Sociology

This dissertation comprises three chapters that examine integration across economic, social welfare, and health outcomes. The first chapter evaluates the chilling effect of the 2017 public charge rule revision leak on Medicaid and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) participation for U.S.-born children of noncitizen parents. Using the Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplements (CPS ASEC) from 2014 to 2024, I find that the public charge rule leak was associated with decreased Medicaid and SNAP participation among U.S.-born children with noncitizen parents compared to U.S.-born children with citizen parents. Among children of noncitizen parents, I find that only Black and Hispanic children with noncitizen parents experienced lower Medicaid enrollment after the leak. I argue that the public charge rule leak created a hostile context for immigrant families and limited the claims-making of social citizenship for U.S.-born children. The second chapter examines the heterogeneity of health among the multiracial child population, utilizing data from the National Health Interview Survey (1999–2018) and CPS ASEC (2003–2018). I find that multiracial children, as an aggregated category, experience worse health than children with two non-Hispanic White parents and indistinguishable health compared to children with two same-race parents. Disaggregated analyses reveal that multiracial children with a Black, White Hispanic, or American Indian/Alaska Native parent drive the pattern of worse health observed in the aggregated analyses. These findings reveal diverging patterns of health in childhood that have implications for later health and overall population health dynamics. Finally, the last chapter evaluates labor market stratification in early twentieth-century New York City. This chapter expands on the existing historical labor market literature, which primarily focuses on European immigrant men, by incorporating the experiences of Black and White internal migrants from the U.S. South, Black Caribbean immigrants, as well as women. This chapter finds evidence of labor market stratification shaped by race, place of birth, national origin, and gender in the early twentieth century. More broadly, this work demonstrates that understanding labor market inequality in its historical context necessitates expanding beyond the European immigrant male case to identify the factors that shaped stratification during this period.

This dissertation draws on ethnographic fieldwork to analyze contemporary Mexican migration to the United States. It focuses on a single rural community—a rancho—in the central Mexican state of Guanajuato. The first part addresses the historical context of this study, which occurred at a moment in which intensified border enforcement had driven the cost of border crossings to unprecedented levels. An expansion of temporary work visas offered prospective migrants some hope of legal passage, but this hope was dependent on the random luck of ties to US employers. This first section outlines how young people in the rancho grew up seeing the US as their only path towards social mobility, as it was for their parents. This perception was confirmed not just by their parents’ previous successes through migration, but also by low local wages, constant comparisons to friends and family who’ve migrated, and the expansion of cartel violence and the drug economy. Given the dangers of crossing the border, an older generation encouraged young people to wait for work visas. However, many grew tired of waiting and took on debts to cross into the US. The second part of the dissertation focuses on the experiences of migrants who’ve crossed. It follows undocumented migrants who, due to the cost and danger of border crossings, had lived in the US for years and built lives in a country often hostile to their presence. It also follows young people who said goodbye to home indefinitely, crossed the border with a coyote, and began a new life in the US, as well as temporarily documented farmworkers with H-2A visas, who divided their lives seasonally between the US and Mexico. It examines their lives as they navigate family relations and jobs in fields, factories, dairies, and slaughterhouses. In so doing, this dissertation illustrates the range of experiences that characterize contemporary Mexican migration: young people in Mexico dreaming of migration, undocumented migrants leading lives far away from loved ones in Mexico, and perpetually temporary H-2A farmworkers. It considers what parenthood, social mobility, and home mean in the context of this migration.

