Research Agenda
My research interrogates the emergence of racial formations and their subsequent vectors of racial power. As an ethnographer, my work deploys interviews, participant and non-participant observation, and archival methods. My projects investigate how race and racism emerge, are contested, and redeployed at varying scales to meet different political ends.
Trayvon Martin
On February 25th, 2012, I was at my first Eastern Sociological Society meeting. Excitedly, I attended sessions and roundtables getting a sense, for the first time, of how the discipline operated beyond my small liberal arts college. I desperately wanted to be a part of this world but was still anxiously waiting to hear back from PhD programs. The next morning, as I prepared to leave my home in Harlem to return to Dickinson College, I finally got the email extending admission to Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. Later that night, some 1000 miles away, 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, a Black boy making his way home with some snacks, would be shot by George Zimmerman, a neighborhood vigilante. Trayvon Martin’s death sparked the Black Lives Matter movement and would set the trajectory of some of my research foci.
In my 2017 Sociological Forum article, “Trayvon Revisited: Race, Fear, and Affect in the Death of Trayvon Martin,” one I co-authored with Mary Canitto-Coville and Dalia Rodriguez, I focus on the affective dimensions of race. Centering the work of Sara Ahmed, a cultural studies scholar not often engaged with in an empirical discipline like Sociology, we contended that fear opens up past histories of racist association such that we ought to think of Zimmerman’s fear of Martin as a product of the sedimentation of racial history that produces habituated and embodied orientations towards Black bodies. This complicates the question of intent while allowing us to convincingly make the case for the injustice of Martin’s killing. The narrow aperture of the legal realm reduces the question of intent to willful and individual decision making, and thus fails to consider the constitutive and animating force of history in how George Zimmerman came to interpolate Trayvon Martin as a threat. We made the case that it is precisely this history makes clear the racial valence of George Zimmerman’s violence independent of any conscious or willful racial animus.
The affective, habituated, and embodied dimensions of racism remain of immense interest to me given both their centrality to the reproduction of racial inequities and the empirical challenges they pose.
Leaning In
My dissertation is an ethnographic project titled Leaning In: Diversity Work and Campus Culture at a Quaker Prep School. It is an ethnographic project that analyzes the circulation of multiple, often competing, diversity discourses by a multitude of institutional actors—including Black and Latina student-activists, conservative students, and faculty and administrators—at Friends Prep, a Quaker boarding school in the United States. In analyzing the discursive life of diversity and the labor that subtends it, I render visible the power of institutional Whiteness, whose sedimented history makes overcoming institutional inertia, and catalyzing institutional change around diversity, equity, and inclusion a monumental challenge.
My dissertation illuminates the complexities of equity work, highlighting both how exhausting it is for workers—overwhelmingly women and girls of color—who are made marginalized insiders by virtue of their commitment to diversity work and their desire to change their school. Moreover, it illuminates how vulnerable diversity work is to the reification of an already established and marketed self-image. This institutional self-image is subtended by the myth of White Quaker exceptionalism, a series of circulating founding narratives that frames Friends Prep as having always been progressive and ahead of peer schools on questions of equity and access, particularly as they pertain to race, by virtue of its Quaker founding. However, the mythic exceptionalism centers the needs, wants, and proclivities of whites. They in turn arbitrate and delimit the scope of diversity initiatives and thus derail, stall, or otherwise coopts diversity work toward non-performative ends that prevent actualizing change.
Emerging Directions
Following my dissertation, there are two emerging projects I hope to pursue as the next phase of my research agenda.
The first, following the seminal work of Anthony Jack, asks how exactly the privileged poor become the privileged poor. There are a multitude of “community access organizations,” like A Better Chance, Prep for Prep, the Oliver Program, and Harlem Lacrosse, that recruit and prepare aspiring students of color to be competitive applicants at some the most prestigious independent schools in the US. Independent schools, weary of the optics of White homogeneity, cultivate these relationships to offset the labor of recruiting and retaining students of color. Despite their varying structures and philosophies, these community access organizations seek to suture the savage inequalities faced by Black and Latina families in struggling school districts by sending them to elite, opulently resourced schools where their collegiate aspirations—and the upward mobility promised therefrom—are all but guaranteed. And yet, the diversification of the elite does result in broader, accessible, or publicly ensured educational equity. There is a persistent tension between the immediate urgency of securing a good education for one’s child and the longer project of equalizing public education. I want to understand how these programs recruit students, how they rationalize their mission, how they make sense of educational inequities they proport to address, and the longitudinal experiences and outcomes of their students over the course of their independent school experiences. Like Leaning In, this is a project that will deploy semi-structured interviews and participant observation. It is a project that is made possible through contacts I made in my time at Friends Prep and Westtown School. I hope to e
I am also interested in understanding the emergence of new identity regimes at the dawn of the emerging Web 3.0. Terms like BIPOC and Latinx seemed to emerge overnight and find their way into mainstream racial discourse in everything from collegiate diversity statements to online blogs and mainstream news. Relatedly, terms previously provincial to the social sciences—intersectionality, systemic racism, unconscious bias—have entered the popular lexicon as Michelle Alexander, Robin DiAngelo, and Ibrahim Kendi become household names. Despite what many have come to see as a racial awakening, particularly in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, we have simultaneously seen the emergence of a regressive identitarian left whose politics are primarily negotiated online using the curatorial tools afforded by social media platforms like twitter and TikTok and whose primary tactics are “cancelling” individuals, policies, or initiatives deemed “problematic.” I am interested in the genealogical evolution of identity politics from the Combahee River Collective through the contemporary moment and investigating the visions of freedom articulated and foreclosed by identity regimes and social justice movements grounded in wounding, victimhood, and disciplinarity.