Annette Lareau is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of the award-winning books Unequal Childhoods and Home Advantage. She is the co-author, with Blair Sackett, of the book We Thought It Would be Heaven: Refugees in an Unequal America forthcoming in the summer 2023 from University of California Press. Her most recent book, Listening to People: A Practical Guide to Interviewing, Participant-Observation, Data Analysis, and Writing It All Up, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2021. In 2022, she stepped away from full-time teaching, but continues to teach one class per year. Funded by the National Science Foundation and the Russell Sage Foundation, she is currently doing a study of the blessings and challenges of wealth for families. She has a contract with University of California Press to write a book on this project. Annette Lareau is the Past President of the American Sociological Association.
Jessica Calarco is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research examines inequalities in education and family life, with a focus on qualitative methods. Her first book, Negotiating Opportunities, draws on ethnographic observations and in-depth interviews to reveal the origins and consequences of social class differences in help-seeking. Calarco is also the co-author of Qualitative Literacy, which outlines indicators of quality that readers can use to evaluate qualitative research on its own terms.
Yi-lin Chiang is an Associate Professor of Sociology at National Chengchi University, Taiwan. Her research focuses on educational stratification and intergenerational status transmission in greater China. She uses qualitative and quantitative methods to understand how family background and cultural capital shape children’s educational outcomes. Her book, Study Gods: How the New Chinese Elite Prepare for Global Competition examines how affluent adolescents in China prepare themselves to join the ranks of the global elite by absorbing and implementing the rules surrounding status.
Maia Cucchiara is an Associate Professor of Urban Education at Temple University. She applies a sociological lens to questions of urban education, with a particular focus on people’s lived experiences with education policy in the urban context. A former National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Scholar, she is the author of Marketing Schools, Marketing Cities: Who Wins and Who Loses When Schools Become Urban Amenities, (University of Chicago Press, 2013), which received the Pierre Bourdieu Award for the Best Book in the Sociology of Education in 2014. Her most recent study, funded by the National Science Foundation, examines school culture in innovative urban public high schools. She is also leading an evaluation of trauma-informed practices in elementary schools in Philadelphia.
Matthew Desmond is the Maurice P. During Professor of Sociology at Princeton University. He is the author of four books, including Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, which won the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Carnegie Medal, and PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction. The principal investigator of The Eviction Lab, Desmond’s research focuses on poverty in America, city life, housing insecurity, public policy, racial inequality, and ethnography. He is the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel Award, and the William Julius Wilson Early Career Award. A Contributing Writer for the New York Times Magazine, Desmond was listed in 2016 among the Politico 50, as one of “fifty people across the country who are most influencing the national political debate.”
Shani Evans is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Rice University. Her research and teaching focus on race and racism, space and place, urban education, and qualitative research methods. Her forthcoming book considers how Black long-term residents experience and respond to gentrification in a historically Black neighborhood in Portland, Oregon. She has also published work about school choice and the reproduction of inequality in urban school districts.
Sherelle Ferguson is Assistant Professor of Sociology for the University of California at Irvine, where she studies how race and class influence the way people experience educational institutions, and she is interested in the varying experiences of first generation and continuing generation college students. Her current project is looking at how progressive high schools serve low-income students of color.
Chenoa A. Flippen is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity, Race, and Immigration at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research addresses the connection between racial and ethnic inequality and contextual forces at the neighborhood, metropolitan, and national level. She has published on diverse topics in stratification, including minority aging and retirement security, the impact of residential segregation on minority homeownership and housing wealth, and the link between internal migration and racial stratification. Another major research area relates to Hispanic immigration, adaptation, and health in new areas of destination. She is currently working on a book project for the Russell Sage Foundation’s Rose series entitled The Great Dispersion: Geography, Diversity, and Opportunity among Latinos in the United States.
