PhDs on the Job Market

I am a PhD Candidate in Sociology at New York University and a Guggenheim Fellow. My dissertation, “Violence and Imaginaries of Security in Medellín, Colombia” examines the interactional mechanisms that mediated violence in an urban neighborhood. From 2012 to 2018, I followed dozens of men who were part of a narco-paramilitary-gang network that had battled insurgents in rural areas and zones of Medellín. As civil war waned, the men took on a new security role in their community, engaging in vigilante surveillance and violently punishing assailants who preyed on local residents. Forty-five months of ethnographic observations and 59 oral history interviews suggested that residents saw the men to augment, rather than supplant, the police, and that police used the men to manage the burdens of supplying security. My research shows how the community constructed both violent vigilantes and police officials as legitimate protectors and why this collective meaning-making gradually propelled the men to desist from using violence and establish a nonprofit organization, independent of punitive state interventions.

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Chantal Hailey is a PhD candidate and Ford Dissertation Fellow. Her research uses multiple methodologies—quantitative analysis, experiments, and interviews—to understand the experiences of low-income Black and Latino children in their residential and educational settings and how these social contexts affect social stratification patterns. Her dissertation, entitled Choosing Schools, Choosing Safety: The Role of School Safety in School Choice, uses the NYC High School Admissions Process to examine the relationship between families’ school choices, school and neighborhood safety, and school racial demographics. Chantal’s research also examines the effects of school suspensions and neighborhood policing on students’ educational and carceral outcomes. 

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Jessie's dissertation research uses administrative data to investigate the relationship between racial and socioeconomic neighborhood change and patterns of social control in New York City. Her broader research project focuses on patterns of inequality in urban environments and major institutions. She uses observational, experimental, and computational methods to explore how changes to institutional and ecological systems perpetuate patterns of race and class disparity. Her work explores the effects of structural changes on outcomes in informal organizations, like neighborhoods, and formal organizations such as the criminal justice system and institutions of higher education. Recent projects include a computational interrogation of the concept of critical mass for Affirmative Action, an analysis of patterns of adjudication in complaints made against police in Chicago, and an experimental investigation of court reporter mistranscription of African American English.

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My research interests include Political Sociology; Political Economy; Sociology of Development; Innovation Policy; and Comparative-Historical Methods. My work is motivated by a central puzzle: why are some societies able to generate economic development, while others are unable to do so? I use historical case study analysis to illuminate the political dynamics and state institutions that drive these large-scale economic processes, particularly the transition from traditional to innovation-based industry. Such transitions, I argue, are not the spontaneous result of market forces, but of deliberate state-led projects. My work sheds light on how a series of incentives - alongside a set of disciplining mechanisms - allow policymakers to nurture the rise of new industries.

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Michelle Esther O’Brien researches social movements, LGBTQ studies, and political economy. Her dissertation considers the role of class and political economy in shaping LGBTQ social movements in New York City since welfare austerity and financialization.

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Barum’s research interests include political sociology, social networks, social mobility, and computational/statistical methods. 

His dissertation engages in the question of social integration of small and large social collectivities. On the national level, he studies political polarization and integration in the contemporary US both in terms of political attitudes and network segregation; on the smaller scale, Barum’s dissertation analyzes how ambiguity in multiplex role relationships shape the integration of naturally occurring communities.

Besides his dissertation, Barum works on network approaches to study occupational mobility and developing models for the quantitative analysis of social phenomena.

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José G. Soto-Márquez is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology and an Urban Democracy Lab Doctoral Fellow at New York University. He researches and teaches on the topics of migration, race/ethnicity, gender, theory, cities, work, inequality, health, and the family.  His dissertation focuses on one of Europe’s so-called “lost generations” and draws on two years of ethnographic observations of and 135 in-depth interviews with young and high-skilled Spanish immigrants, who left Spain after the 2008 global financial crisis. His doctoral work explores Spanish immigrants’ divergent and gendered social mobility, assimilation/integration, and ethnoracial identification across New York City, Buenos Aires, and London. 

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