My research sits at the intersection of political sociology, social demography, and law and society studies.
I am interested in the institutional collection of data about different populations, the management of those populations through institutions of social control, and the consequences of institutional contact.
Published
Algorithmic Risk Scoring In The U.S. Child Welfare System
[Published in Sociological Science] U.S. states and counties have begun to supplement caseworker-based assessments of child maltreatment risks with algorithmic risk assessment tools. I examine the impact of this evaluative shift on patterns of system contact among a particularly vulnerable subset of children and highlight the significance of algorithmically generated state knowledge for racial inequalities and the governance of poverty.
The Limiting Principle: How Privacy Became a Public Issue
[Forthcoming at Columbia University Press; winner of the 2023 Theda Skocpol Award in Comparative-Historical Sociology; and partially published in Law & Social Inquiry] Focusing on the decades around the turn of the twentieth century, I explain how privacy evolved from a set of social norms related to family life and domestic space into a public issue: something that was not merely a personal concern but was deemed worthy of political attention, legislative intervention, and regulation, and had consequences for the structure and functioning of American society during the Information Age. My book draws attention to the role of social movements and intra-judicial competition in the governance of privacy, highlights the embedding of reactionary moral imaginaries and progressive political ideologies into the regulation of spatial and informational access, and identifies codified exceptions as a central aspect of legal regimes that make commitments to the privacy of citizens and consumers compatible with expansive surveillance systems.
Re-identification risk in national foster care datasets
[Published in Child Maltreatment] Data suppression in national AFCARS (Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System) datasets aims to protect the privacy of vulnerable children but also limits researchers’ ability to study smaller and rural communities. Using internal AFCARS data, I examine trade-offs between data access and re-identification risks across a wide range of potential data suppression scenarios.
Racial Disparities During the 1918 Influenza Pandemic
[Published in Demography] 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? Drawing on a combination of historical newspaper records, digitized city-level death records, and historical census data, 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.
Ongoing
Algorithmic risk scores at the bureaucratic frontline
With Maria Fitzpatrick and Chris Wildeman, I examine how frontline workers in Child Protective Services offices incorporate algorithmic measures of maltreatment risk into child welfare investigations.
Childhood vulnerabilities and life-course outcomes among US children
With Chris Wildeman and Garrett Baker, I examine joint patterns of childhood maltreatment and foster care placements. We show that the likelihood of entering foster care differs significantly by race, class, and place among maltreated children, and demonstrate that different patterns of childhood vulnerability are associated with unique disadvantages in health and education during adulthood.
Disaggregating the consequences of jail and prison incarceration
With Chris Wildeman, Robert Apel, and Alexandra Gibbons, I am conducting research 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.
The techno-politics of racialized data
The expansion of legibility often precipitates new forms of biopolitical regulation, and regulatory interventions can in turn affect how personal data are deployed in bureaucratic agencies and through the informational technologies of governance. In my next book project, which I will begin in early 2025, I focus on three historical junctures to investigate how the collection and techno-political utilization of race-specific data affects the governance of racial inclusion and exclusion: the introduction of racial identifiers on vital records in the 1920s, the collection of race-specific employment and educational enrollment data through the Current Population Survey and the U.S. Department of Education during the postwar civil rights era, and the use of racialized data and correlated proxy variables by the so-called “dataist state” of the twenty-first century.
By studying the politics of racialized data across shifting techno-political environments, my research will shed light on the race-making power of bureaucratic organizations in an age of de jure equality and amidst a growing reliance on actuarial tools.
Child welfare system contact among indigenous children
With Peter Fallesen, Chris Wildeman, Brielle Bryan, Alexander Roehrkasse, Alexandra Gibbons, and Mikkeline Munk Nielsen, I am working on several projects that aim to provide the first estimates of cumulative lifetime exposure to child welfare agencies in the United States and also estimate disparities in child welfare system contact between indigenous and non-indigenous populations across multiple countries with histories of settler colonialism.
Demobilization in a decentralized social movement
Social movement scholars have focused increasing attention on “networked” social movements: decentralized forms of collective action with relatively short organizational life-cycles. I reconstruct a time-series network for one such movement, using large datasets of email exchanges and meeting records, and show that 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.