The microfoundations of inclusion in civic institutions

My dissertation asks: how do people navigate institutional life together amid deep differences? The demographic and ideological pluralism that marks modern societies is unprecedented. We are encountering diverse contexts that pose challenges to us as individuals, as well as any hope of forging deep community and cultivating shared institutions. Existing work highlights some of the mechanisms that drive and challenge exclusion and polarization – from homophily, social influence, and stereotyping to intergroup contact and social differentiation. But these theories do not account for the moral frameworks that guide action. I argue that we need to bring tools from cultural sociology to bear on the question of how to build community across lines of difference.

To develop this approach, I focus on the case of how students with multiple minority identities navigate modern universities. I conducted a comparative ethnographic study of two groups: a diverse community of evangelical Christians at a secular, private university and a progressive nonprofit that serves underrepresented minorities at a prestigious, public university. Drawing on four years of fieldwork and 100 interviews, I identified and theorized three modal strategies of action that people deployed to navigate personal beliefs and identities pluralistic spaces: burrowing (embedding in one group and foregoing others), distancing (foregoing former groups, identities and/or beliefs), and bridging (belonging to multiple, oppositional groups which requires reckoning with new beliefs while maintaining long-held belief anchors). An article based on this analysis is under review.

In the second half of my dissertation, I shift from focusing on how individuals navigate diverse contexts to focusing on how identity-based groups navigate internal diversity among their members. I consider how both groups that I studied acted as burrowing spaces for their core members (Chapter 4) but were transformed into bridging spaces through an interactional process that I call playing up difference, where members bring non-shared identities and beliefs to the fore of group life (Chapter 5). An independent article based on Chapter 5 received an R&R from Sociological Theory and won the ASA Theory section’s Best Graduate Student Paper Award.

In former projects, my work has examined how universities themselves act as agents of inclusion and exclusion in society. In a paper published in American Sociological Review, my (then-student) colleagues and I examine the mechanisms underlying the stratification of higher education by gender and religious subculture. We find that girls raised by Jewish parents develop self-concepts that facilitate their efforts to attend highly selective universities, underscoring the habitus that such organizations require. Additionally, in a first-author paper in the Journal of Higher Education, we show how massively online open courses operate as ambiguous credentials, opening access to elite courses, but also risks as people strive to leverage such credentials in the labor market.