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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 Americans 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 Russell Sage Foundation, the Rapoport Family Foundation, and the ASA (formerly NSF) DDRIG. |
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Dissertation: Email: carlo.sariego@yale.edu Website: www.carlosariego.com Research Areas: Gender and Sexuality, Race and Ethnicity, Sexualities, Political Sociology, Gender Studies Fields of Interest: Transgender Studies, Reproduction, Queer and Feminist theory, Migration, Nationalism, Queer of Color Critique Carlo received their Master’s degree from the Reproductive Sociology Research Group (ReproSoc) with distinction at the University of Cambridge in 2019. They are currently a Health Policy Research Scholar with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, an affiliate in the Yale Research Initiative on the Histories of Sexuality, a fellow with the Yale Ethnography Hub, and co-run the WGSS Colloquium and Graduate Policy Fellows Program at Yale. They have an article forthcoming in Signs and the edited volume Sperm/Health/Politics with NYU Press. Their work has been published in Social Science and Medicine and Population Studies. They are currently writing a dissertation on trans reproduction & gender-affirming care via the tools of speculation & desire. In their spare time, Carlo is a fiber artist and doll maker. |
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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 theory, methods, and the intersections of politics, media, and religion. Her research explores the ways in which people find joy in life, including how they overcome obstacles to do so. She has published in Cultural Sociology, Sociologica, and the American Journal of Cultural Sociology, as well as a forthcoming paper in 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. Her dissertation examines the religion/secular across three cases: Deion ‘Coach Prime’ Sanders’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. And in a co-authored paper (under review), she examines how performances of civil religion at the January 6th insurrection and the 2022 CrossFit Games reveal the need for scholars to look to the seemingly secular spaces, like the gym, where white Christian nationalism is nurtured.
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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: 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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