Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration
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Bliss, Catherine
- Catherine Bliss
- Associate Professor
- Ph.D. New School for Social Research
- Email: catherine.bliss@rutgers.edu
- Office: Davison Hall
- Curriculum Vitae
Catherine “Rina” Bliss is Associate Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University. Her research explores the personal and societal significance of emerging genetic sciences.
Rina's award-winning book Race Decoded: The Genomic Fight for Social Justice (Stanford University Press 2012) reveals how genomics became today’s new science of race. Her second book Social by Nature: The Promise and Peril of Sociogenomics (Stanford University Press 2018) traces convergences in social and genetic science, and their implications for healthcare, education, criminal justice, and policymaking.
Rina is currently writing two books for a general audience. Let's Stop Calling Race a Social Construct (W.W. Norton) explains why the phrase "race is a social construct" is at once apt and inadequate to the ongoing confusion around race. Rethinking Intelligence (Harper Wave) shares insights from the burgeoning science of epigenetics to help us harness our environments to empower our minds.
- In the Public Eye:
- Featured in STAT: "Buffalo shooting ignites a debate over the role of genetics researchers in white supremacist ideology"
- Featured in Texas Monthly: "Are Some People Born Lucky?"
- Faculty Article(s):
- Ambiguity and Scientific Authority: Population Classification in Genomic Science
- Conceptualizing Race in the Genomic Age
- Ambiguity and Scientific Authority: Population Classification in Genomic Science
- Faculty Bookshelf:
- Race Decoded: The Genomic Fight for Social Justice
- Social by Nature: The Promise and Peril of Sociogenomics
- Program Areas:
- Health, Population, and Biomedicine
- Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration
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Cerulo, Karen A.
- Karen A. Cerulo
- Professor Emeritus
- Ph.D. Princeton, 1985
- Email: cerulo@sociology.rutgers.edu
- Curriculum Vitae
Professor Cerulo has authored several books and articles in the areas of culture and cognition, symbol systems and meaning, media and technology, social change, decision making, identity construction, and measurement techniques.
Professor Cerulo's research addresses a variety of themes within the sociology of culture and cognition. Some of her works explore the social foundations of symbol systems -- music, scent, verbal scripts, and visual images. Her research examines the ways in which social actors use such symbols to construct personal identity, collective identity, and the identity of eras, events, and places. Her work also charts the ways in which social factors -- i.e. the nature of social ties, the stability of social environments, power structures, economic systems of exchange, and technological innovations – help to shape the content, form, meaning, and effectiveness of symbols. Her prizewinning article entitled “Scents and Sensibility: Olfaction, Sense-making and Meaning Attribution” (American Sociological Review) uses focus group data to understand the role played by neural, physical, and sociocultural elements when we process and racialize the messages contained in commercial perfume scents.
Professor Cerulo's writings are often noted for their contributions to the literature on measurement. She has developed a number of indicators designed to systematically capture verbal and non-verbal symbol structure. These measures render aural, olfactory, literary, and visual objects extremely accessible sources of social science data, amenable to all of the rigorous methods that are central to the social science tradition.
In recent years, Professor Cerulo has turned her attentions to the social and cultural foundations of cognitive concepts and schema. Her work pays special attention to the links between cultural sociology and cognitive neuroscience. She has edited and contributed both to special issues and special sections on this topic published in Poetics (2010) and Sociological Forum (2014; 2021). She also co-authored a review piece, “Rethinking Culture and Cognition” published in the Annual Review of Sociology (2021).
One prominent theme in Professor Cerulo's work on conceptualization concerns new communication technologies. Specifically, she explores how emerging communication media can change the ways in which individuals perceive social actors and social groups, experience social connectedness, and define forums of social action.
Some of Professor Cerulo's work explores the conceptualization of the best and worst of people, places, objects and events. Her book Never Saw It Coming builds on theories and ideas forwarded by both cultural and cognitive sociologists. Professor Cerulo argues that the inability to envision and specify the worst is a sociocultural phenomenon. Indeed, in a broad array of social situations, she discovers that conceptions of the worst represent a gap in many cultures' shared frames of reference. The worst is a "blind spot" created by a variety of normative and patterned sociocultural practices – practices that, despite any single individual's intentions, keep the worst veiled and difficult to define. In her work, Professor Cerulo itemizes and unpacks these practices. She explores as well the ways in which certain elements of social structure may encourage this biased perspective. Finally, she considers the social consequences and pitfalls that masking the worst can exact. In so doing, she questions whether a more symmetrical view of quality is an achievable ... or a desirable social goal.
