Class Keeping. My dissertation is about the relation between elite people and the elite professionals (like stylists, architects, designers, personal assistants, event planners, and estate managers) who help produce their lifestyles. I call the relation class keeping. I draw on diverse data to theorize the system of occupations that makes class keeping possible, analyze the work of class keeping, and explore the social psychological experience of class keeping. I argue that contemporary elites are in an ineliminable relationship with class keepers (and vice versa), such that neither elites nor class keepers can be fully understood absent their relationship with the other. I am drafting an article based on this work, “Class Keeping: The Linked Fates of Middle-Class Professionals and Elites.” Later, I will adapt the dissertation into a book.
Borrowing Class. Class experience mobility (CEM) is a form of temporary class mobility in which people temporarily access a class lifestyle that does not correspond to their class position, tasting another life before returning to their own. While often fleeting, CEM can augment our capacity for long-term class mobility, reshape our classed self-understandings, and commit us to the institutions that enable our temporary class elevation. An article based on this work, “Class Experience Mobility through Consumption, Work, and Relationships,” was recently published in Sociological Theory. An earlier version of this manuscript received Honorable Mention in the ASA Consumers and Consumption section’s student paper contest in 2023. I am expanding the article into a short, theory-driven book, Borrowing Class, which has been invited by The University of Chicago Press.
Workers and Customers. In “Workers and Their Foes: Customer Scapegoats in the Service Triad” (Socius, 2023), I seek to explain why some service workers blame their customers for frustrating working conditions. Drawing on theories of the interaction order and formal Simmelian sociology, I illuminate the formal and contextual conditions that shift blame for precarious work from employers to customers. The paper demonstrates how people’s experiences of domination matter for the reproduction of class relations. An earlier version of the manuscript won the Harry Braverman Paper Award from the Labor Division of SSSP in 2022.
Service Workers and COVID-19. I conducted more than forty interviews with service workers during the summer of 2020 to understand service workers’ experiences of the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic as it happened. In “Classed Burdens: Accessing Unemployment Insurance during the COVID-10 Pandemic“ (Sociological Science, 2024), I bring Bourdieu’s notion of the habitus to bear on the literature on administrative burden. I show how class-based differences in workers’ approaches to bureaucracy led to differences in workers’ experiences of seeking unemployment insurance benefits in the wake of job loss. “Classed Burdens” argues that the idea of the habitus is an essential but neglected tool for researchers who wish to fully capture people’s experiences of administrative burden. This research was funded in part by the Institute for Research on Poverty.
First-Generation College Students and Place. In “’Going Places’: First-Generation College Students Framing Higher Education“ (Sociological Forum, 2022), co-written (as first author) with Eric Grodsky and Lyn Macgregor, we draw on interviews with first-generation college students to show how they framed college in terms of place, how different place frames shaped students’ college choices and experiences, and how place became a proxy for students’ sense of belonging. The extent to which students’ place desires matched their choice of college shaped students’ sense of fit in college by determining students’ access to cultural and network resources. The paper uses these findings to explore implications for student outcomes and supporting first-generation students. The research was conducted as a part of a larger NSF-funded project on first-generation college students’ pathways.
The Sociology of Makeup. Is your mascara a beguiling tool of symbolic violence or a liberating aid to creative self-expression? In this book project, co-written with Mustafa Emirbayer, we examine the sociology of makeup with an intersectional and field-theoretic lens. Makeup is a rich sociological topic: it can tell us a great deal about how gender, class, race, ethnicity, and sexuality, among other principles of division, operate in contemporary life. In The Sociology of Makeup, we put forth a working sociological definition of makeup and trace important dynamics in its history. Exploring how makeup becomes a way of doing or performing one’s positionally in the social space, we discuss how makeup styles are constructed relationally against one another. Throughout, we are concerned with the question of makeup’s normative evaluation: to what extent (and from whose perspective) should makeup be seen as symbolic violence?