Search Fellows | Russell Sage Foundation

Maria Abascal

New York University

Visiting Researcher

Maria Abascal will write up the results of four studies that examine how Americans classify themselves and others in terms of race/ethnicity and the consequences of these classifications for racial/ethnic inequality. The first two projects, which draw on nationally representative surveys, explore which people are likely to be classified by others as people of color or as Latino. The third project investigates whether people from higher socioeconomic backgrounds are more likely to be classified as White during traffic stops.

Rich Benjamin

Independent Journalist

Visiting Researcher

Rich Benjamin will work on a book investigating how White anxieties about White demographic decline, both real and perceived, shape economic, political, and racial inequality in the United States. His book will reveal how seemingly race-neutral issues such a fiscal policy and the social safety net are defined by racial anxiety over perceived White decline. More specifically, the project will illuminate how White status threat creates opposition to, or support for, presumably “universalist” economic policies such as investment in universal preschool and increasing the federal minimum wage.

Andrew J. Cherlin

Johns Hopkins University

Visiting Researcher

Andrew J. Cherlin is the Benjamin H. Griswold III Professor of Public Policy in the Department of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University. In an effort to examine the current state of the white and black working classes, Cherlin will write up findings from a recent study of white and black former workers at a now-shuttered Baltimore steel plant and their adult children.

Annika Hinze

Fordham University

Visiting Researcher

Annika Hinze will work on a project using “ambos Nogales” – sister towns Nogales, Sonora, Mexico and Nogales, Arizona, USA which sit across from each other on the U.S.-Mexico border – as a case study for the social, political, and local impact of U.S. border fortification policies. She will examine everyday practices that resist, rework, and/or reproduce boundaries between individuals, communities, and countries along the border.

Michael Jones-Correa

University of Pennsylvania

Visiting Researcher

Michael Jones-Correa is the President’s Distinguished Professor of Political Science and founding Director of the Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity and Immigration (CSERI) at the University of Pennsylvania. He taught previously at Harvard and at Cornell, where he served as the Robert J. Katz Chair of the Department of Government.

Paul Osterman

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Visiting Researcher

Paul Osterman will work on a book examining the emerging nature of the employment relationship and what kinds of policies are appropriate for people whose economic outcomes are put at risk by these developments. He will focus on occupations which are being “cut-loose” from traditional employment relationships. This growing trend includes the rise of freelancing and contract work, but is broader and more complex that these two categories.

James Ziliak

University of Kentucky

Visiting Researcher

James Ziliak will work on a project investigating inequality in labor market outcomes of men and women across the life cycle, focusing on the roles of changing employment, hours of work, and the wage levels of workers on inequality. He will use data from the Annual Social and Economic Supplement of the Current Population Survey from 1976-2018 to better understand life cycle gender wage inequality among different birth cohorts across income groups.