Current PhD Students on the Job Market
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Dissertation: The Rise of Heterosexual Refusal? Gender Politics and Family Change in South Korea
Email: meera.choi@yale.edu
Research Areas: Gender, Sexuality, Social Movements, Popular Culture and Media, Political Sociology
Field of Interest: Gender Politics, Feminist and Queer Movements, Violence, Politics of Low Fertility, East Asia, Transnational and Decolonial Feminism Meera Choi is a sociology Ph.D. candidate at Yale University. Meera investigates how evolving gender dynamics and politics shape gendered and sexual identities, relationship formation, intimacies, and care work in South Korea, a social landscape marked by low fertility. As a feminist sociologist, she critically examines “the politics of lowest fertility”— the sensationalization of “lowest fertility rate” as a national crisis, while minimizing the impact of gender and sexual politics. In her dissertation, “The Rise of Heterosexual Refusal: Gender Politics and Family Change in South Korea,” she introduces “heterosexual refusal” as both a novel theoretical and analytical framework to understand demographic shift and relationship (non-)formation. She examines the impact of popular feminism, misogyny, and anti-feminist politics on heterosexual relationships, which has worldwide implications beyond the South Korean context.
Her research on the 4B Movement and heterosexual refusal has been featured in prominent media outlets, including The Atlantic, NPR News, CNN International, NPR Radio (The Brian Lehrer Show), and Sirius XM Radio (Mornings with Zerlina). Her work is supported by the Council of East Asian Studies at Yale University. She has received the Martin P. Levin Dissertation Award from the American Sociological Association’s Sexualities Section and an Honorable Mention for the Coser Dissertation Proposal Award from the Eastern Sociological Society. |
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Dissertation: Echos of Empire: State Formation in Algeria and Morocco Email: benjamin.kaplow@yale.edu Research Areas: Political Sociology, Environmental Sociology, Comparative-Historical Sociology Fields of Interest: Empire and Colonial Legacies; State Building; Postcolonial Transitions; Land Policy; Agriculture; Geospatial Methods; Society and Politics in the Middle East and North Africa Ben Kaplow is a sociology PhD candidate in Sociology at Yale University. His research spans political, environmental, and compartive sociology. His dissertation examines the causes driving independent Morocco’s replication of French colonial land policy and seeks to identify these policies’ implication for rural communities. His work uses diverse methodologies, with particular an emphasis on archival methods, micro-historical analysis, and geospatial approaches. Ben also has long standing interests in the study of new religious movements and the structure of religious communities. |
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Nick Kearns Dissertation: Relocating Urban Lives: Negotiating Urban Identity and Urban Culture Beyond the City Email: nkearns23@aya.yale.edu Research Areas: Ethnography, Criminology, Poverty and Social Inequality, Urban Sociology, Rural Sociology Nick Kearns earned his Ph.D. in Sociology from Yale University in 2023. In his dissertation, he wrote about Puerto Rican men who moved away from various cities in the northeast, relocating to a town in a rural area of Western Massachusetts. By looking closely at their experiences of economic marginality, unemployment, and the drug market, he showed how those in America’s underclass can be structurally driven into crime. Other topics included fatherhood in the context of poverty, romantic relationships across different locations, the negotiation of urban identities in a rural area, and the spread of urban culture to a rural area. While Nick searches for a position on the academic job market, he continues to work toward the publication of his research. Adding the voices of African-American men and black men of Caribbean descent who had also relocated, as well as the voices of local white men who had grown up in his field site, he hopes to offer a fuller account of the contemporary rural drug market. The goals of his current writing in particular are: 1) to trace the development of the opioid epidemic in New England and 2) to examine the role that drug dealers from the city have played in facilitating its growth. |
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Dissertation: The Social and Symbolic Boundaries of U.S. National Membership Email: keitaro.okura@yale.edu Website: www.keitarookura.com Research Areas: Immigration; Race/Ethnicity; Education; Inequality; Culture; Political Sociology; Health Fields of Interest: Racial and National Boundaries; Americanness; Nationalism; Panethnicity Keitaro Okura is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology at Yale University. He studies social inequality and stratification with a substantive focus on immigration, race/ethnicity, and education. His research draws primarily from survey data and experiments. Keitaro’s research agenda examines social and symbolic boundaries as they relate to national and ethnoracial group membership in the United States. This work is driven by questions such as: How do insiders define the contours of their group identity - for example, how do American conceptualize what it means to be “truly American”? Which individuals are perceived to be more - or less - prototypical members of their social group? How do group boundaries and classifications inform inter-/intra-group tensions and dynamics, and what implications does this pose for social stratification and inequality? His papers have been published in peer-reviewed academic journals such as International Migration Review and Sociology of Education, and they have received awards from the American Sociological Association and the American Education Research Association. His research has been supported by the Russel Sage Foundation, the Rapoport Family Foundation, and the ASA (formerly NSF) DDRIG. |
