This research paper investigates the impact of “amenity migration” on the local populations in rural mountain towns during the COVID-19 pandemic as well as potential barriers to healthcare that arise when the infrastructure of these communities is strained by a large and sudden population boom. It aims to explore the distinct perspectives, challenges, and adaptations of local residents and healthcare providers by employing interviews as the primary method. The study delves into motivations to live in the mountains, housing limitations, remote work, community dynamics, and balance between full-time and part-time residents during the pandemic. Furthermore, this study takes an analytical approach to theories of social ambivalence as a means to understand the complex and contradictory emotions local populations may experience towards amenity migrants. The social determinants of health play a significant role in analyzing the needs of these communities as they continue to undergo change because of these in-migrants. This paper contributes to the existing literature by filling gaps in understanding the nuanced responses of locals, healthcare workers, ski patrollers, and mountain rescuers to the pandemic in rural settings, offering insights into their distinct coping strategies, perceptions, and contributions to community well-being. This paper aims to identify the existence of “amenity migrants'' in rural mountain towns proposed by previous literature, understand their impact on local populations during the COVID-19 pandemic, and how the health landscape has been altered in the equitable distribution of healthcare. In bringing attention to this phenomenon, I aim to further inform policies and interventions that will support the diverse needs of both the locals and amenity migrants in the areas faced with the challenges posed by the pandemic.

Pittsburgh’s Strip District offers a look into how urban redevelopment disproportionately affects the communities within. Utilizing 20 semi-structured interviews, it was determined that individual experiences were dictated by certain characteristics that were investigated, like age or one’s social role in the neighborhood. These divergences in lifestyle and overall position in the Strip, therefore, complicate each individual’s perception of growth and their corresponding outcomes. Young residents, who occupy the new residential spaces introduced to the area, accept change as a positive, utilizing the refurbished environment and amenities to their advantage. However, business owners, belonging to an older demographic who better represent what the area once was, meet this change with apprehension. Concerns about fading identity, misguided policy, and displacement repeatedly expose the harmful effects of redevelopment in an urban context. Together, the findings demonstrate how growth presents itself unevenly, with any positive change benefiting only select groups.

Existing literature on penal farm labor is dominated by the prison-industrial complex (PIC), which argues that private companies profit from penal labor and incarceration more broadly. At the Louisiana State Penitentiary, better known as Angola Prison, incarcerated men perform fieldwork. In this thesis, I ask: how does penal farm labor shape the material, corporeal, and emotional conditions of men who are serving time at Angola? What was the utility of penal farm labor for the state of Louisiana from the 1980s until the 2010s? I conducted interviews with 26 formerly incarcerated men who described their violent experiences with fieldwork at Angola. I argue that fieldwork is a disciplinary mechanism that helped the state of Louisiana manage its political economic crisis beginning in the 1980s. The PIC fails to explain Angola’s farm economy because the food produced at Angola stays within the state prison system. My proposed framework of carceral reproduction fills in the gap left by the PIC. Carceral reproduction captures how Angola’s closed, circular farm economy reduced the Louisiana state prison system’s operating costs. In doing so, penal farm labor at Angola offered a solution to the political conundrum of how to run a prison system when the state lacked the money to do so.

The Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) is a substantial initiative that has had a tremendous impact on the housing market throughout the United States. The tax credit was created due to the privatization of the affordable housing industry. With this privatization, the United States government created the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) with the intent of subsidizing private owners/operators who work to create affordable housing. This program has been a tremendous success overall, but this study looks at the disparity of LIHTC in rural versus urban areas, specifically in Texas. Privatization often leads to profit maximization, and this profit maximization can hinder rural affordable housing development and preservation. Through a comparative analysis of two rural cities and two urban cities, this study shows that the rural cities have a disproportionately lower amount of LIHTC-funded housing units per capita. This disparity is then understood through the 2025 Texas Qualified Allocation Plan, and how several factors of the plan, such as amenity-based scoring and rents calculated based on Area Median Income, inadvertently favor urban cities. Looking at this disparity and the causes involved, Karl Polanyi’s concepts of “embeddedness” and “double movement” and Viviana Zelizer's concept of “relational work” provide a useful framework to understand how policy and profit maximization have mixed to create the spatial disparity. This study recommends policy changes that can even out the incentives for the private sector to operate in rural cities to help close the LIHTC disparity in rural versus urban cities.