Racial and gender inequality in the workplace has many causes. On the supply side, factors like applicant pool diversity and differences in educational attainment, skills, and credentials contribute to racial and gender inequality. On the demand side, it can be influenced by individual decision-makers, organizations, and broader social forces. This dissertation focuses on how organizational practices can contribute to inequality. The first paper examines how workplace inclusion efforts inform organizational attraction. In a within-subjects experiment with a nationally representative sample (? = 500), only 42.6% chose the company with inclusion efforts; however, Black participants, Democrats (and Independents), and women were more likely to select workplaces with inclusion efforts than White participants, Republicans, and men, respectively. Using a quota sample (? = 598), I found evidence that all demographic subgroups, except White Republican women, preferred companies with inclusion efforts more than White Republican men did. The second paper asks how the design of hiring processes affects the racial composition of selected applicants. Drawing on a survey experiment with participants who have hiring experience (? = 1,265; 1,729 decisions), I found that neither collective nor simulated collective hiring contexts significantly increased the selection of Black applicants compared to an isolated context. However, Black applicants were 20% more likely to be selected in the simulated collective condition than in the collective condition. Additionally, Black participants and Democrats selected Black applicants at higher rates than White participants and Republicans. The third paper explores whether increasing clarity in reward allocation criteria can reduce gender inequality in bonuses and promotions. Using a survey experiment with participants who have management experience (? = 1,626; 8,130 bonus and 1,626 promotion decisions), I found that the ambiguous condition amplified disparities: women, but not men, allocated higher bonuses to women (by 7.69%) and were 5.6 percentage points more likely (equal to 28% of the expected baseline rate) than men to promote a woman. There was insufficient evidence of similar disparities in the clear condition. Combined, these three papers demonstrate how organizational practices can shape inequality in attracting, hiring, and rewarding employees, and how these effects vary across demographic groups.

Through state intervention, citizens of the United Arab Emirates have experienced stark versions of global trends toward rising women’s employment, shared breadwinning, and economic precarity. I call this postcolonial, authoritarian state effort to expand women’s opportunities while creating a modern national reputation and strong economy state-building feminism. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 64 Emirati women and men and 15 follow-up interviews, I demonstrate that to see women’s rising employment rates as clear evidence of their empowerment misses women’s more ambivalent, unequal experiences. Across class lines, citizens feel disenchanted by economic shifts that restrict men’s provision, necessitating multiple household incomes while precluding Emiratis from forging egalitarian work and family lives. I trace how families use daughters’, sisters’, and wives’ wages to meet basic household needs but obscure their provision to preserve men’s dignity, maintaining unequal domestic gender relations despite women increasingly working for pay. I find that men, despite feeling frustrated and emasculated by the challenge of breadwinning while the state supports women’s entrance into the workforce, transform their emotions into unaffected pride, not backlash; they enact a modern masculinity institutionally supported by state-building feminism. I also demonstrate how the elite women at the forefront of state-building feminism’s display work leverage the state to manage family challenges to their career advancement but will require institutional support to respond to organizational cultures hostile to their inclusion, notably in the expatriate-dominated private sector. Finally, I show how young Emiratis dream of sharing the responsibility to provide and caretake with their future spouses but through institutional and social experiences come to understand those aspirations as implausible futures; this gives way to a stratified liminality, as those with the class resources to pursue graduate degrees and professional careers react by postponing family formation, forging elite identities predicated on not yet having relinquished egalitarian ideals. This research provides insight into the relational and emotional impacts of gender and labor policy amid economic shifts, bridging gender and family studies with economic and political sociology. While challenging Orientalist assumptions, it advances understanding of how gender relations interact with citizenship and class inequality in the Arab Gulf.