Pilar Gonalons-Pons is the Alber-Klingelfhofer Presidential Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, with affiliations to the Population Studies Center, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and the Leonard Davis Institute for Health Economics. Her research examines how gender, work, families, and public policies structure economic inequalities, with a particular focus on how inequalities change over time and over the life course. Much of her research is guided by the overall goal to develop a comprehensive understanding about the political economy of care and reproductive paid and unpaid work and its contribution to economic inequalities. She is also interested in understanding how and when change in gender culture occurs and how it shapes family dynamics. Her research has appeared in American Sociological Review, Demography, Socio-Economic Review, Social Science Research, Social Problems, Demographic Research, and the RSF: Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences.
Peter Harvey is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Inequality in America Initiative at Harvard University. His research focuses on culture, social inequality, and education. His current work examines the processes by which race, class and gender inequalities are reproduced in elementary schools via socialization and discrimination processes. His work has been published in the American Journal of Sociology, Bulletin of Sociological Methodology, and Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. His work has also received numerous awards from the American Sociological Association and Eastern Sociological Society.
Shamus Khan is Willard Thorp Professor of Sociology and American Studies at Princeton University. He writes on culture, inequality, gender, and elites. He is the author of over 100 articles, books, and essays, including Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School, The Practice of Research (with Dana Fisher), Approaches to Ethnography: Modes of Representation and Analysis in Participant Observation (with Colin Jerolmack), and Sexual Citizens: Sex, Power, and Assault on Campus (with Jennifer Hirsch), which was named a best book of 2020 by NPR. He was a co-principal investigator of SHIFT, a multi-year study of sexual health and sexual violence at Columbia University. He directed the working group on the political influence of economic elites at the Russell Sage Foundation, is the series editor of “The Middle Range” at Columbia University Press, and served as the editor of the journal Public Culture. He writes regularly for the popular press such as The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and has served as a columnist for Time Magazine. In 2016 he was awarded Columbia University’s highest teaching honor, the Presidential Teaching Award, and in 2018 he was awarded the Hans L. Zetterberg Prize from Upsala University for “the best sociologist under 40”.
Karyn Lacy is Associate Professor of Sociology and African American Studies at the University of Michigan. Her work focuses on race relations, residential segregation, identity, parental socialization, social stratification, and suburban culture. Her book Blue-Chip Black: Race, Class, and Status in the New Black Middle Class received the Oliver Cromwell Cox Book Award, and she is a contributing writer to media outlets including the New York Times and the Chronicle of Higher Education. Lacy’s current work explores the construction and reproduction of racial and class-based identities among members of an elite children’s organization.
Michèle Lamont is a Professor of Sociology and of African American Studies, and the Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies and Sociology at Harvard University. A cultural and comparative sociologist, she is the author or coauthor of a dozen books and edited volumes and over one hundred articles and chapters on a range of topics including culture and inequality, racism and stigma, academia and knowledge, social change and successful societies, and qualitative methods. She is completing a book, titled Seeing Others: How Recognition Works and How It Can Heal a Divided World, to be published by Simon and Schuster (US) and Penguin (UK) in September 2023. She also co-chaired the advisory board to the 2022 UN Human Development Report, “Uncertain times, Unsettled Lives: Shaping our Future in a World in Transformation.” After directing the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University (2014-2021), she now leads its research cluster on Comparative Inequality and Inclusion. Recent honors include a Carnegie Fellowship (2019-2021), a Russell Sage Foundation fellowship (2019-2020), the 2017 Erasmus prize and honorary doctorates from six countries. She served as the 108th President of the American Sociological Association in 2016-2017.
Judith Levine is Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of the Public Policy Lab at Temple University. Her work addresses poverty, social welfare policy, inequality, and social mobility with a focus on the role social interactions play in economic outcomes. She is the author of Ain’t No Trust: How Bosses, Boyfriends, and Bureaucrats Fail Low-Income Mothers and Why It Matters. In current work funded by the Russell Sage and Spencer Foundations, she is qualitatively following a cohort of 100 college seniors as they move through graduation and into the labor market in order to study differences by class, race and ethnicity, and gender in the job search process. She is a 2023 recipient of the university wide Lindback Distinguished Teaching Award.