Systematic discrimination has had long term effects on the African American community, limiting the ability of this demographic to receive affordable housing, high education, and positions within the workforce that provide substantial wages. In the workplace specifically, cultural biases and homophilic networks decrease access to positions for African Americans, even when these workers are qualified for the position. Through the analysis of in-depth qualitative interviews held amongst six professional players and five MLB executives, this thesis investigates these racial preferences in the context of professional baseball, exploring the factors that have led to decreased participation of African Americans in the MLB. Factors such as early exposure to the sport, financial support, and barriers to accessible baseball all play large roles in forming the small supply of Black players seen today. In addition, organizational preferences and the surplus of talent coming from Latin American countries, have influenced the markets of players that professional teams invest in. Furthermore, this paper explores the experiences of Black players, bringing to light the struggles that come with playing a sport dominated by white contemporaries. By investigating these topics and understanding the social mechanisms that have limited Black participation in baseball, this paper brings awareness to the challenges that this demographic faces and current initiatives aimed at reintegrating black athletes into baseball.

While migration to more economically developed countries may be desirable for migrants settled outside their home countries (Bijwaard and Wahba 2023; Della Puppa, Montagna, and Kofman 2021; Mas Giralt 2017; Paul and Yeoh 2021), many migrants ultimately do not migrate, either by choice or due to constraints on their mobility. This thesis challenges the mobility bias in migration studies, particularly in the case of secondary migration. There are many reasons why people who have migrated to countries generally classified as belonging to the “global south” may be unwilling or unable to leave. In this thesis, I use the aspiration-capability framework proposed by Kerilyn Schewel (2020) to analyze three different forms of immobility among migrants. Analyzing thirty (30) semi-structured interviews with Haitian migrants in São Paulo, Brazil, I find that factors beyond individual economic maximization shape migrant immobility. More importantly, I show that immobility involves a complex interplay of pull, push, repel and retain factors, as well as specific capability profiles which together produce specific mobility outcomes. Thus, immobility should not be viewed as the default but rather as the result of elaborate decision-making processes.

This thesis examines how transnational entertainment brands shape identity and belonging through a case study of NCT, a modular K-pop group under SM Entertainment. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in South Korea and the U.S., and 36 interviews with fans and industry professionals, the study explores how NCT’s decentralized structure, multilingual content, and visual branding enable regionally tailored fan engagement. Focusing on Korean and Asian American fans, it investigates how fans interpret NCT’s music, fashion, and subunits as tools for cultural connection, self-expression, and diasporic pride. Findings suggest that NCT operates not just as a musical act, but as a flexible platform through which fans emotionally engage, negotiate identity, and construct meaning. By centering fan perspectives, this thesis contributes to the sociology of music, diaspora studies, and media globalization, arguing that K-pop brands like NCT offer infrastructures for global fans to co-create cultural belonging across borders.

This study examines the experiences of Guatemalan Americans, a steadily growing community shaped by migration history and socio-economic challenges. While media narratives since 2017 have focused on caravans from the Northern Triangle fleeing hardship, this research shifts attention to what happens after arrival. Through surveys conducted with participants from the Latin American Legal Defense and Education Fund (LALDEF), the study explores how informal support networks—especially churches and community-based organizations—help build community cohesion and address economic and legal vulnerabilities. By highlighting these networks’ role in fostering resilience and adaptation, the research fills a gap in the literature and contributes to a deeper understanding of immigrant integration in the U.S.

Over the last nine years, California has come a long way in its efforts to expand state-sponsored Medi-Cal benefits through its Health for All campaign. The campaign aimed to expand full-scope healthcare coverage to ensure that all Californians, regardless of immigration status, would have access to healthcare through this state reform. For the first time, unauthorized Californians could seek full-scope coverage without worrying that being labeled as ‘ineligible immigrant’ would prevent them from being considered, including California’s farmworker population, of which three-fourths are unauthorized. Access to the healthcare coverage can create a much-needed health safety net for California’s unauthorized farmworker population who have been historically been excluded from healthcare reforms, living with disproportionately poor health outcomes and lack of quality care. With ths advent of the full-scope Medi-Cal expansions, I conducted ethnographic research in agricultural communities in California’s Central Valley, specifically the San Joaquin region, among 40 farmworkers seeking to secure access to specialized health care services provided by Medi-Cal. My objective was to learn how farmworkers are, most of them without solid legal standing, navigating the bureaucratic requirements needed to receive Medi-Cal assistance. This senior thesis is an investigation and documentation of their described reality experiencing the reverberating threads of exclusion encoded in the roadblocks they encountered at the application and renewal step.

This thesis examines the ongoing influence of parental divorce during early years on how parent-child relationships develop as these children grow up and attend college. Most of the studies spotlight the immediate consequences of separation. However, this research delves deeper into how these dynamics shift after custody arrangements end and students step into autonomy. Drawing on twelve in-depth interviews with college students from divorced families, this study highlights four main themes: freedom from household alternation, uneven parental involvement, emotional stress during school breaks, and efforts to rebuild or redefine relationships in adulthood. Through qualitative analysis, the research shows how students reflect on their family past, set boundaries, and redefine love and support on their terms. This study explores how young adults manage parent–child relationships after divorce, highlighting resilience, growing independence, and shifts in self-awareness. It is beneficial to understand the long-term impact of divorce on identity and family connection.

