Clark Bernier's research combines the longitudinal breadth of massive online
interaction data with the grounded depth of ethnographic methods to study the
dynamics of status, authority, and culture. His dissertation work focuses on
status and authority hierarchies in rapidly-changing organizations without
traditional bureaucratic structures. He has also published work using online
text corpora to extend sociological models of interaction to online settings.
Kalyani's research interests lie in cities, climate change, environmental risk, and inequality. Her dissertation project is an ethnographic study based in Mumbai and Miami that examines how vulnerable communities, local governments, and the real estate market make decisions about flooding based on their access to resources and information, their perception of risk, and their ties to place. Kalyani received her undergraduate degree in Sociology from Mount Holyoke College.
Rebecca is interested in health, law, and moral dimensions of public policy, investigated using experiments and administrative data. Current research focuses on how third-party actors shape organizations' rationing of resources--using the case of parents intervening in school districts to secure resources for their child with a disability--and demographic variation in perceptions of consent. At Princeton, she is affiliated with the Joint Degree Program in Social Policy and Office of Population Research.
Jessamin Birdsall in the joint degree program in Sociology in Social Policy. After receiving her B.A. in Sociology from Harvard (2010), Jessamin spent several years working in the international development sector, based in Delhi and in London. Her current research focuses on religious pluralism, identity formation, and political mobilization in the United States and United Kingdom.
Megan is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology and Social Policy. Her broad research interests include policing, neighborhood inequality, race, and social control. Her current project uses mixed methods to examine the impacts of low-level interactions between police officers and civilians. At Princeton, Megan is affiliated with the African American Studies Department and Prison Teaching Initiative. She earned her BA in Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley and worked at the Institute for Policy Studies and Mathematica Policy Research before coming to Princeton.
Gozde Guran is interested in economic valuation, pricing, and money, with a regional focus on the Middle East. Her areas of interest include economic sociology, historical sociology, and science and technology studies. Her dissertation research examines the conflict economy in Syria through the lens of cross-border money transfer networks (hawala). She holds an MA in Near Eastern Studies at New York University and a BA in Political Science from Bogazici University, Istanbul.
Liora O’Donnell Goldensher's research on contemporary natural birth and homebirth in the United States explores how knowledge, expertise, and ideas of the human and of freedom are constructed in lay knowledge communities. At Princeton, she is jointly enrolled in the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities and is affiliated with the programs in American Studies and Gender and Sexuality Studies, the Prison Teaching Initiative, and the McGraw Center. Liora worked as a labor and faith-based community organizer in Massachusetts and California before coming to Princeton.
Leah graduated from the University of Chicago with a BA in Anthropology in 2011. Before coming to Princeton in 2014 she worked as a researcher in the museum field, most recently on the staff of UC Berkeley’s Lawrence Hall of Science. In graduate school she works on the sociology of culture, economic sociology and organizational ethnography, with applications to cultural policy. Her specific interests include cultural organizations and philanthropy in the United States and Mexico.
Grace graduated from Wellesley College, where she studied political science and economics in 2012. Her senior thesis was a study of China’s Boss Christians – Christian entrepreneurs whose economic success has yielded them substantial autonomy – and their distinctive business practices, focusing on the integration of Confucian and Protestant influences on business practices and management. After working as a corps member in Baltimore with Teach for America, she came to Princeton where she has conducted research in the Center for the Study of Religion.
Kyle Chan received a B.A. in Economics from the University of Chicago and a master’s degree in Political Sociology from the London School of Economics. His research focuses on state capacity and the role of the state in development, particularly in the provision of public goods such as infrastructure. Currently, he is conducting fieldwork on China’s high-speed rail system, which is the largest in the world and was built in less than a decade.