This dissertation investigates why and how development becomes predatory in India’s poorest places – and what marginalized people do when it is their own development under threat. Drawing on 4 years of ethnographic fieldwork and over 40 interviews conducted in India’s Araku Valley between 2012 and 2023, I analyze institutional arrangements that appear to offer pathways to social inclusion for marginalized groups but ultimately reproduce and entrench systemic inequalities. I theorize the concept of “predatory development” to describe these arrangements, referring to social arrangements that aim to include marginalized people in development initiatives, while ensuring these initiatives do not fundamentally disrupt the existing social order through perverse institutional designs. In Araku Valley, the expansion of universal education was enthusiastically embraced by historically excluded Adivasi communities, who viewed formal schooling as the key to overcoming social disadvantage. Despite this engagement, significant employment opportunities remained inaccessible to them, highlighting a core logic of predatory development where maintaining entrenched social structures, like caste, overrides inclusive goals. I argue that the extension of education in Araku Valley, rather than serving as a pathway to empowerment, becomes entangled with enduring caste structures and neoliberal economic policies, resulting in a ‘glass door’ phenomenon that channels Adivasi aspirations into precarious forms of labor and limited social recognition. This dissertation further investigates how the cultural meanings of education are shaped and contested in the context of predatory development, highlighting the ways in which Adivasi youth deploy education not only as a means of economic advancement but also as a tool for reclaiming dignity, agency, and self-worth. Sociologically, this research contributes by: 1) Theorizing “predatory development” as a mechanism functioning through caste hierarchies in India, analogous to predatory inclusion via racial hierarchies in other contexts. 2) Demonstrating ethnographically how caste, as a system dividing laborers and controlling knowledge, shapes the devaluation of educational credentials for lower-caste groups even amidst universal access. 3) Highlighting the complex interplay of caste, development, and agency, showing how Adivasi youth navigate and challenge predatory systems by strategically using education to contest ontological categories, redefine social identities, and pursue alternative pathways to dignity and self-determination.

How do urban high schools prepare students for college, careers, and adult success? Drawing on114 in-depth interviews with students and educators across five public high schools in Philadelphia, I find the answer depends on the social composition of their student bodies. Selective schools, which are characterized by cultivated racial and socioeconomic diversity, channel postsecondary resources towards college readiness and organize the minds of students around long-term goals. Open access schools, which serve communities of concentrated disadvantage, try to accelerate students’ routes to upward mobility by exposing them to potential careers and presenting them with flexible, customizable pathways to the workforce that emphasize technical over academic training. I argue that school-based influences matter not only for whether first- generation, low-income (FGLI) students pursue college, but also for how they plan to engage higher education. The between-school variation that persists in Philadelphia and many similar urban districts is an underappreciated engine of educational stratification and an artifact of failed desegregation efforts that reshuffled but never dismantled the city’s two-tiered public system. My findings explain how social inequality contributes to educational disparities, as schools define their missions and interpret their obligations differently depending on the backgrounds of the students they serve. In so doing, they point to the limitations of schooling as an economic mobility strategy and equalizing force in society.

This dissertation investigates the relationship between school choice systems, educational inequality, and institutional legitimacy, advancing our understanding of how educational policies and structures contribute to social stratification. Across three empirical studies, I explore the heterogeneity of students’ school choices, interrogate the material benefits of elite schools, and provide insights into how school admissions policies shape perceptions of fairness and inequality. In the first chapter, I focus on understanding the heterogeneity among students in the school choice process. I use computational techniques on student-level application data to identify distinct clusters of school choosers based on their ranked school choices. This inductive approach reveals several categories of student choices, reflecting complex interactions between preferences, constraints, and tradeoffs that students and families make when they choose schools. My findings suggest that different groups of students place varying emphasis on distance, selectivity, curricular foci, and safety.
The second chapter critically examines the widely held belief that attending elite, selective schools universally benefits all students. More selective schools do not necessarily provide more opportunities for advanced coursework. I use a regression-discontinuity design to identify the causal effect of attending a more selective high school on advanced math course-taking. In some cases, internal stratification processes within these schools can create barriers to advanced course-taking, even for students with high academic achievement. In chapter three, I conduct a survey experiment to examine how different school admissions policies influence individuals' perceptions of fairness and their attitudes toward inequality. Using a national sample of U.S. adults, I found that exposure to meritocratic admissions systems and choice-based systems increased perceptions of fairness and deservingness, even after keeping constant the level of underlying educational inequality. My results suggest that meritocratic and choice-based frameworks can legitimize social hierarchies, even when they result in the same level of inequality as other admissions regimes. Overall, my dissertation offers new insights into how educational systems reproduce or obscure inequality and underscores the need for policies that address not just access to opportunity, but also how those opportunities are allocated and perceived.