As technology is now regularly used in classroom environments, identifying its benefits and drawbacks has grown more important. Although research has studied its impact on young adults, it has not yet shown how a college setting can change social media’s influence. This study, based on interviews with twenty current Princeton students, aims to clarify the correlation between social media usage habits and the overall emotional responses that they can evoke. It finds that though students have an overall positive view of social media, which they use for communicating and networking, they cannot avoid its common side effects, such as lower quality relationships and skewed priorities. These factors, among others, are responsible for the presence and severity of their emotional responses.

This thesis examines stakeholder perceptions of artificial intelligence in film and television through a mixed-methods approach. The core analysis employs a MaxDiff utility measurement with 611 general audience members and 48 entertainment professionals to quantify acceptance patterns across 19 distinct AI use cases. Additionally, a question wording effect experiment reveals that describing technology as "AI" versus "software that scans automatically" results in a statistically significant difference of 12.77 percentage points, highlighting how terminology influences perception independent of functionality. When combined with interview insights, these findings reveal consistent psychological boundaries: non-creative assistance applications receive broad acceptance while creative autonomous applications face strong resistance, a tension between enhancing versus replacing human creativity. AI implementations that maintain human guidance dramatically outrank their autonomous counterparts across all demographics. Demographic analysis reveals age as the strongest indicator of AI acceptance, with younger respondents showing greater openness to creative applications while older participants demonstrate stronger acceptance of non-creative tools but heightened resistance to creative uses. Surprisingly, media consumption habits (self-identified viewer type) show minimal influence on acceptance patterns, suggesting that AI perceptions are rooted in deeper values rather than entertainment engagement levels. Industry professionals demonstrate more nuanced distinctions than general audiences, showing stronger protection of core creative domains while expressing greater appreciation for technical assistance. These findings offer practical guidance for implementation strategies that respect domain-specific boundaries while leveraging AI capabilities in ways that preserve human creative direction.

As Gen Z men trend more conservative and Gen Z women more liberal, scholars have identified social media as a key site of ideological polarization, especially around gender. While much cultural attention has been given to the “Alt-Right Pipeline” for exposing young men to misogynistic content, little empirical research has examined whether algorithms actually systematically promote Gender-Based Hate or whether similar patterns exist for women. This study addresses that gap through a sock puppet audit of Instagram’s recommendation algorithms. Eighteen sock puppet accounts, assigned to different content-preference treatments, were used to collect recommended posts over time. Posts were qualitatively coded using a deductive approach to assess three dimensions of diversity based on Michiels et al.'s (2022) definition of filter bubbles. To capture hostility toward any gender, this study introduces the concept of Gender-Based Hate (GBH). Findings offer insight into how algorithmic personalization may reinforce gender-hostile ideologies among young users.

Universities are often seen as centers for economic growth, but they can also drive housing inequality in surrounding communities. Student demand is frequently linked to rising rents and gentrification, but this overlooks important variations across college towns, market shifts, and COVID-19’s impact. This thesis asks: to what extent do universities and their expanding student population contribute to the nationwide rental housing crisis? Using a fixed effects regression on data from 2012-2022 concerning 1,746 universities, this study examines how proximity to campus and student populations affect rent over time. The results suggest that while being near a campus consistently predicts higher rent, the student presence does not uniformly drive prices – and in the South, is even linked to lower rents. Instead, rents positively correlate with college graduate presence. Thus, universities may influence housing markets not only by attracting students, but by training gentrifiers who transform neighborhoods long after graduation.

Spoken language interpreting in U.S. educational settings remains a largely understudied area compared to sign language interpreting and other specialized fields. As a result, interpreters who serve language-minoritized families often navigate complex, underdefined roles. Drawing from semi-structured interviews with certified interpreters, bilingual staff, and ad-hoc language brokers, this qualitative study develops metaphorical descriptions that offer a deeper understanding of the roles educational interpreters perform. These role metaphors reflect interpreters’ dynamic role and alignment shifting, their negotiation of professional identity and collaboration with other members of the educational team, and the relational and linguistic work they do to build meaning across language and culture. Findings provide valuable insight into the plurality of actors who serve as interpreters, offer a foundation for developing professional standards and strengthening institutional support for interpreters in education, and calls attention to the importance of improving the quality of language access services in education.

