Doctoral Student

  • Portrait
  • Stephanie Peña-Alves
  • Email: salves@sociology.rutgers.edu
  • Curriculum Vitae

  • Steph Peña-Alves is a Doctoral Candidate with research interests in the areas of culture and cognition, space and place, access, deviance, semiotics, and sociological theory. Her work explores how people make sense of inclusion and exclusion, and how they negotiate issues of access and restriction in everyday spaces. In her dissertation, she examines patterns in how spatial boundaries are set, regulated, and crossed at multiple levels of analysis, focusing on tensions between personal and collective definitions of rules of access as manifest in individual accounts, public discourse, law, and policy. Her work is published in Symbolic Interaction, Journal of Health Communication, Aslib Journal of Information Management, The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Sociology, and Contemporary Sociology. She teaches courses in deviance, sociology of race, social psychology, and sociological theory.