I am cultural and historical sociologist of racism, colonialism, and cisheterosexism. In my current book project on the elite U.S. research professoriate, I investigate how historic racist and cissexist segregation is maintained through cultural processes of defining and justifying hireability from the 1860s to the present. In a second project on archives, I ask how people from marginalized gender, sexual, and faith backgrounds form anti/colonial, decolonial, and anti/casteist subjectivities through the collection of oral histories of queer and trans Sikhs in the U.S. and the creation of a public, oral history archive. While these are different empirical areas, what unifies my research is the focus on understanding how power and inclusion operate from "above" and "below", and how mundane actions can reveal the possibility of societal change in the United States.
I have been supported by the California Department of Social Services and Commission on Asian and Pacific Islander American Affairs, The Institute for Transformative Practice at Brown University, a fellowship at the Swearer Center, the Office of Institutional Equity and Diversity at Brown University, and the Nelson Center for Entrepreneurship. My additional research projects have been supported by the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America's Humanities Lab and the American Sociological Association's Fund for the Advancement of the Discipline. Some of my past project have considered how universities are sites for maintaining structural racism and colonialism, with a focus on university-neighborhood relations (mutual aid and libraries) and desegregating sociology. My research, in addition to peer-reviewed publications, has produced digital humanities projects (with Dr. Elena Shih), such as AMORStories, which is a digital oral history archive documenting the experiences of Providence organizers and residents who mobilized to create a mutual aid network in the face of the 2020 pandemic and in the absence of robust state support. |