Remote work blurs boundaries between paid employment and household life, often producing overwork and gendered divisions of unpaid labor. This project moves beyond the “work-life balance” metaphor to study how remote households reorganize space, time, and labor. Using interviews and ethnographic observation, it examines household-level arrangements among remote workers, including partners, children, paid domestic workers, and extended support networks.
With roughly 2.3 million migrants awaiting asylum decisions, this project examines how Americans perceive asylum-seekers relative to refugees and undocumented migrants, and how perceptions vary by respondent race. Using a conjoint-design survey, respondents evaluate randomized hypothetical migrant profiles across multiple attributes. The analysis estimates average marginal component effects for each attribute, tests interactions among key variables, and assesses heterogeneity by respondent racial identity.
This project studies how bureaucratic politics shape migration policy outcomes, especially under large backlogs. Bureaucrats routinely make consequential prioritization choices that affect migrant lives, yet the internal dynamics of these decisions are underexamined. Using a comparative-historical approach, I analyze U.S. and Canadian migration bureaucracies from 1960 to present.
Older Mexican immigrants in the U.S.—many with limited or no legal status—face particular vulnerabilities in later life due to restricted access to public safety nets. This qualitative project explores how legal status shapes retirement planning, reliance on family versus public supports, and decisions about where to age. It will conduct 90 life-history interviews with Mexican immigrants aged 50+, 30 interviews with their adult children, and ethnographic observation of family and community interactions in San Diego County.
This project examines how governance—policing, shelter systems, and moral regulation—shapes the spatial lives and well-being of queer and trans people experiencing homelessness across Midwestern cities. It asks how laws, policies, and public moral discourse both neglect and control LGBTQ+ unhoused populations; how queer and trans people navigate these systems; and how communities create alternative safety and belonging.
Educational inequality is deeply intertwined with neighborhood conditions, yet widely used measures of neighborhood disadvantage, such as the Area Deprivation Index (ADI), rely on infrequently updated survey data and fail to capture the physical environments that children encounter daily.
Given the myriad ways residential places can determine life chances, understanding the reasons for and effects of exurban migration is important for understanding and mitigating the processes that may contribute to place-based racial and socioeconomic inequality. Residential migration from suburbs to exurbs has been led by more affluent residents contributing to a kind of rural gentrification with consequences for both the sending and receiving communities.
For the people and places facing climate-related risks, such as flooding, questions of whether to relocate, how, and to where, are becoming increasingly pertinent. To assist, the federal government has been funding the retreat of people and housing from areas of greatest risk by paying homeowners to voluntarily give up their housing for demolition and move elsewhere. Local officials have now used the policy to purchase and demolish more than 40,000 homes, leading to related relocations from more than two thousand census tracts nationwide.
Homeowners within the same taxing jurisdiction can face very different effective property tax rates as a result of differences in assessment ratios. Younger homeowners, and Black and Hispanic homeowners are thought to face higher assessment ratios than older and White homeowners, contributing to reduced rates of homeownership entry and increased rates of homeownership exit via tax foreclosure.
Previous research has focused on white Christian nationalism as a factor shaping reactionary, and racially exclusive, political mobilization on the right. Less attention has been paid to how Christian nationalist beliefs promote racialized understandings of “deservingness” and views of economic inequality and the welfare state. Sociologist Penny Edgell will examine the following questions: 1) How does Christian nationalism interact with racial identity for White, Black and Hispanic Americans to shape attitudes toward economic inequality, the welfare state, and welfare recipients?