This dissertation consists of three articles focused on the experiences of outsourced workers making sense of their roles in increasingly automated environments. Workers used to “make out” the rules of the factory floor, but now firms are downsizing and encouraging workers to be independently entrepreneurial and market savvy without the safety net of a firm. The alternative workforce grew and diversified, especially post-2008 recession. New technology at work further accelerated changes to the ways firms organized their workforce and where organizations could offload risk and overhead onto the emerging “entrepreneurial” workforce. I focused on high-skill freelancers in and around New York City’s labor markets in one article and platform gig workers across the United States in the other two. My data consisted of interviews with 138 freelancer workers across 5 industries between 2018 – 2020, 10+ years of ethnographic fieldwork as a freelancer, and 41 interviews with gig workers in August – September 2019. The growth of the alternative labor market in the U.S., especially post Covid-19, means the work experiences I describe are increasingly familiar to American workers. The first article focuses on the roles platform gig workers played as they navigated their new automated middle managers and the boundaries of a firm. The second article describes the experience of high-skill freelancers making sense of their role as outsourced workers first, small businesses second. The popular media and academic landscape offered these workers models to help refine their business thinking, manage uncertainty, and use resources effectively. However, freelancers quickly discovered these models were designed for bureaucracies, which exist without the limits of the human body. The final essay is a method article on publishing interview data as a snapshot of evolving technology and workers’ experiences of it in a public repository. These essays contribute to our understanding of the growing alternative workforce and the future of work.

This dissertation investigates a selection of unanswered questions from the sociology of science’s heroic age and issues of contemporary interest to scholars of science. Chapter 1 investigates the hard-soft distinction. We first reevaluate and extend the Mertonian theory of ‘hardness’ as scientific consensus with new theoretical advances from ethnographic and quantitative studies of science and methodological advances in data processing. We then present 14 metrics that collectively summarize field-level publication, citation, communication, and collaboration norms, and we use these metrics to compare 9 fields of study to one another. We find that the hard-soft spectrum exists and mirrors popular and academic understandings of the hard-soft distinction. We suggest that theories of inter-field differences may enrich future work in science studies. Chapter 2 presents a methodological toolkit for investigating bias and inequality in the sciences using sociology as a test case. We create a metric for tracking bias in publication that we term the citation-adjusted publication premium, and we use it to show that the works of alumnae of prestigious sociology PhD programs are over-published but under-cited in sociology’s three top journals. We additionally find that sociology’s two house journals, the American Journal of Sociology and Social Forces, are biased in favor of PhD alumnae of the University of Chicago and the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill respectively. Both types of bias diminish over time except for the bias in favor of University of Chicago PhD alumnae in the American Journal of Sociology. Chapter 3 applies the methodological and theoretical techniques from Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 to investigate bias against Chinese American scientists in sociology, economics, chemistry, and physics. We find that male Chinese American scientists suffer from a citation penalty and must attain more citations than their non-Chinese male peers to attain equivalent positions where female Chinese American scientists instead enjoy a citation bonus relative to their non-Chinese female peers. Taken together, the three chapters of this dissertation form a research agenda for analyzing the intersection of field-level and national cultures across the sciences and for uncovering evidence of inequality and favoritism in any of science’s main institutions.

