Graduate Students on the Job Market

Committee:
Greta Krippner (Co-chair)
Robert Manduca (Co-chair)
Charles Shipan
Fabian Pfeffer (Sociology)

I am a political and economic sociology and a social demographer. I use longitudinal methods to study how developments in political systems, employment relations, and household structures affect economic inequality and insecurity in the United States. In one set of projects I examine American state governments’ impact on economic inequality. State governments have become increasingly important to distributive politics since the mid-1990s, when partisan polarization caused gridlock in the federal government but concentrated the parties’ power in states. In a solo-authored paper that recently received a revise and resubmit decision from the Socio-Economic Review, I assess what political dynamics account for reductions of household inequality in liberal states. Most studies attribute these reductions to policies that improve workers’ bargaining power. I show they result instead from increases in labor force participation, especially among women, that likely result from policies that reduce work-family conflicts. In a separate paper in development, I assess the federal government’s role in producing inequality between state governments. The federal government supports state revenues, but I find it does not meaningfully target resources to poor state governments. Poorer states have therefore maintained higher levels of tax effort than middle- and high-income states in most years since the 1960s. I develop and test several hypotheses to explain why rich states are able to benefit more from federal support, relative to their need, than poor ones.

I examine workers’ experiences of employment loss in a second line of research. Employment relations theory describes workers’ experiences as becoming more volatile over the past several decades, but data issues have rendered empirical research on employment loss inconclusive. In a solo-authored paper currently under review, I make use of the short-term panel structure of the monthly Current Population Survey to construct a new measure of employment loss. Against expectations, I find the prevalence of employment loss has declined substantially since the late 1970s. I use time-series and decomposition methods to assess possible explanations. I find the decline is not the result of changes in the macroeconomy, multiple job-holding, or nonstandard employment. Instead, it has resulted largely from the aging and increased educational attainment of the labor force. These findings contribute to literature that argues the labor market has become more stagnant rather than volatile, benefitting incumbents but providing few opportunities to outsiders.

My website (chalembolton.org) contains my CV as well as more information on my research and teaching.

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 summary:
Daumler’s dissertation investigates large and meaningful questions about how the wealth and poverty dynamics of American families reinforce population-level inequalities. At its core, Daumler’s dissertation is motivated by the desire to understand how the temporality of life experiences contributes to new and existing forms of social stratification. It is not just what happens to you that matters, but when something occurs and how long it lasts. Daumler’s central argument is that differences in temporality—over the life course and across historical time—are fundamental in explaining how certain instances of inequality can become rigidly stratified. Each paper of the dissertation addresses a different facet of this theoretical argument, exploring how the temporal dynamics of families accumulate into generational inequalities.

In his first paper, Daumler investigates why an exposure to early-childhood disadvantage leads to worse socioeconomic outcomes than later-childhood disadvantage. The study's findings challenge the dominant explanation in the social sciences, which holds that the effects of disadvantage are uniquely harmful for young children at early stages of development. Instead, Daumler presents evidence for an alternate explanation, demonstrating that children who are exposed to poverty at younger ages tend to be the same children who experience poverty for a longer share of childhood. This phenomenon—which Daumler refers to as the cumulative dimension of timing—is evident in the case of poverty, but it can apply to any empirical context in which scholars find that timing differences are correlated with cumulative exposure. For this paper, Daumler was awarded the 2023 Robert D. Mare Graduate Student Paper Award from the ASA Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility section.

Extending his research on the historical and life-course dynamics of American families, Daumler's second dissertation paper establishes how the temporality of disadvantage reinforces racial/ethnic inequalities across generations. His findings identify an important and understudied component of the stratification process. The third dissertation paper examines the effects of historical shifts in marital timing on family wealth. Daumler argues that the deinstitutionalization of marriage contributed to reduced rates of wealth accumulation among recent cohorts. The final paper of Daumler's dissertation investigates how restructuring of the American economy, characterized by asset price inflation and wage stagnation, affected wealth dynamics for everyday American families.

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:
Sarah Burgard (Co-chair)
Alexandra Murphy (Co-chair)
Roi Livne
Celeste Watkins-Hayes

Erin’s empirical research spans the subfields of medical sociology, demography, sociology of the family, inequality, and gender. In her dissertation, she studies the demographic, institutional, and interpersonal foundations of modern caregiving. Across her research projects, she combines expertise in demographic and ethnographic methodological traditions to provide a fuller understanding of the complexities of an aging society.

Today’s caregiving for aging and disabled adults is uniquely complex, caught in the throes of increasingly intensive medical care, a move to push care back into the home, and an aging population with complex families. Erin’s research shows how these shifts are reshaping everyday life by crafting new social identities, forms of organizing family life, and axes of inequality. Her research highlights the demographic and institutional roots of caregiving: care demands are shaped by the demography of aging and fertility as well as the shifting organization of health care. In her first paper, published in Social Forces, she pushes the literature to consider how women’s caregiving burden is shaped not only by negotiations between partners within a household, but also by population-level distributions of caregiving demands. This paper received the Dorothy Thomas Best Graduate Student Paper Award from the PAA. She builds on these findings in her dissertation, which examines the broader social reorganization of care emerging with ongoing demographic and medical system changes. Erin completed a three-year ethnographic case study of caregiving after a stroke and combines this rich data with nationally-representative survey data on older adults with various health conditions. She shows how shifts in the health care system are creating more intensive forms of caregiving and describes the emerging tensions that are reorganizing family life and potentially creating a new caregiving life course phase. Erin’s research has received funding from the National Science Foundation, the Horowitz Foundation, and several institutes at the University of Michigan.

In addition to her research on caregiving, she has published at the intersection of health, aging, and gender, creatively combining demographic and qualitative methods. Her collaborative research based in the U.S. and South Africa has been published in Gender & Society, The American Journal of Epidemiology, and Population and Development Review.

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.

Committee:
Jason Owen-Smith (Chair)
Roi Livne
Renée Anspach
Greta Krippner
Mark Ackerman (School of Information)

Research Interests: Medical sociology, economic sociology, science and technology studies, mental health, morality, ethnography

CV

Website: miradvale.com

About:

Mira Vale studies how organizations and social institutions adapt in the face of technological change. Her research analyzes how the introduction of new technologies transforms professional authority, influences inequality, and provokes moral dilemmas.

Mira’s dissertation and book project examines the use of large-scale digitally sensed behavioral data for healthcare and research. Despite concerns about privacy, the marketization of personal data, and algorithmic bias, digital behavioral data remains largely unregulated. Mira’s dissertation draws on three years of ethnographic fieldwork and interviews to explore how digital health researchers tackle moral questions in the absence of clear social or legal prescriptions. Amidst calls for an “ethics of AI,” her dissertation offers an empirical investigation into how powerful social actors are already building the moral infrastructure for digital healthcare. This project contributes to scholarship on how moral ideas are adjudicated amidst uncertainty and how digital technology transforms expertise and affects social inequality.

Mira’s work has been published in Social Science & Medicine, Socius, and the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, among other venues. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), the American Sociological Association (ASA), and the Institute for Citizens & Scholars. She has received awards from three sections of the ASA.