PhDs on the Job Market

My research deals with political and economic sociology, public policy, public opinion, and political behavior. My dissertation—"Scarcity Politics: Budget Deficits, Public Debt, and Distributive Conflict"—explores the political economic and institutional dynamics that shape American public finance and fiscal policy, as well as what these politics mean for inequality, public attitudes and policy preferences, and inter-group conflict. I am also the co-principal investigator with Professor Gianpaolo Baiocchi of the Politial Participation Project at NYU’s Urban Democracy Lab, a collaborative, multi-site interview and ethnographic study of civic enagagement, political participation, and community organizing in New York City. My publications and working papers can be accessed at nedcrowley.com.

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I am a PhD Candidate in Sociology at New York University. My scholarship investigates the mechanisms by which racial oppression is created and reproduced using two distinct lines of inquiry. The first and primary approach is concerned with integrating the insight that race is spatially constituted into the study of these mechanisms. I do so by contextualizing the study of concepts like racial ideologies and community trust in order to accomplish three things: 1. Expand our empirical understanding of the phenomena by incorporating and centering spatial variation; 2. Sharpen our theoretical frameworks by delineating how context matters; and 3. Open new lines of inquiry based on novel empirical and theoretical insights. In my second line of work, I examine non-spatial mechanisms of racial inequality in critical sites like childbirth and identify interventions that disrupt them. 

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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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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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