Xuan Nguyen | xnguyen3@wisc.edu

WISCER Fellow | Graduate Student Coordinator

Jane Ahn | jahn63@wisc.edu

WISCER Fellow | Graduate Student Coordinator

Elisa Avila | eavila3@wisc.edu |

Elisa Avila is a PhD candidate in sociology. Her primary research interests are on place, race, and urban change. Her current research examines the processes of place-based, racialized identity formation amidst rapid development in San Antonio, Texas. Elisa uses in-depth interviews, cognitive maps, and spatial data to build an understanding of how our environments, institutions, and regions shape community identities over time.  Her research takes a person centered approach to critically include people’s wisdom, perspectives, and experiences as they intersect with social processes and structures. Prior to this research, Elisa worked in nonprofit evaluation and in higher education as an experiential learning professional. 

Taylor Barrett | tsbarrett@wisc.edu | Twitter

Taylor Barrett (she/they) is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research interests lie at the intersection of economic sociology, culture, and labor studies. Taylor is interested in examining how individuals negotiate their relationship to the current economic system and embrace counter-hegemonic approaches to work and money.

She holds a B.A. in sociology and creating nonfiction writing from Northwestern University and a M.A. in the social sciences with a concentration in sociology from The University of Chicago.

Kristin Billings | kbillings2@wisc.edu

Kristen Billings (she/her/hers) is a PhD student in the Department of Community and Environmental Sociology. Her current research investigates the environmental impacts of militarism and situates resistance to U.S. military pollution and occupation within anti-imperial and abolitionist struggles. More broadly, her research interests include state violence, migrant justice, climate colonialism, and environmental narratives. Prior to starting graduate school, she worked as a communications associate for an immigration advocacy nonprofit in New York.

Alexis Econie | econie@wisc.edu | Twitter

Alexis Econie (she/her) is a PhD student of Sociology and Community & Environmental Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Alexis’ primary research interests are in environmental justice, green jobs, and precarious work. Her current research combines participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and spatial mapping tools to interrogate how the notion of ‘expendability’ is deployed and experienced in the workplace to reproduce social inequality for marginalized workers. Alexis’ research interests are informed by her upbringing in a post-industrial central-IL community driven by commercial agriculture and her experiences working in urban waste collection and as a rural factory day-laborer.

Erin Gaede | egaede@wisc.edu

Erin Gaede (she/her) is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with research interests in rural sociology, housing, poverty, race and ethnicity, and qualitative methods. Her current research uses ethnographic methods to examine the experience of housing insecurity in rural Wisconsin. Prior to academia, Erin worked in housing and homeless services in New York City, Miami, Florida, and the Bay Area of California.

Morgan Henson | mlhenson@wisc.edu

I am from Tacoma, Washington (just south of Seattle). I did my bachelors in history at Fordham University in New York City and my masters in Russian Studies and Global Policy at the University of Texas at Austin. In between my bachelor’s and master’s degrees, I lived and travelled around Russia and Eastern Europe learning Russian culture, language, and history as well as meeting ambassadors and military attachés in various post-Soviet countries. During this time abroad, and the subsequent times I lived in Eastern Europe, I became interested in identities and the social power one may have over another in different social contexts. Since then, I have been interested in different forms of domination and social hierarchy (race, gender, sexuality, religion, etc.) and the salience of certain hierarchies on a global scale; specifically, I am interested in the global hierarchy of whiteness and the cross-national institutional structures that make it so prominent, sustainable, and invisible to those who reap its benefits.

Jungmyung Kim | jungmyung.kim@wisc.edu

Jungmyung Kim is a PhD candidate of the Department of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His main research interest is in the sociology of organizations. For his dissertation, he revisits the concept of division of labor with the case of the police-social services nexus. He seeks to achieve this task by conducting an ethnography of a Midwestern law enforcement agency and related social service agencies and organizations. His research also regards mainly collaborative efforts to analyze relations between organizations and social lives of various kinds. As a part of this direction, he studies various topics such as the relationship between workplace paid leave policies and mothers’ labor market outcomes and the status competition among countries through the aesthetic prowess embedded in the automation of metro systems.