The Detroit area’s most prevalent non-bank financial services providers are not the check cashing outlets, payday lenders, pawnshops, and rent-to-own stores that receive the lion’s share of attention in the research literature. Rather, they are neighborhood convenience and liquor stores, known as "party stores," which in addition to purveying alcohol and related products, serve as neighborhood financial hubs. This dissertation combines urban ethnography with analysis of everyday finances to investigate how these economic activities unfold within the social fabric of neighborhoods, paying careful attention to the underlying social order and unspoken rules that make possible these potentially risky transactions. Drawing on relational capital accrued with store personnel, customers circumvent the information dragnets that might otherwise ensnare them, relegating them to predatory markets. As the system relies on personal relationships, emergent social orders, and businesses that provide a fuller range of services, the project presents a case that runs counter to the long-held axiom that the poor pay more.
The first chapter, "‘It’s a Who-You-Know Thing’: Interactional Fraud Prevention in Non-Bank Check Cashing" looks to how party store personnel reduce uncertainty in the form of fraud when cashing customers' checks. It highlights how soft information gleaned through presentations of self plays a pivotal role in decision-making, risk assessment, and fraud prevention. The second chapter, “Disposable Information: Informal Credit Networks and Urban Poverty" shows how relationships between customers and store personnel influence economic survival strategies, in this case helping facilitate resource exchange in an interest free informal credit market. The third chapter, "Lottery Play as Meaningful Social Action," explores lottery participation among members of the urban poor throughout the temporal phases of play. It brings contemporary lottery play into sociological accounts of action, particularly adaptations or attempts at controlling fatefulness. Adaptations help explain how players’ affective states influence not only their decisions to play, but also how they play, and even go about collecting their winnings under increased state surveillance.

In so doing, this dissertation advances sociological understanding of how information flows and social interactions shape economic practices, revealing how neighborhood stores play a crucial role in bridging the gap between urban poor communities, mainstream financial institutions, and governmental bodies. Combining ethnographic insights with theoretical perspectives, it offers a comprehensive analysis of a relatively overlooked financial system, highlighting its significance in the lives of the urban poor and suggesting avenues for future research and policy on economic behavior and financial inclusion.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews, this study explores the experiences of people coming home from prison in Pennsylvania. The dissertation includes three standalone articles. The first chapter identifies an overlooked reason why people on parole engage in rule-breaking and withdraw from otherwise supportive resources. I leverage insights from organizational sociologists and poverty scholars to show how parole’s inattention to socioemotional dynamics and individuals’ efforts at dignity maintenance impede reentry and risk reincarceration. Moving beyond a focus on material hardship, network dynamics, and carceral governance, this chapter broadens our understanding of failure in criminal-legal supervision and the promise of reform. The second chapter investigates how the rise of “lived experience,” typically understood as exposure to adversity in mainstream circles, is shaping reentry work. Using a symbolic interactionist approach, I trace how lived experience is understood as a biographical credential that facilitates bureaucratic achievements and permits social validation within our credential society. While the credentialing of lived experience has reinvented stigma in some respects, it runs the risk of freezing identity and exacerbating the burdens of already marginalized people. The third chapter examines people’s experiences navigating and working within the broader reentry landscape. I analyze how people respond to conditions of institutional fragmentation and attempt to construct a safety net. I document how their strategies secure concrete gains and sometimes falter in a complicated criminal-legal bureaucracy. Accordingly, this chapter sheds new empirical light on how organizations play a central role in people’s post-prison trajectories. Together, these three chapters make contributions to sociology, criminology, and social policy.

This dissertation draws upon political economic theories that view cities as owned spaces wherein social processes reflect profit making and class conflict, empirical work on which has often been stymied by a lack of data. The first chapter details a computational methodology for tracing through landowners’ shell companies, elaborating their corporate structures and operationalizing a range of characteristics to describe them. Methods for solving this “LLC problem,” and piercing the corporate veil have been an active area of methodological research in recent years, and this chapter presents the most sophisticated and scalable approach yet developed. I draw on these data in the subsequent two chapters, showing the range of analyses that it opens, including aggregate estimates of landlord composition and detailed analyses of individuals’ holdings. In the second chapter, I contribute to the body of scholarship showing how racialized housing markets have created racial wealth disparities, arguing that we have underestimated the full import of these processes by not considering the racialized ownership of rental housing. I show that in majority-Black neighborhoods, more than twice as many rental units are owned by White as by Black landlords and that this ownership gap has only increased in recent years. This results in nearly three billion more dollars being paid every year from Black tenants to White owners than would be expected in the absence of this racist history. The third chapter identifies and analyzes the characteristics of the top evictors in three metro areas, showing that even over a seventeen year period filings are highly concentrated among a small number of landlords, at geographic levels ranging from Census tracts to entire metro areas. I present this as a novel, “investigative” approach to studying social problems, which identifies and analyzes the small number of elite actors who disproportionately contribute to and benefit from poverty, in contrast to conventional approaches that frequently focus on the aggregate characteristics of disadvantaged individuals. These chapters make distinct contributions to (1) computational methodologies, (2) the sociological study of racial inequality, and (3) our understanding of the eviction crisis and urban social problems more broadly.