Spurred by some of the issues raised in Never Saw It Coming, the prizewinning book, Dreams of a Lifetime: How Culture Shapes Our Future Imaginings (with Janet M. Ruane), argues that dreams are thought to be matters of an individual's heart and mind. But in this book, the authors explore the sociocultural dimensions that organize and structure what Americans do (or do not) dream about, the ways in which they dream, variations in dreams according to one's social location, and when, if ever, people stop dreaming.
Professor Cerulo's articles appear in a wide variety of journals including the American Sociological Review, Social Forces, Social Psychology Quarterly, Sociological Methods and Research, Sociological Forum, Sociological Inquiry, Sociological Focus, Communication Research, Contemporary Sociology, Poetics, Social Science Research, Law and Policy, Science As Culture, and annuals and collections such as the Annual Review of Sociology, the Encyclopedia of Nationalism, the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, the Handbook of Cultural Sociology, the Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Sociology, the Handbook of Social Theory, Research in Political Sociology, and the World Book Encyclopedia. She is the author of Never Saw It Coming: Cultural Challenges to Envisioning the Worst (University of Chicago Press, 2006), Deciphering Violence: The Cognitive Order of Right and Wrong (Routledge,1998), and Identity Designs: The Sights and Sounds of a Nation – winner of these Culture Section's "Best Book Award, 1996" (The Rose Book series of the ASA, Rutgers University Press,1995). She also co-authored Dreams of a Lifetime: How Culture Shapes Our Future Imaginings (Princeton University Press, 2022), Second Thoughts: Seeing Conventional Wisdom through the Sociological Eye (Sage, 2015), and edited a collection entitled Culture in Mind: Toward a Sociology of Culture and Cognition (Routledge, 2002).
Professor Cerulo served as the Sociology Department Chair from July 2009 to August 2012. She has also served as the Chair of the ASA's Culture section (2009 through 2010), where she also functions as the section's network coordinator, and the director of the Culture and Cognition Network. She is a former Vice President of the Eastern Sociological Society and the current editor of Sociological Forum, the flagship journal of the Eastern Sociological Society. In 2013, she was named the Robin M. Williams Jr. Lecturer by the Eastern Sociological Society and she also won that organization's 2013 Merit Award. In 2012, she received the Rutgers University Scholar-Teacher Award, recognizing both her pedagogy and research in sociology. She was also elected to the Sociological Research Association.
Professor Cerulo’s work has been widely covered in the media, including venues such as the Chicago Tribune, CNN Travel, The Conversation, DAME magazine, Le Monde, Mycentraljersey.com, The New York Daily News, The New Republic, The New York Times, North Jersey.com, Playboy, Psychology Today, The Post Courier, The Scientific American, Slate Magazine, The Times of India, and USA Today. She has also been interviewed on 1010 Wins news radio, The Brian Lehrer radio program (WNYC), the Freakonomics podcast/radio program, Jeff Schechtman's Talk Cocktail podcast, Mancow Morning Radio Show (WLUP FM), Matthew Crawford’s The Curious Man podcast, and Thinking Aloud on BBC radio.
- In the Public Eye:
- Work on dreams of the futures has been featured in The Conversation, The Chicago Tribune, and Psychology Today, as well as several podcasts.
- Research on the social meaning of commercial scents was featured in the Science section of LeMonde and on the BBC radio show Thinking Aloud.
- Work on our inability to anticipate worst case scenarios was featured in Slate Magazine and Sociology Lens.
- Featured on the radio show Freakonomics and in Dame Magazine regarding her research on public apologies.
- Faculty Article(s):
- Apologies of the Rich and Famous: Cultural, Cognitive and Social Explanations of Why We Care and Why We Forgive
- Enduring Relationships: Social Aspects of Perceived Interactions with the Dead
- Rethinking Culture and Cognition
- Scents and Sensibility: Olfaction, Sense-making and Meaning Attribution
- Apologies of the Rich and Famous: Cultural, Cognitive and Social Explanations of Why We Care and Why We Forgive
- Faculty Bookshelf:
- Culture in Mind: Toward a Sociology of Culture and Cognition
- Deciphering Violence: The Cognitive Structure of Right and Wrong
- Dreams of a Lifetime: How Who We Are Shapes How We Imagine Our Future
- Identity Designs: The Sights and Sounds of A Nation (The Arnold and Caroline Rose Book Series of the American Sociological Association)
- Never Saw It Coming: Cultural Challenges to Envisioning the Worst
- Second Thoughts: Sociology Challenges Conventional Wisdom
- Program Areas:
- Culture and Cognition
- Politics and Social Movements
- Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration
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Chaudhary, Ali R.