Ruo-Fan Liu | mikki.liu@wisc.edu | website

I am an ethnography researching higher education, social inequality, and cultural reproduction. My work has centered on how teens envision the future, how others assist them, and how they procure admissions advantages in a college-for-all era. I also conducted online, offline, and hybrid ethnography despite my primary work. My work has appeared in International Studies of Sociology of Education and is currently under review in Sociological Perspectives and Ethnography.

Emily O. Miller | eomiller2@wisc.edu

Emily is a doctoral candidate in Educational Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin – Madison with graduate minors in Sociology and Qualitative Research Methods in Education. Prior to pursuing her Ph.D., she was an elementary school educator, first as a second grade bilingual teacher in Brooklyn and then as a fourth grade teacher in Ithaca, New York. As a teacher, she participated in school and community groups engaged in antiracist activism and racial equity work. Informed by these experiences, Emily seeks to understand how white education stakeholders challenge and/or (re)produce racial inequities in K-12 schooling. Emily’s dissertation research, which is supported by the Michael W. Apple Fellowship, is a qualitative case study of school and community conversations about equity and inclusion in a predominantly white, small town. The project explores how tensions between different understandings of race shape equity and inclusion policies and practices in the school district.

Chiara Packard | cpackard@wisc.edu | website | Twitter

Chiara Packard is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at UW-Madison with research interests in the sociology of punishment, criminal justice, inequality, and discretion. Her research is unified by both an interest in how and why communities adopt different systems of punishment as well as a concern for how the criminal justice system impacts people’s lives. Her dissertation is an ethnographic study of prosecutorial discretion and decision-making, drawing on interviews, observations, archival evidence, and court administrative data from the District Attorney’s offices of two mid-sized midwestern counties. This project first explores generally the factors that shape prosecutors’ use of discretion and how prosecutors make sense of their decisions as they process criminal cases. Then, it focuses specifically on how prosecutors think about and construct the boundary between violent and nonviolent crimes in cases where prosecutors could choose to charge disorderly conduct or battery. Chiara is also engaged in several collaborative research projects including a survey study of the experiences of incarcerated individuals during the COVID-19 pandemic, an interview study on families’ experiences with fines, fees, and restitution in the juvenile justice system, and a quantitative analysis of the relationship between prison building and incarceration. In past work, published in Violence Against Women, she has explored how feminists in India contend with punitive approaches to gender-based violence in television news media. Chiara’s research is being generously supported by the Mellon-Wisconsin Fellowship and the UW-Madison Institute for Research on Poverty Fellowship.

Yue Qin | yqin56@wisc.edu

Yue Qin is a Ph.D. student in Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research interests include aging, life course, health disparities, family, work, social mobility, social change, and social policies. Currently, she has three major lines of inquiry. The first one focuses on how various factors such as social mobility, family relationships, labor unions, and public policies are associated with health disparities in mid and later life. Her second line of inquiry concentrates on the relationship between precarity and social inequality, including what justifies the existence of precarious work, how precarity and inequality are reproduced, and how precarious experiences shape sense of self-worth, social relationships, and attitudes toward social inequality. The third strand of research is about land dispossesion and politics in China, and she has published a Chinese book entitled “Distinctive Governance: A Comparative Case Study on Three Resettlement Programs” (Beijing: China Social Sciences Press) with Xiangyi Li and Rui Xie in 2022.

Sara Gia Trongone | trongone@wisc.edu

Sara is a doctoral student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research interests include social movements, sociology of labor, and political sociology. Sara is currently conducting a comparative analysis of union campaigns in Chicago in the aftermath of the 2008 recession.

Matthew J. Zinsli | zinsli@wisc.edu | website | Twitter

Matthew J. Zinsli is a PhD candidate in the Department of Community and Environmental Sociology and the International Development Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His research explores place-based food networks, rural development, and scientific discourses, expertise, and practices in international development projects.