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.