Social Security is a bedrock anti-poverty program that provides crucial support to millions of low-income, older Americans. Despite its importance, Social Security is not a universal entitlement but an insurance program that determines eligibility based on life-time earnings in the formal labor market. In recent years, an increasing population of seniors have reached retirement age without qualifying for benefits. I argue the rise in ineligibility is an example of policy drift where Social Security has remained static while a range of socio-economic dislocations have undermined the ability of individuals to qualify. First, I estimate the consequences of incarceration for Social Security eligibility. I draw on a set of administrative data from the state of Wisconsin to evaluate the probability that formerly incarcerated individuals qualify for Social Security using a blend of survival analysis and causal identification strategies. I find that one in four individuals who experienced incarceration will not qualify for Social Security and there are substantial racial disparities in this risk. Second, I investigate a set of interconnected social dislocations that undermined the transition to adulthood for many young urban women. I rely on data from the NLSY-79 to estimate the probability of qualification based on a range of exposures using survival analyses. Coming of age amid high unemployment, childhood poverty, welfare receipt, and the presence of children are notable risk factors for exclusion. Third, I evaluate the probability that seniors without access to Social Security experience material hardships in their finances, nutrition, health care, and housing. I analyze data from the Health and Retirement Study to compare senior’s sources of retirement income to their reported experiences of hardships. I find seniors without Social Security are much more likely to experience hardship across a range of domains, individually and simultaneously. I synthesize these results into a portrait of Social Security’s emerging weakness in reaching America’s most vulnerable seniors.

This dissertation examines the role of horizontal stratification (qualitative differences within the same education level) in higher education for social stratification and inequality. Sociological studies long debated the role of educational expansion for social mobility, where it is assumed that increased access to higher education occurs more or less uniformly. However, the limited focus on the quantitative increase in the number of highly educated individuals may obscure another important mechanism, that is, the growth of institutional heterogeneity through the proliferation of lower-tier institutions. This study examines the case of social mobility, and two critically related outcomes – assortative mating and gender stratification.

This dissertation develops and applies innovative causal inference methods to investigate the causes, mechanisms, and consequences of intergenerational mobility within the United States. Chapter 1 redefines the concept of mobility effects, a traditional focus of social stratification research, by shifting attention from the individual to the societal level. It establishes a methodological framework for assessing the impact of macro-level social mobility, specifically examining how changes in social mobility influence societal outcome distributions. This approach is demonstrated through two analyses exploring the effects of social mobility on average fertility rates and income inequality in the United States. Chapter 2 explores the influence of labor market transformations on the mechanisms underlying intergenerational income transmission. Utilizing data from diverse sources and employing a novel causal decomposition technique, this chapter reveals a shift in intergenerational income transmission away from cognitive factors towards non-cognitive ones in recent decades in the United States. Chapter 3 evaluates the impact of parental college education on intergenerational mobility. While previous discussions have primarily centered on the college attainment of children, this study redirects attention to the educational backgrounds of parents. The research demonstrates that children of college-educated parents experience significantly greater mobility compared to those with non-college-educated parents. I assess the robustness of this pattern to confounding factors by evaluating a novel causal estimand. Collectively, this dissertation addresses longstanding puzzles in social mobility studies through the application of cutting-edge causal inference methodologies. These methodological advancements offer new insights on traditional research questions and theoretical perspectives.

