Graduate Students on the Job Market

Committee:

• Alexandra Killewald (co-chair)
• Fabian Pfeffer (co-chair)
• Deirdre Bloome
• Greta Krippner
• Davon Norris

More information:
Website
CV

About the candidate:
Davis Daumler is a sociologist who studies wealth, poverty, and families—in order to understand the process by which societies become economically and racially stratified. His research is embedded in several literatures, including: (1) stratification and social mobility; (2) economic sociology; (3) racial/ethnic inequality; and (4) demographic and quantitative methods.

Dissertation project:
Even though families are experiencing rising levels of economic insecurity and volatility across the life course, racial and economic inequalities have remained remarkably stable over time. Daumler's dissertation is motivated by a desire to understand how the temporality of life experiences contributes to social stratification. It is not just what happens to you that matters, but when something occurs and how long it lasts. The central argument of Daumler's project is that differences in temporality—over the life course and across historical time—are fundamental for explaining how year-to-year inequalities become rigidly stratified. Each paper of Daumler's dissertation addresses a different facet of this theoretical argument, by investigating the role of temporal dynamics in the contexts of intergenerational poverty and family wealth accumulation. The first chapter of Daumler's dissertation won the 2023 Robert D. Mare Graduate Student Paper Award from the ASA Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility section.

Committee:
Elizabeth Bruch (Chair)
Jeffrey Morenoff (Sociology & Public Policy)
Fabian Pfeffer (Sociology)
Robert Manduca (Sociology)
Joffre Swait (Erasmus School of Health Policy & Management)

I am a quantitative sociologist and demographer studying racial and economic inequality. I completed my PhD in Sociology from the University of Michigan in 2024 and I will begin a postdoctoral fellowship at the Brown University Population Studies and Training Center in August 2024.

My research agenda focuses on two major areas. First, I study how the structural link between schools and neighborhoods created by school district policies shapes racial segregation dynamics. In a first-authored paper which has received a revise and resubmit decision at the American Journal of Sociology, I propose and test a general theory of how schools and neighborhoods experience racial composition change, termed “coupled tipping.” My dissertation expands this work to trace the individual-, neighborhood-, and school district-level processes that shape these dynamics of change. Through an original stated choice survey experiment, I show how parents’ preferences for schools and neighborhoods are deeply intertwined and explore how these interrelated preferences will shape residential and school segregation based on parents’ decisions. This chapter has received a revise and resubmit decision at Social Forces. In the rest of my dissertation, I use a novel data set capturing school and neighborhood racial compositions across time, I examine how school district choice policies, urban geographies, and race shape the dynamics of school and neighborhood change.

My second research area focuses on poverty and material hardship. My sole-authored paper, published in Demography, captures how the unmet needs of poverty, or material hardship, harm women’s ability to consistently use reliable methods of contraception. In a co-authored working paper, I examine how the decline of unions has combined with deindustrialization and the rise of the service industry to increase workers’ risk of earning poverty-level wages.

My research has been supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, the National Institutes of Child Health and Human Development Graduate Fellowship, and the American Sociological Association/NSF Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant.

More information and my CV are available on my website: www.ellymfield.com

Committee:
Elizabeth Armstrong (Co-chair)
Deidre Bloome (Co-chair)
Fabian Pfeffer
Kevin Stange (Public Policy)
Gongjun Xu (Statistics)

Jane Furey is a PhD candidate in Public Policy and Sociology at the University of Michigan, where she is also pursuing a master’s degree in Statistics. Her research uses innovative quantitative methods and multiple data sources to explore how education attained at different stages in the life course reduces, expands, or maintains economic and racial inequality in the United States. Jane’s research has been supported by the NAEd/Spencer Dissertation Fellowship, the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, and a National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Predoctoral Traineeship.

Jane’s dissertation focuses on how educational upgrading – i.e., education attained after age 25 –reshapes inequality over the life course. Across three papers, she examines the extent to which educational upgrading reduces, expands, or maintains racial and economic inequality in the United States. In one paper, she analyzes educational upgrading in the context of racialized education careers. By developing a racialized education careers framework, Jane connects inequalities established at different points in the life course to show that educational upgrading largely maintains economic inequality between Black and White people in one cohort. Jane’s other two dissertation papers utilize an educational careers framework to examine the relationship between upgrading and educational inequality across several cohorts and dimensions of inequality. She uses newly collected life history data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) and the NLSY1979 and 1997 cohorts to examine how educational careers have shifted among individuals born from the 1930s through the 1980s. She also examines how educational inequalities by gender and by social class evolve over the life course across multiple cohorts.

In addition to her dissertation, Jane’s research agenda includes several collaborative and independent projects that examine education policy, racial inequality, and social mobility in the United States. Her research has been published in the American Sociological Review, Research on Social Stratification and Mobility, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis and the Journal for Research on Educational Effectiveness.

Committee:
Jaeeun Kim (Co-Chair)
Barbara Anderson (Co-Chair)
Erin Cech (Sociology)
Fatma Müge Göçek (Sociology)
Gayle Rubin (Anthropology)

Interest Areas: sexuality, sex/gender, migration, urban sociology
Methodologies: ethnographic and qualitative interview

Chelle Jones (they/them) studies gender and sexuality and is a doctoral candidate at the University of Michigan with certificates in LGBTQ Studies and in Teaching. Jones expects to graduate in April 2025. Jones’ research agenda focuses on how the intersection of gender and sexuality with other statuses such as national origin, class, and race influences the life trajectories of LGBTQ migrants in South Korea. Much of the literature on queer migration has attempted to isolate the effects of sexuality on migration in order to theorize how migration processes affect LGBTQ people. However, this approach obscures important insights offered by an intersectional perspective attentive to sexuality, gender, race, class, and national origin. Jones’ dissertation examines how trans, gender nonconforming, and lesbian, bisexual and queer women (LBTQ) skilled labor migrants in South Korea negotiate different social and policy regimes governing sexual minority and migrant’s rights, as they pursue employment and/or maintain mixed citizenship relationships abroad.

