My research sits at the intersection of political sociology, social demography, and law and society studies. I am particularly interested in the institutional collection of data about different populations, the management of those populations through institutions of social control, and the health consequences of institutional contact.
My research combines computational methods that can identify population-level patterns and longitudinal trends with archival research that is designed to uncover decision-making processes at the organizational level.
Find my CV here.
Ongoing research projects
Algorithmic risk assessment in the U.S. child welfare system — In recent years, U.S. states and counties have begun to supplement caseworker-based assessments of child maltreatment risks with algorithmic risk assessment tools. My research examines the impact of this evaluative shift on patterns of system contact among a particularly vulnerable subset of children; and it highlights the significance of algorithmically generated state knowledge for racial inequalities and the governance of poverty.
Patterns of child welfare system contact and life-course outcomes — Together with Chris Wildeman and Garrett Baker, I examine multidimensional patterns of child maltreatment and contact with the U.S. child welfare system. We show how race, class , and place moderate exposure to different modes of child welfare governance and examine long-term consequences of CPS system contact among maltreated and fostered children.
Patterns and trajectories of criminal justice system contact — Together with Chris Wildeman and Robert Apel, I am working on a project to extend and expand our understanding of how jail vs. prison incarceration shapes long-term economic, health, and family outcomes in the era of mass incarceration. This research, which requires extensive updates to the data infrastructure of the National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth, is generously supported by the Russell Sage Foundation
Past and published work
Privacy at Large: Politics and Power in the Informational Age (Forthcoming at Columbia University Press; partially published in Law & Social Inquiry; and based on a dissertation that won the 2023 Theda Skocpol Award in Comparative-Historical Sociology) — In this project, I turn to the origins of the Informational Age (1870-1920) to explain the diffusion and institutionalization of privacy as a “limiting principle” of governance and a politically and legally salient correlate to the exercise of informational power. I show that the logic of privacy was applied to a gradually expanding set of social problems and began to affect the exercise of informational power and the functioning and organization of American society across many different domains: Privacy emerged as an important pillar of moral crusades against the perceived ills of modern life; it grew into an influential legal concept that has structured the relationship between American citizens and an expanding bureaucratic state for much of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; and it was incorporated into a system of what I call “governance by exception” that imposed limits on the informational reach of state officials but also continues to legitimate the disproportionate surveillance of minority populations and specific types of personal data in the name of infectious disease prevention or national security. My argument complicates claims about the ubiquity and totality of surveillant assemblages but also draws attention to the selectivity of privacy protections in the modern United States.
Racial Disparities During the 1918 Influenza Pandemic (Demography 2022) — During first half of the twentieth century, racial disparities in infectious disease mortality were staggeringly high — Black Americans were around three times as likely to die from infectious diseases as White Americans. There’s one exception: During the 1918 influenza pandemic, racial disparities in infectious disease mortality declined by around 74%. Why did this happen? My co-authors and I draw on a combination of historical newspaper records, digitized city-level death records, and historical census data to systematically test different hypotheses that might explain this surprising fact. We suggest that mortality patterns during public health emergencies are best understood as the interaction effect of population-specific histories of exposure with the virology of a particular virus.
Demobilization in a Decentralized Social Movement — Social movement scholars have focused increasing attention on “networked” social movements: decentralized forms of collective action that rely heavily on digital communication channels to mobilize, coordinate, and retain participants. Many such movements also have short life cycles, making the study of demobilization especially pertinent to theories of collective action in the twenty-first century. I reconstruct a time-series network for one such movement, using large datasets of email exchanges and meeting records, and show that the process of organizational decline had two distinct but previously undocumented phases: Movement contraction due to the loss of peripheral participants, followed by movement fragmentation due to a loss of organizational ties among central participants.