The following essays focus on causal inference methods for answering questions related to the sociology of mental health and self-harm. They collectively help illustrate what I call an imperfectionist perspective on causal inference. On this view, we shift away from debating whether our causal estimators are biased and move toward carefully reasoning about the magnitude and direction of the bias. Chapter 2 (co-authored with Brandon Stewart) reviews instrumental variables (IV) analysis for causal inference and shows that an imperfectionist perspective calls into question the elevation of IV over selection-on-observables approaches. Chapter 3 applies an imperfectionist approach to studying suicide contagion with interrupted time series analysis. I provide evidence that fictional TV shows can produce imitation effects among certain subpopulations, showcasing a variety of tools to help us reason about the direction and magnitude of the bias in our treatment effect estimates. Chapter 4 analyzes a debate over the effects of digital technology use on adolescent well-being. This chapter demonstrates the limits of the imperfectionist approach: in some settings, multiple factors plausibly bias our estimates in different directions, making it difficult to reason about the bias and draw informative conclusions about the causal claims in question. By exploring this framework and its limits, this dissertation helps advance methodological practice and expand our knowledge about suicide and self-harm.

This three-paper dissertation argues that analytically distinct collections of elites are often connected through kin in sprawling upper-class family networks. Those connections play central roles in processes of elite change and persistence, and they are visible only with the systematic inclusion of women. Analyses are based on the first-ever full kinship network of an upper-class population in a U.S. city- Dallas, Texas from 1895-1945 (n = 12,282). In the first paper, I demonstrate that at least seventy percent of high society was related in a single web encompassing most of the city’s wealthy, powerful, and high-status people. The more deeply families connected to the web, the more likely they were to persist over time. I conclude that upper class populations are best understood not as collections of distinct dynasties that live or die with the success of sons, but as complex, durable family webs. The second paper tackles an enduring archetype of Texas wealth: the new money oilman. Midcentury Dallas elites consistently alleged that “new money” oil families replaced “old money” cotton families during the 1930s oil boom, but the data refute their claims: most cotton families persisted, and most oil families were born rich. I argue that perceptions of elite turnover reflected a shift in prototypicality, and regime change among the 1% of the 1%, rather than broader patterns of upper-class mobility. Conceptions of elites as ultra-wealthy individuals divorced from their relational contexts may similarly overemphasize change and underemphasize persistence.
The final paper uses probate data to tackle the gender of inheritance in upper-class Dallas. Surprisingly, Dallas elites bequeathed more wealth more often to female relatives. Less surprisingly, men tended to inherit forms of wealth that gave them control over family finances, and women tended to inherit forms that gave them status and security. Together, family wealth strategies aimed to ensure a continued upper-class lifestyle for all close kin, rather than simply preserving a patrilineal dynasty. And because the elite was so densely interrelated, most Dallas inherited wealth simply circulated within the large, white, extended upper-class family.

Long-acting reversible contraception (LARC) use has increased dramatically in recent years, with a nearly 5-fold increase between 2002 and 2012. One form of LARC, levonorgestrel intrauterine devices (IUDs), is quickly becoming the favored choice among health care providers across the U.S. and internationally. Many providers see IUDs as unequivocally beneficial devices, highlighting benefits such as a low side-effect profile due to local administration of hormones and high efficacy due to their long-acting design. Yet patients and reproductive justice activists raise counternarratives of IUDs as coercive and limiting patient autonomy. They underscore the fact that IUDs are more likely to be prescribed to low-income women and women of color and that many women report feeling pressured to select this method of contraception or to keep the device in when they no longer wish to use it. Through a multi-pronged, mixed-methods approach, including interviews with physicians and patients, ethnographic observations of digital and clinical settings, and primary document analysis, this project explores medical and lay narratives surrounding intrauterine devices (IUDs). Drawing on intersectional theory, this research analyzes the epistemic world of key groups of actors involved in the provision and consumption of intrauterine devices, including physicians, patients, and medical organizations. I delineate the epistemic logic of these groups and investigate what happens when these logics come into conflict, such as during clinical encounters between doctors and patients. I explore how broader power structures such as gender and race shape the resolution of these conflicts and the implications this has for women’s bodies.