- Ali R. Chaudhary
- Associate Professor
- Ph.D. University of California, Davis
- Email: ali.chaudhary@rutgers.edu
- Office: Davison Hall, 132B
- Personal Website
- Curriculum Vitae
- Google Scholar
Dr. Ali R. Chaudhary is a sociologist, musician, and associate professor of sociology at Rutgers University in New Brunswick-New Jersey. His scholarship interrogates the significance of socially constructed categories as they mediate opportunities and constraints in contemporary social life. Dr. Chaudhary deploys diverse methodologies, data, and theoretical perspectives to understand how ascriptive social categories (e.g. race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, etc.), and their corresponding symbolic boundaries—are activated within and across immigrant/diaspora communities, immigrant organizations, and popular music.
Dr. Chaudhary is currently developing new research on the sociology of music and musicians. This research is comprised of two projects. The first is a comparative-historical project examining the legacy and logics of racial segregation in the production/consumption of musical instruments.
The second project examines the lasting consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic on working musicians and music venues across New York City and New Jersey. Dr. Chaudhary is currently on leave and a visiting scholar with the Advanced Research Collaborative at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is collecting new data for a book manuscript focusing on the lasting consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic on musicians and music-making in the United States.
To view my recent and earlier academic publications, please visit my Google Scholar page.
- In the Public Eye:
- Research on immigrant voting in Europe featured by the International Migration Institute at Oxford University.
- Interviewed about New Jersey Supper Clubs as a strategy to reduce inter-group tensions between natives and immigrants in the Asbury Park Press and USA Today Network.
- Faculty Article(s):
- Ascriptive Organizational Stigma and the Constraining of Pakistani Immigrant Organizations
- Immigrant Organizations
- Paint it White: Segregationist Logics in Advertising and the Electric Guitar
- Voting ‘Here’ and ‘There”: Political Integration and Transnational Political Engagement among Immigrants in Europe
- Ascriptive Organizational Stigma and the Constraining of Pakistani Immigrant Organizations
- Program Areas:
- Culture and Cognition
- Environment and Sustainability
- Global Structures
- Organizations, Networks, and Work
- Politics and Social Movements
- Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration
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Dahaghi, Kevin
- Kevin Dahaghi
- ASSISTANT PROFESSOR
- Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2021
- Email: kdahaghi@sociology.rutgers.edu
- Curriculum Vitae
Kevin Dahaghi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Rutgers University. He received his Ph.D. in Sociology from The University of Texas at Austin in 2021. His research interests include criminal justice, law, organizations, and political sociology.
His research broadly focuses on the dynamics between social contexts and organizations in the policy process, with an emphasis on punishment and criminal legal policies. Using historical and quantitative methods, his current work examines the origins and development of policies that shape differential exposure to the criminal legal system.
Kevin is affiliated with the Program in Criminal Justice.
- Faculty Article(s):
- Uneven Access to Justice: Social Context and Eligibility for the Right to Counsel
- Program Areas:
- Crime and Social Control
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Handsman, Emily
- Emily Handsman
- ASSISTANT PROFESSOR
- Ph.D. Northwestern University, 2022
- Email: ehandsman@sociology.rutgers.edu
- Curriculum Vitae
Emily Handsman is an incoming Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Rutgers University. She received her Ph.D. in sociology from Northwestern University in 2022, and worked as a Harvard College Fellow (2022-2023) and a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Annenberg Institute for Education Reform (2023-2024).
Emily is a sociologist of education who uses qualitative methods to study processes of cultural, political, and organizational change in the context of K-12 schools. In her research, she considers how cultural and political changes impact K-12 schools and how K-12 schools as organizations are either resistant to or open to change. In her current book project, Eras of Equity, she studies equity efforts in three suburban school districts, highlighting how exogenous shocks impact these efforts.
