Lauren Valentino

Valentino will work on a book examining how ordinary Americans define discrimination and why those definitions matter. Drawing on original mixed-methods data, including 40 in-depth interviews and two nationally representative survey experiments, Valentino analyzes how people decide what "counts" as racism, sexism, and classism. Rather than treating disagreement as a matter of individual sensitivity, she identifies patterns in symbolic boundaries around discrimination definitions, and how they are shaped by social location, lived experience, and political orientation.