Jones shows that persistent cisheteronormativity in both migration and family reunification policies constrains LBTQ families unable to achieve full legal recognition even after they marry legally in one country. Jones argues that Korea proves to be a desirable destination for LBTQ migrants because its skilled labor recruitment policies make it accessible, whereas cisheteronormative and socioeconomic discrimination, or strict immigration limits make other desired destinations with better legal protections for LGBTQ people inaccessible. Compared to ‘LGBTQ-friendly’ destinations in the West, Korea’s comparatively low bar for ‘skilled’ labor migration enables college educated LBTQ people to stay together even without legal recognition and accumulate resources to settle in their desired destinations in the future.

Jones won Fulbright and other grants to spend 16 months studying South Korea’s queer communities. Jones has published in International Migration Review, the Journal of Lesbian Studies, and is under review at Gender and Society.

Committee:
Alexandra (Sasha) Killewald, University of Michigan (Sociology, Co-chair)
Lauren Duquette-Rury, Wayne State University (Sociology, Co-chair)
Alexandra Murphy, University of Michigan (Sociology)
Fabiana Silva, University of Michigan (Public Policy)
Fabian Pfeffer, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Müchen (Sociology)

I am a multi-method sociologist, and my research engages broadly with ethno-racial stratification, immigration, and urban/regional dynamics. My research interests lie on how these areas intersect with the experiences of Latino and Latino immigrants in the United States. My dissertation, Placing the American Dream: Latino geographic dispersion, socioeconomic well-being, and belonging across the American Landscape, is guided by the overarching question: how important is place for the socioeconomic well-being and incorporation of Latino immigrants?

My dissertation encompasses three projects. Using U.S. Census data, the first project focuses on the spatial dispersion for recently arrived Latinos across the United States and how immigrant destinations have changed over time. There are two contributions from this project. First, changes for recent Latino immigrant destinations not only vary across destination types, but also vary by Latino subgroups, suggesting new Latino diasporas than previously examined. Second, I find that the spatial dispersion of recent Latino immigrants has stalled since the 2008 recession and continued stalling at the start of rising anti-immigration legislations across the United States in 2010. My second project uses U.S. Census data and state legislation data to investigates how restrictive immigration legislations across the United States affects the socioeconomic well-being of Latino immigrants. Specifically, I demonstrate how sub-national policies, especially across the U.S. South, has complex effects on the socioeconomic well-being of Latinos, with effects varying by demographic characteristics such as citizenship status, country of origin, and years spent in the country. My third project interrogates how Latino immigrants establish a sense of belonging in geographies with historically Black and White majority populations in Southeastern Tennessee. Using interview and observational data, I argue that placemaking, ethno-racial identity formation, and engagement with local institutions are interwoven in the degree to which Latino immigrants form a sense of belonging in their communities.

My dissertation project has been funded internally by the University of Michigan and the Population Studies Center/National Institutes of Child Health and Human Development Graduate Fellowship, as well as the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, The Russell Sage Foundation, and The American Sociological Association/NSF Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant. More information on my ongoing work is available on my website: giovannifromantorres.com

Committee:

Sarah Burgard (Co-chair)
Luke Shaefer (Co-chair)
Natasha Pilkauskas
Scott Allard (University of Washington Evans School of Public Policy)

Research Interests: Sociology of poverty, sociology of inequality, human services programs, rural sociology, social determinants of health

Shoshana Shapiro researches poverty, inequality, and the social safety net as a National Poverty Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. Her National Poverty Fellowship placement is in the Office of Community Services (OCS) in the Administration for Children and Families. Shapiro’s research agenda focuses on the geography of poverty and access to the human services safety net. Using quantitative analysis of national administrative data, Shapiro finds that rural, Black, Hispanic, and Latino communities are intersectionally underserved by the nonprofit human services safety net after controlling for other possible covariates. Although the effect is explained by geographic factors, county-level poverty is also associated with lower rates of nonprofit human services expenditures. Another line of research uses a mixed-methods research design to gather information about possible human services deserts. This project will create the first systematic study of human services deserts. Shapiro’s dissertation findings show that the distribution of nonprofit human services is largely wrong: nationally, services to address poverty are going disproportionately to the wealthiest counties and regions, while communities of color, rural counties, and poor counties are underserved. This research on the sociology of inequality illustrates how market-based social safety nets worsen macrospatial inequality.

A third line of research for Shapiro’s postdoctoral placement focuses on how OCS programs serve vulnerable populations, including Americans experiencing poverty, rural Americans, and Americans of color. This line of research applies her broader research agenda to federal antipoverty human services programs, including the Community Services Block Grant, which funds over 1000 Community Action Agencies nationwide. This research informs policy and programmatic decisions in the federal human services safety net.

Shapiro’s work has been published in Social Service Review, the American Journal of Public Health (with collaborators from the U-M Policies for Action Research Hub), and the Journal of Primary Care and Community Health (with collaborators from the U-M Center for Improving Patient and Population Health). She has received grants in support of this research from the Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy, Poverty Solutions at the University of Michigan, the National Science Foundation, and the Annie E. Casey Foundation.