This dissertation examines the encounter of technologists and traders in Kenya’s “Silicon Savannah,” one of Africa’s largest tech hubs. At this frontier of the platform economy, I document how a coalition of Kenyan and foreign technologists, buttressed by powerful frames of “data for development,” work to migrate interaction and exchange in informal fresh produce and fast-moving consumer goods markets onto digital platforms and how market communities respond to these efforts. In so doing, I elucidate how local practices of valuation and exchange, human-environment interaction, and the bonds of market community are molded in encounter with the global, and increasingly digital, economy. Drawing on 24 months of fieldwork and blending multi-sited ethnography, 112 interviews with farmers, traders, investors, field agents, and platform managers, original survey data, and analysis of large-scale platform log data, this dissertation develops three linked studies. First, I document in ethnographic detail how identity, interaction, and understandings of value along agricultural value chains are transformed as market governance is unbound from interpersonal networks and embedded in data-driven algorithmic systems— a process I call “making markets machine-readable.” While sociological studies typically analyze how the use of data produces the social order, this study examines how social and ecological systems are remade so as to produce and be governed with data. Second, I shift our attention downstream to show how retail platforms broker new relationships across a wide range of actors including global financiers, multinational distributors, and local traders. While this emerging network offers certain benefits to retailers, I show how imbalances in these relationships distribute benefits unevenly and often exclude small-scale women traders. Finally, while platform narratives frame Nairobi’s wholesale markets as chaotic, inefficient, and in need of reform, I reveal order in the chaos. I show how wholesale traders cultivate multiple, diverse, and negotiated relationships to help them manage the uncertainty endemic to small-scale agricultural value chains. Compared to strict platform discipline, it represents a different way of organizing socio-economic life— one that holds lessons as we grapple with climate change among other radical uncertainties sparked by rapid globalization and technological change.

This dissertation advances a theory of reference, and a theory of “group” cognition, regarding how the mind makes references to the world. It also articulates a concept learning mechanism for how the mind acquires conceptual representations that are “dual-factor” – that is, involve both meaning and reference. Both these theories of reference and of group cognition, and this articulation of a concept learning mechanism, are based on a reading of American pragmatist, Charles Sanders Peirce, as offering a theory of specialized cognition. This reading of Peirce on cognition maintains that we have two specialized cognitive faculties that collaborate in the elaboration of conceptual knowledge. I argue that while the first of these two specialized faculties corresponds to a contemporary literature in the cognitive sciences on “core” cognition, the latter is in keeping with work in the sociology of cognition on distributional, or topological, representations. The theory of reference that I advance, takes a Peircean specialized cognition reading of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s work on the bodily unitary system of dispositions called the “habitus”. Such a Peircean-Bourdieusian theory of reference, I argue, addresses core concerns in the philosophy of mind and language. Moreover, I make the case that this theory of reference doubles up as the description of a specialized cognitive learning mechanism embedded in a theory of “group” cognition (a cognitive theory of reference), that is distinct from (but integrated with) a theory of “core” cognition (a cognitive theory of meaning). I show that such a cognitive theory of “group” cognition acts as a second arm in the elaboration of a domain-general concept learning mechanism that offers an alternative to Quinian Bootstrapping– a domain-general learning mechanism in the contemporary cognitive sciences literature also drawing inspiration from pragmatism. I argue that my “Peircean Synthesis” concept learning mechanism addresses a potential weakness of Quinian Bootstrapping in its treatment of “wide” content, or reference. In this way, I make the case that Peircean Synthesis, and a Peircean specialized view of cognition, offer a bridge between the sociology of cognition and the cognitive sciences that stands to fundamentally change the relationship between the two disciplines.