In her other projects, she examines changes in character education in US schools as well as equity efforts in mathematics. She is also engaged in a long-term, collaborative project on equity-centered school leadership funded by the Wallace Foundation.
- Faculty Article(s):
- From Virtue to Grit: Character Education in the U.S., 1985-2016
- Solving for X: Constructing Algebra and Algebra Policy During Curriculum Change
- From Virtue to Grit: Character Education in the U.S., 1985-2016
- Program Areas:
- Culture and Cognition
- Organizations, Networks, and Work
- Politics and Social Movements
- Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration
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Jones, Leslie Kay
- Leslie Kay Jones
- Assistant Professor
- Email: lv251@sociology.rutgers.edu
- Office: Davison Hall, 131
Dr. Leslie Kay Jones is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Rutgers New Brunswick, specializing in social movements. She draws extensively on the fields of race and gender, critical race theory, and online social media in her study of collective mobilization. She teaches qualitative and computer assisted research methods, particularly digital ethnography and content analysis.
Leslie’s recent article, BlackLivesMatter: An Analysis of the Movement as Social Drama, proposes a theoretical model for the role of the Black Twitter counterpublic in mediating the frames of #BlackLivesMatter protests. Her working manuscript argues that Black women are forming intellectual salons through online social media, in which they are making groundbreaking theoretical contributions toward the public understanding of race and gender.
Leslie is an interdisciplinary scholar that is active in the digital humanities and digital sociologies communities. She co-directs the Digital Sociology Collective with Drs. Rachel Durso (Washington College) and Francesca Tripodi (UNC).
As a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, she held fellowships at the Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy (2018-2019) and the Price Lab for Digital Humanities (2017-2018)
In 2016, she began co-ordinating the Digital Sociology Mini-Conference as part of the Eastern Sociological Society annual meeting, an initiative first started in 2015 by Jessie Daniels, Karen Gregory, and Tressie McMillan Cottom. In 2020, the Digital Sociology Mini-Conference became the 1st Annual Digital Sociology unconference, independently hosted by the newly named Digital Sociology Collective.
- In the Public Eye:
- Silva, Katelyn. 2017. The New Salon: Leslie Jones on the intersection of Black feminism and social media.
- Faculty Article(s):
- #BlackLivesMatter: An Analysis of the Movement as Social Drama
- Program Areas:
- Gender, Sexuality and Embodiment
- Politics and Social Movements
- Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration
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Lee, Catherine
- Catherine Lee
- Associate Professor
- Ph.D. University of California, Los Angeles, 2003
- Email: clee@sociology.rutgers.edu
- Office: Davison Hall, 141
- Personal Website
- Phone: 848-932-7807
- Curriculum Vitae
Catherine Lee is associate professor of sociology and faculty associate at the Institute for Health, Health Care Policy, and Aging Research. As a political sociologist, she examines how meanings of race and ethnicity shape social relations and inequalities across three critical sites: immigration; science and medicine; and law and society. Catherine is the author of Fictive Kinship: Family Reunification and the Meaning of Race and Nation in American Immigration (2013, Russell Sage) and co-editor of Genetics and the Unsettled Past: The Collision of DNA, Race, and History (2012, Rutgers University Press). Her current projects include an investigation of the use of DNA testing in family reunification cases in the United States and Europe and of the meaning of diversity in U.S. biomedicine given shifting ethnic and racial demographics and the rise of multiraciality due to increased immigration.
- In the Public Eye:
- Discusses the role of families in U.S. immigration policies, past and present.
- Program Areas:
- Culture and Cognition
- Gender, Sexuality and Embodiment
- Health, Population, and Biomedicine
- Politics and Social Movements
- Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration
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Mai, Quan
- Quan Mai
- Assistant Professor
- PhD, Vanderbilt University in 2018
- Email: quan.mai@sociology.rutgers.edu
- Office: Davison Hall, 049
- Personal Website
- Curriculum Vitae
Quan D. Mai is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Rutgers University. He received his Ph.D. in Sociology from Vanderbilt University in 2018. Dr. Mai’s research and teaching interests include work & occupations, social stratification, social movements, research methods, and environmental sociology. His scholarship focuses on how a range of social relations—including employment relations, race-ethnic relations, state regulatory capacity, and social movements—combine in the economy, polity, and in urban spaces to influence processes of social stratification. His current projects explore various consequences of nonstandard employment for workers’ labor market outcomes and socioeconomic well-being.