This thesis explores the emergence of the English-language call center industry in Mexico City. It explores the way in which the industry engages with the community of those forcibly returned from the United States. Often restricted by their lack of Spanish-speaking capability and/or enabled by their strength in the English-language, returnee employees significantly contribute to the industry as they can connect with American customers or business partners. While journalists and academics have explored this interaction between post-U.S. returnee migration and call center employment at large, this thesis asks: How do returnees use and shape call centers as places in which they can reinvent community, and how does this call center-returnee relationship impact Mexico City and the resettlement landscape of those forcibly returned at large? Through interviews with the forcibly returned community in Mexico City and their peers, I claim that call centers are a vital space within the resettlement process used by returnees to enter the global market, find and support one another, and reinvent community. They build these social networks both socio emotionally and materially, which emerge as integral in their own resettlement processes. These networks inspire institutional changes within the call center industry and distinctly situate returnee call center workers within the forcibly returned community at large in Mexico City.

The teaching profession is very important in educating and transforming the next generation of people. Not only are teachers educating their students, but they are also instilling good morals and values in them, in hopes of setting them up for success in the future. After learning that teachers across the country have been facing job insecurity due to complaints of student’s parents or school boards because of things like decorations, I became curious as to why this was happening. This research paper uses both literature and quantitative data to understand society’s perception of teachers. I used an abundance of literature to understand the regulations in place surrounding what is acceptable for teachers in the classroom, regarding decorations, personal belongings, and personal opinions. It became clear that there are very vague rules for teachers to follow, which allows for teachers to get in trouble a lot more due to different interpretations of these rules. A survey was created to understand people’s perceptions and levels of professionalism of teachers in different scenarios. The survey also helped look deeper into the topic, by having one survey with all female teachers and one with all male teachers. Because the teaching profession is dominated by women, I was curious if that had any impact on the public’s perception of the profession. This research helped demonstrate the harsher judgement placed on minority groups in the workplace and helped understand the perception of professionalism of teachers in the so-called ‘grey area’ of teacher conduct.

While people with substance use issues make up only 8% of the U.S. population, they comprise nearly half of the nation’s prison population. Given the extremity with which incarceration is deployed as a response to addiction, this thesis asks: How does incarceration impact experiences of substance use and recovery, both during and after imprisonment? Criminologists have long examined the intersection of addiction and incarceration, often emphasizing crime as the central link. Meanwhile, critical addiction studies scholars have framed incarceration as a political response to addiction. This thesis seeks to broaden the conceptual foundations of this relationship by centering the lived experiences of those navigating both substance use and incarceration. Drawing on in-depth, semi-structured interviews with formerly incarcerated individuals who have struggled with addiction, this study explores how incarceration shapes the social, economic, mental, and physical dimensions of their lives. Using MaxQDA to conduct thematic coding and employing phenomenological analysis, this research traces how addiction and recovery are experienced across time and institutional space. In doing so, it presents how participants’ needs evolve through their contact with the prison system, the barriers they face in pursuing recovery, and the forms of resistance and agency they enact in response.

The privacy paradox suggests there is a discrepancy between people’s expressed concerns about privacy and their actual actions online. Traditionally, this paradox is supported most significantly by the cost-benefit analysis where the perceived benefits of certain web platforms outweigh the perceived risks to their privacy. Additionally, in sociology, the violation of privacy norms is often understood as the inappropriate flow of information across social contexts, known as the contextual integrity theory. This study aims to challenge this theory and redefine our understanding around the privacy paradox, specifically in algorithmic engagement. Through empirical and qualitative research, this thesis asks: how do individuals across generations navigate privacy concerns in the age of Artificial Intelligence? Specifically, it explores how these algorithms challenge conventional understandings around privacy by obscuring the flow of information and enforcing strong user behaviors, known as interaction rituals. By analyzing 20 interviews (10 subjects ages 18-24 years old and 10 subjects ages 47-53 years old), I work to disprove the traditional theories behind privacy behaviors. Instead, I find that social interactions, particularly market-driven interaction rituals and complex contagions, are normalizing the erosion of personal privacy in algorithms. These findings suggest that individuals interact in networks that socially reinforce constant engagement with digital technology, which makes opting out and privacy-focused behaviors increasingly difficult.

Refugees face significant challenges in socio-economic integration due to language barriers and limited access to technology, and community-based agencies provide other resources to fill these gaps and make social connections. This research study outlines ways to help refugees become part of U.S. society through community support, digital literacy, and digital tools. I explore the use of digital literacy and digital tools in resettlement programs, and the need for more participatory approaches to understand refugees' perspectives on integration. Finally, I suggest the development of resettlement orientation programs to improve refugees' socioeconomic and civic integration.