I am a doctoral candidate in the Sociology Department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Three core questions animate my research: 1) how do local organizations and community groups change and, at times, resist change?; 2) how are social and symbolic boundaries constructed and deconstructed; and 3) how is the wider symbolic and cultural order re-mapped through conflict between community groups? My qualitative research, using ethnographic, interview, and visual methods, bridges sociologies of cities and communities, culture, and politics. My work on how communities work in concert and conflict with extralocal organizations and agencies has been published in Journal of Urban Affairs and International Journal of Urban and Regional Research.
What happens to a small town's collective sense of self and social order when successive waves of urban migrants move in? In my dissertation project, I examine how political culture shapes the social production of place and community life. Put simply, I ask: amidst deep division, spatial sorting, and renegotiation of our social order, how do we achieve community? Building on robust literatures that explore community change processes and politics as a system of meaning we use to organize our lives, I use ethnographic methods to investigate how community members in a small, gentrified city in New York’s Hudson Valley impute a political identity and culture on place, construct social and symbolic boundaries around political identity, and achieve community across difference through ‘recognition.‘ This research is generously supported by the UMass Graduate School and UMass Sociology Department.
I am the outgoing Coordinating Editor for the American Sociological Review. I am also a dedicated teacher and have constructed core and elective classes for a variety of teaching contexts. In 2019 and 2020, I was a finalist for the UMass Office of the Provost’s Distinguished Teaching Award, the highest teaching honor awarded on campus.