Hyunjoon Park is Korea Foundation Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the Director of the James Joo-Jin Kim Center for Korean Studies at Penn. Park is interested in education, inequality and family in cross-national comparative perspective, focusing on South Korea and other East Asian societies. In recent years, he has studied changes in marriage, divorce, and living arrangements as well as consequences of demographic and economic trends for education, well-being, and socioeconomic outcomes of children, adolescents, and young adults in Korea. He is the author of the book, Re-Evaluating Education in Japan and Korea: De-mystifying Stereotypes and a Korean-language book, Changes in Intergenerational Social Mobility: Has Korean Society Become More Open? (2021, Pakyoungstory). A new book, Diversity and the Transition to Adulthood in America, coauthored with Phoebe Ho and Grace Kao, has been published last summer by the University of California Press.
Emilio A. Parrado is the Dorothy Swaine Thomas Professor of Sociology and Director of the Population Studies Center at The University of Pennsylvania. He received his bachelor’s degree in sociology from the University of Buenos Aires and his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Chicago. His area of specialization is social demography, with particular emphasis on international migration and family and fertility behavior in the United States and Latin America. His research explores multiple dimensions of Latin American immigration and adaptation to the United States as well as demographic behavior in the United States and Latin America. Most of his published work falls into five interrelated domains: 1) Hispanic migration to traditional and new areas of destination, 2) Hispanic fertility and reproductive health, 3) the new geography of Hispanic settlement, 4) determinants and consequences of international migration for sending and receiving regions; and 5) social and demographic change in the United States and Latin America. Underlying these foci is a common interest in issues of inequality, development, and stratification.
Aliya Rao is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Methodology, London School of Economics and Political Science and a Faculty Associate at the International Inequalities Institute. Aliya’s research uses qualitative methods to understand how social mechanisms facilitate or impede gender inequality in the institutions of paid work and family. Her first book, Crunch Time: How Married Couples Confront Unemployment, shows how comparable men and women have starkly different experiences of unemployment. Men’s unemployment is seen as an urgent problem while women’s unemployment – cocooned within a narrative of staying at home – is treated like a non-issue in their families. Her academic work has been published in American Sociological Review, Gender & Society, Journal of Marriage and Family, and Sociological Methods and Research amongst others. Her research has received coverage from news outlets like The New York Times, Financial Times, The Washington Post, Huffington Post and the BBC. She also writes on gender, work, and family for mainstream audiences in venues such as The Atlantic, Harvard Business Review, and Quartz.
Blair Sackett is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University. In a period of rising forced migration, due to war and political upheaval as well as climate change, her research focuses on refugees and the institutional barriers and opportunities they face in accessing rights and resources. Her forthcoming book co-authored with Annette Lareau, We Thought It Would Be Heaven: Refugees in an Unequal America, shows how the very social service organizations meant to help refugee families can end up halting their access to valuable resources through a bewildering array of opaque rules, inflexible deadlines, and seemingly small mistakes. Her second book project follows refugee families in Kakuma refugee camp, Kenya to highlight the economic costs of long-term displacement.
Doron Shiffer-Sebba is an Institute for Policy Research Postdoctoral Fellow at Northwestern University. His research lies at the intersection of family and wealth, focusing on intergenerational extended families, and developing novel computational methods. His current projects include an analysis of extended families (or “clans”) in patterns of wealth distribution, the role of communities in predicting tax avoidance, and the development of computer vision tools for the study of social inequality. He is also working on a book on the role of elite family systems in sustaining wealth inequality based on his ethnographic dissertation project observing an office that managed the finances of top 0.1% wealthy families in the U.S.