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Dissertation: Performing Religion: Charisma, Enchantment, and the Sacred in the Post-Secular Age Email: anne.taylor@yale.edu Website: www.anneelizabethtaylor.com Research Areas: Culture, Theory, Religion, Media Politics Fields of Interest: Charisma, Travel, Social Performance, Spiritual-but-not-religious and secular religion, Methods, Media, Popular Culture, Sport Anne Taylor is a cultural sociologist focused on the intersections of religion, media, and politics in popular culture. Her research explores the ways in which people find joy in life, including how they overcome structural and symbolic obstacles to do so. She has published articles in Cultural Sociology, Sociologica, the American Journal of Cultural Sociology, and Material Religion. Her work theorizes cases that are confounding to, or made invisible by, traditional categorization - including the interpretive agency of those on the margins. Using social performance theory and a multi-method qualitative research design, Taylor’s dissertation examines three cases from popular culture that would traditionally be cosidered “secular” and reveals how each have a search for religious meaning deep inside of them: Deion ‘Coach Prime’ Sander’s takeover of the University of Colorado football team, group travel in Scotland with Rick Steves, and a podcast that reads Harry Potter as a sacred text. |
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Dissertation: The Stability of Singlehood? Romance and Intimate Relationships in the United States Email: hannah.tessler@yale.edu Website: www.hannah-tessler.com Research Areas: Race/Ethnicity, Gender, Sexuality, Education Fields of Interest: Intersectionality, Union formation, Life course, Transition to adulthood Hannah Tessler is a PhD candidate in Sociology at Yale University. Her research advances the sociology of race and ethnicity, sociology of gender, sociology of sexualities, sociology of family, and sociology of education. She has published multiple articles in peer-reviewed journals using both quantitative and qualitative research methods to examine the life course, including traditional markers in the transition to adulthood such as higher education and union formation. She has received funding from the NSF/ASA DDRIG for her dissertation research, which focuses on the experiences of single adults in the US. |
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Dissertation: “Precarious Lives in Crown Heights, Brooklyn: Dealing with Difference in a Gentrifying Neighborhood” Email: kayla.thomas@yale.edu Website: www.kaylakarylthomas.com Research Areas: Race & Ethnicity; Urban Sociology; Community Fields of Interest: US-based Immigrant communities; Identity construction and performance; Precarity; Gentrification Kayla Thomas is a Sociology PhD candidate at Yale University. Her research explores racial and ethnic identity formation, displacement, and precarity among immigrant communities in the United States. She is an interdisciplinary scholar, relying on mixed-methodologies to address questions of disparity and marginality. Her dissertation project, “Precarious Lives in Crown Heights, Brooklyn: Dealing with Difference in a Gentrifying Neighborhood,” utilizes ethnography, in-depth interviews, and document analysis to analyze the ways residents navigate various forms of economic and social vulnerability in an ever-changing socio-spatial landscape. |
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Dissertation: Transposing Privilege: Organizing an Afterschool Music Program Across Race and Class Email: jiwon.yun@yale.edu Website: www.jiwon-yun.com Research Areas: Racial and Ethnic Minorities; International Migration; Culture; Altruism, Morality, and Social Solidarity Fields of Interest: Organizational diversity; Intercultural interactions; Interracial solidarity; Nonprofit organizations Jiwon is interested in topics of race and ethnicity, migration, organizational diversity, and intercultural interactions. His projects are driven by this fundamental question: How do people work with each other across racial, ethnic, and cultural boundaries when they have little in common? To answer this question, he looks at various social arrangements that make different ideas, cultures and populations come into contact with each other. His current project explores how we can bring marginalized populations to sectors that have historically been inaccessible to them. It consists of an ethnography of a nonprofit organization that provides a tuition-free afterschool music program to overcome race- and class-based barriers to classical music. By looking at the obstacles that this organization faces, he seeks to uncover strategies that we can employ to combat structural barriers to access and, therefore, to organizational diversity. |
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