struggles for better working conditions? My work advances debates within environmental sociology and expands discussions about race, labor, and automation through the lens of a unique crop requiring materially specific forms of human care. My project will contribute to discussions of farmworker safety through an environmental justice lens amid climate change and digital agriculture.
Joseph van der Naald (Graduate Center of the City University of New York), Organizing Outside and Under the Law: A Comparative Case Study of Public Sector Unionism in Michigan and Ohio, 1960-1985.
Public employees in the United States are far more likely to be unionized than private-sector workers. Private-sector union membership peaked two decades after the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, while government employees, excluded from the Act, were largely unorganized until the 1960s when public unionism unexpectedly surged. Scholars attribute public-sector unions’ success to the passage of state-level collective bargaining rights; however, government unionism also expanded in states without labor protections. In this dissertation, I compare public-sector labor movements in Michigan and Ohio, two states with robust unions but divergent laws and institutions regulating public-sector labor relations, to explore the forces that propelled government unionism during its most formative period. Leveraging these cases, I ask: how and under what conditions did government workers build durable unions following the public labor upsurge in the late 1960s? Drawing on insights from political sociology and social movements scholarship, I trace the drivers of public unionism while illustrating the centrality of labor and civil rights coalition-building across institutional contexts. Using a comparative framework to shed light on the foundations of public unionism, my research provides insight into how labor can organize to overcome present obstacles.
Hazel Velasco Palacios (Pennsylvania State University), Immigrant Healthcare Nexus: A Comparative Analysis of Healthcare Access in Pennsylvania’s Latina/o Farmworker Families.
In Pennsylvania’s mushroom and dairy industries, Latina/o farmworker families face significant healthcare access challenges. My research delves into these obstacles, focusing on how the unique conditions within these sectors and the dynamics of immigrant family life affect healthcare availability. Through interviews with farmworkers and healthcare providers, and observations in community initiatives, this study illuminates the structural barriers to healthcare, such as remote work locations, inconsistent income, and immigration status. It also explores the strategies these families use to overcome these barriers, including alternative health practices and community resources. This project introduces the Immigrant Healthcare Nexus, a new perspective considering how labor conditions and socio-economic factors influence healthcare decisions among immigrant and mixed-status families. By examining the interplay between work, family, and healthcare, my research offers insights into the broader implications of these challenges, both for individuals and their communities. Beyond academic contributions, this research collaborates with community organizations to ensure it resonates with the real-life experiences of farmworker families. This work aims to bridge the gap between academia, healthcare providers, and farmworker communities, promoting greater awareness and advocacy for addressing healthcare access barriers.
Karyn Vilbig (New York University), Redistribution and the Top 10%.
Since reaching a low point during the Great Recession, Americans’ support for redistributive policies has grown substantially, and much of this increased support has come from high-income Americans. As a result of partisan realignment, progressive economic interests in the United States are now represented by a cross-class coalition, and we know surprisingly little about the motivations, ambitions and commitments of these high-income proponents of redistribution. This project explores the sources and limits of high-income support for redistributive policy with a special focus on the roles of racial attitudes and concerns over top-end inequality. Racial attitudes have long been associated with opinions towards redistribution to the poor, and since the Black Lives Matter Movement, racial attitudes have undergone dramatic changes. Top-end inequality has also received much attention in recent years. Have these conversations shifted people’s beliefs and preferences about who redistribution takes from and gives to in ways that recruited a larger share of the income distribution to progressive economic causes? I explore each of these forces using three approaches: 1) analysis of pre-existing survey data, 2) an original conjoint survey experiment with an oversample of high-income respondents and 3) in-depth interviews with a subset of survey respondents.
Benny Witkovsky (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Fig Leaves or Fortresses: Nonpartisan Politics in a Polarized Time.
For more than a century, all city politics in Wisconsin—and in 75% of cities across the country—have been officially nonpartisan. Today, these institutions contend with a partisan polarization that has grown more encompassing, intense, and intimate. Nowhere is this more evident than in small cities, which combine robust nonpartisan institutions with deep partisan divides. This project pursues a qualitative, comparative study of nonpartisan municipal politics in four Wisconsin cities. Using innovative methods and data, including analyzing video recordings of city council meetings, reviewing local political party social media activity, compiling new datasets of local election results and voting patterns on city councils, and conducting extensive archival research, I examine how local nonpartisan actors resist, exploit, and succumb to partisan polarization. This research highlights the real pitfalls of one of the nation’s greatest experiments in mitigating partisan conflict—one that should be a lesson for future reforms. The tense relationship between nonpartisan government and partisan polarization is not merely a parochial issue of urban politics. It should concern anyone who studies development, public health, policing, election administration, and other issues shaped by local government.
Xinyi Zhang (New York University), Exploring Variation in Residential Trajectories of Long-Time Black Residents From A Gentrifying Neighborhood in New York City.
Despite persistent segregation and stagnation, some disadvantaged, predominantly-Blackneighborhoods in central cities have gentrified in recent years, with significant changes in their class characteristics and racial composition. However, despite the public and scholarly concerns over the displacement of long-time residents, most studies have studied gentrification’s effects within neighborhood boundaries. My dissertation project intends to address this selection-out-of-sample problem by asking: How do long-time residents make decisions about leaving their gentrifying neighborhood and choosing migration destinations? What does the process of the move look like? How do residents experience the outcomes of their move and make sense of the move retrospectively? I utilize in-depth interviews and ethnographic observations of a carefully constructed sample of current and former long-time Black residents at different stages in their residential move trajectory from a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. Understanding the process and consequences of these moves and the variation in the process is critical to ascertaining the costs of gentrification on Black Americans, who have long faced constraints and discrimination in the housing market. I hope my findings can contribute to targeted policy designs and community-building efforts to combat the negative impacts of gentrification.
Shira Zilberstein (Harvard University), The Making of Ethical AI: Developing Machine Learning Solutions for Healthcare.
Social science research on artificial intelligence (AI) often highlights the consequences of new technologies in specific use cases, including how it can contribute to inequality and reproduce bias. Research on the outcomes of AI is critical; however, a key and understudied factor is to uncover the origins of how moral impacts are constructed and enabled from the start of technological development. Scholarship that has focused on technologists often portrays them as working in isolation, ignorant of the risks of their pursuits, and tainted by corporate interests. Such depictions neglect the ways in which technologists are embedded within interactions, organizations, and publics that shape understandings of problems, solutions, and moral obligations. Using mixed-qualitative methods, I explain how interpersonal, organizational, and cultural dynamics impact the construction and enactment of morality in applied, interdisciplinary AI research using the case study of the creation of machine learning solutions for healthcare. Through this investigation I explain the ways in which applied research collaborations define problems and solutions in relation to specific practices, projects, organizations, agendas, and public narratives. By understanding the contexts and values informing research and innovation, technologies can be built that better serve the needs of all stakeholders, address issues of equity, and holistically improve healthcare.