Benjamin Shestakofsky is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. His research centers on how digital technologies are affecting work and employment, organizations, and economic exchange. His ongoing projects investigate the sociology of artificial intelligence; the governance of digital platforms; and the relationship between venture capital, organizational cultures and organizational change. His current book project investigates how the imperatives of venture capital investors structure the relationship between work and technology in startup companies. Drawing on 19 months of participant-observation research, he examines the consequences of high-velocity, high-risk organizational change for an entrepreneurial firm’s workers. Articles based on this project received the 2019 W. Richard Scott Award for Distinguished Scholarship from the ASA’s Section on Organizations, Occupations, and Work, and the 2021 Star-Nelkin Paper Award from the ASA’s Section on Science, Knowledge, and Technology. His work has been featured in the Financial Times, Axios, and in a publication of the World Economic Forum. Benjamin is a member of the international editorial board of Work and Occupations.
Van C. Tran is Associate Professor of Sociology at CUNY Graduate Center. He is an immigration scholar and urban sociologist studying the integration of immigrants and their children, ethnic and racial categories, diversity and intergroup relations, neighborhood gentrification, and urban poverty and social inequality. As a refugee immigrant from Northern Thailand to the Bronx, his research and teaching are deeply connected to the diversity, history, and vibrancy of New York City. Since 2019, Tran has helped mobilize research on critical issues facing New York City as the deputy director for The Graduate Center’s Center for Urban Research. His in-progress book manuscript, The Social Life of Amsterdam Avenue, examines the consequences of gentrification for neighborhood residents and businesses in Manhattan’s West Side. A separate project on the Asian American experience is yielding crucial insight into Asian Americans’ views on affirmative action, attitudes toward immigration policy, patterns of socioeconomic attainment, and the transition from higher education into the workplace. A third project draws on an experimental study on the nature and sources of anti-immigrant attitudes in the United States. Finally, Tran’s research continues to focus on the linguistic, socioeconomic, civic, and political integration of second-generation Latinos.
Karolyn Tyson is Professor and Chair of Sociology at Georgetown University. Her research centers on understanding racial inequality in educational outcomes and how race matters in educational experiences, particularly for black students. By investigating the interplay between institutions and actors, her research has revealed important mechanisms driving racial disparities. She is the author of Integration Interrupted, winner of the 2011 Bourdieu Best Book Award from the Sociology of Education section of the American Sociological Association. She has served as chair of the ASA Sociology of Education section and co-director of the UNC’s Moore Undergraduate Research Apprentice Program (MURAP). She was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and at the Russell Sage Foundation.
Elliot Weininger is Professor of Sociology at SUNY Brockport. In a recent project with Annette Lareau, he analyzed the role of schooling considerations in the residential decision-making of families with young children. A paper from this project was included in the 2014 edited volume Choosing Homes, Choosing Schools, published by the Russell Sage Foundation. He was also a 2014-2015 member of the program committee of the American Sociological Association and the session organizer for the sociology of education special interest group at the 2007 meeting of the American Education Research Association.
Melissa J. Wilde is a sociologist of religion and inequality, currently serving as Chair of the Department of Sociology, University of Pennsylvania, where she was also undergraduate chair from 2013-2017. Her research focuses on the dynamic interactions among religion, race, and politics in America. She has published award-winning articles in the American Sociological Review and the American Journal of Sociology. Her recent book, Birth Control Battles, demonstrates that support for contraception among some of America’s most prominent religious groups was tied to white supremacist views of race, immigration and manifest destiny. She is currently working on a number of projects including: a large survey project on the relationship between religion and politics that will be fielded during the upcoming national election; an archive of historical articles on American religious groups’ views over the first half of the 20th century, and digitizing quantitative historical data on American religious groups that will allow her to examine religious inequality over the past century.
Julia Wrigley is a professor of sociology at the City University of New York Graduate Center. She studies issues related to inequality, including conflicts over the control and funding of public schools, how domestic workers and the parents who employ them deal with value differences over children’s care, and ways the organization of child care can increase, or reduce, risks of injuries and fatalities. She is the author of Class Politics and Public Schools and Other People’s Children, and articles in varied journals, including ASR and AJS. She also had a seven-year administrative stint as Associate University Provost and Acting University Provost of the CUNY system and has served in administrative roles at the Graduate Center.