I am a sociologist who studies education, race and class inequality, debt, subjectivity, and culture using quantitative and qualitative methods.
My work investigates how racial inequality is produced, reproduced, and mediated, as well as the meaning people make of it. I examine PK-12 and higher education as sites where these processes happen. I am particularly interested in inequality at the intersections of race, gender, and class.
I want to understand how social structure and individual subjectivity meet: how social forces shape our understandings and experiences of our selves, our emotions, and our desires — and how this relates to inequality.
I am currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate at The Broad Center at Yale School of Management. I earned a PhD and MA in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley, and bachelor’s degrees from Wellesley College.
My work has been supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellows Program and the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment at UC Berkeley, and has been published in Sociology of Education.
Prior to graduate school, I worked in PK-12 public education, college access, college persistence, and public interest organizing. I have been a certified middle school science teacher and a college counselor in Louisiana, and I co-founded College Beyond, a college persistence non-profit serving Pell-eligible undergraduates in the Greater New Orleans region.
Research
My dissertation uses in-depth interviews and ethnography to investigate the ideological resources Pell-eligible young adults in New Orleans, LA, use to make sense of the precarity they experience in the transition to adulthood after college.
Other work uses causal inference to examine race, gender, and class inequality in the financial returns to ‘some college,’ and how educational debt mediates these returns.