He is a sociologist studying how work, race, and space shape various dimensions of social inequality in the labor market. His recent publications analyze the institutional drivers of work precarity in a cross-national setting. His current research examines how the experience of nonstandard employment shapes various aspects of workers’ lives, including their well-being and labor market prospects. In another related line of research, he explores the interaction between multiple media platforms, political institutions, and social movements. His research has appeared or is forthcoming in Social Forces, Social Science & Medicine, Research in the Sociology of Work, Labor History, and other academic journals.
- In the Public Eye:
- Interviewed by Slate's "Better Life Lab" podcast about the effects of gig work on sleep, April 21, 2022
- Faculty Article(s):
- Employment insecurity and sleep disturbance: Evidence from 31 European countries
- Precarious sleep? Nonstandard work, gender, and sleep disturbance in 31 European countries
- Precarious Work in Europe: Assessing Cross-National Differences and Institutional Determinants of Work Precarity in 32 European Countries
- Unclear Signals, Uncertain Prospects: The Labor Market Consequences of Freelancing in the New Economy
- Employment insecurity and sleep disturbance: Evidence from 31 European countries
- Program Areas:
- Environment and Sustainability
- Organizations, Networks, and Work
- Politics and Social Movements
- Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration
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Martinez-Schuldt, Ricardo
- Ricardo Martinez-Schuldt
- Assistant Professor
- PhD. North Carolina, 2019
- Email: ricardo.martinez.schuldt@rutgers.edu
- Office: Davison Hall
- Curriculum Vitae
- Google Scholar
I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Rutgers University. I received my PhD in sociology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2019. Generally, my research examines how local contexts shape human behavior and institutional actions in the areas of criminology and international migration.
My current research, for example, focuses on the neighborhood and city-level correlates of crime, crime reporting behavior, and officer-involved shootings. In particular, I consider the impact of immigrant “sanctuary” policies, immigration, and non-profit organizations on city-level violence as well as their effects on the likelihood that individuals report crime victimization to law enforcement officials.
I am also the co-principal investigator (with Kraig Beyerlein, University of Notre Dame) for the Chicago Congregation Project. We employ a diverse array of methodologies to locate, identify, and study religious congregations in urban areas. In particular, the Chicago Congregation Project will allow us to study how community-level contexts impacts religious congregations, especially as it pertains to engagement in their local communities. At the same time, we aim to better understand the role of congregations in shaping community-level dynamics.
- Faculty Article(s):
- Immigrant Sanctuary Policies and Crime-Reporting Behavior: A Multilevel Analysis of Reports of Crime Victimization to Law Enforcement, 1980 to 2004
- Program Areas:
- Crime and Social Control
- Global Structures
- Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration
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Mouzon, Dawne M.
- Dawne M. Mouzon
- Associate Professor
- Email: dawne.mouzon@rutgers.edu
- Curriculum Vitae
Ph.D., Rutgers University, 2010
Dr. Dawne Marie Mouzon, Associate Professor of Sociology, engages in research that seeks to identify and explain risk and protective factors for the physical and mental health of populations of African descent. Specifically, she investigates the interplay between social relationships, psychosocial stressors, resilience, and health across the life course among Black Americans. Her early work focused on testing presumed protective factors to explain “the Black-White mental health paradox”, or the unexpected finding that Black Americans generally exhibit better mental health outcomes than Whites despite their lower socioeconomic standing and greater exposure to discrimination. She since built upon this work by investigating how these risk and protective factors, along with status characteristics such as gender, ethnicity, and nativity status, shape mental health risk among African American and Afro-Caribbean populations in the United States.
Her current research program focuses on identifying adaptive coping resources and strategies African Americans use in the face of chronic stress and racial discrimination, with a focus on gender differences in these processes. Another arm of her research investigates the “marriage squeeze” among Black Americans, including preference for (and barriers to) marriage, romantic relationships, and opportunities for parenthood.
- Faculty Article(s):
- Everyday Discrimination Typologies Among Older African Americans: Gender and Socioeconomic Status
- Gender differences in marriage, romantic involvement, and desire for romantic involvement among older African Americans
- Religious Involvement and the Black–White Paradox in Mental Health
- Everyday Discrimination Typologies Among Older African Americans: Gender and Socioeconomic Status
- Program Areas:
- Gender, Sexuality and Embodiment
- Health, Population, and Biomedicine
- Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration