A dramatic recreation of my early days as a student.

I didn’t know much about sociology before I attended university.

In the first week of my first sociology class – a policy course taught by my undergraduate advisor, Dr. F. Kurt Cylke – my world was turned on its head when I realized there was an entire invisible social structure that shaped who we are and how we act. My brother is a physicist, but I like to tease him that he has the easier job, because people are so unpredictable that even the act of observation can change your results. He has since told me that this is exactly the same in physics.

I dove headfirst into research as an undergraduate, and I was lucky enough to receive grants to conduct my first content analysis project on American news coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict, an ethnography where I spent the summer embedded in the far-right activist group PEGIDA UK, and the first of many analyses of large survey datasets like the General Social Survey.

Not knowing very much about graduate schools, I applied to Cornell University and was very surprised to be accepted. My research interests have since shifted and broadened, and with the unwavering support, kindness, and generosity of my mentors and committee members Drs. Filiz Garip, Landon Schnabel, David Strang, and Barum Park, I am now deep in the study of how representation shapes inequality.

My research aims to answer two questions

Why does representation matter?

To those who are marginalized in our society, the value of representation is clear. I aim to formalize this process so social scientists can more easily understand and model it. To do this, I conducted exploratory content analysis of television reviews, to see how different review sites and authors cover different media. For example, do mainstream sites pick up on the race and gender dynamics between characters? Do they pay attention to the authenticity of a casting decision? How do they decide whether something is authentic?

How can we measure the impact of representation on inequality?

In this stream of research, I use conjoint survey experiments to measure how different audiences value different dimensions of representation, depending on their identities. Using survey experiments allows me to test very specific hypotheses across particular contexts. For example, I can ask survey respondents to answer questions about who they’d prefer to hire as employer, who they’d like to work for as an applicant, where they shop, and for whom they vote. This helps me understand how representation shapes inequality in very specific ways.

To dive deeper into the question from an ecological perspective, I use computational text analysis (such as supervised topic models) to test hypotheses on how representation works on an expanded corpus of television reviews. I combine these data with Nielsen’s Ad Intel viewership numbers, which allow me to analyze trends in how media are received in different markets.

In 2020, I started the Representation in Media project to conduct quantitative hand coding on a select corpus of television reviews. In the years since, I’ve been very lucky to work with an exceptionally talented group of undergraduate researchers whose interest and talent have shaped the development of this research. I regularly open the project to new researchers (no experience needed) – if you’re interested, please keep an eye on this link, which will be active during recruitment periods.

I’m very fortunate to have found a great number of collaborators in the social scientific community. Here are a few:

The Criminal Justice and Employment Initiative, led by Timothy McNutt, Jodi Anderson Jr., and Dr. Matthew Saleh. Along with Dr. Sadé Lindsay and Thomas Tee Jones, we investigate the implications of collateral consequences and help employers find workable solutions to help resolve the societal bias against system-impacted job seekers.
The New York Times Obituaries Project, led by Dr. David Strang. Along with Abdullah Shahid, Alec McGail, and Reid Ralston, we use a variety of content analysis methods to study how the NYT covers the lives of American and international leaders since its inception in 1851. This was also my first time working closely with undergraduate research assistants!
The Faculty Diversity Project, led by Dr. Steven Alvarado. We use multilevel quantitative data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System and original surveys and interviews to study shifts in faculty diversity in higher education over time.

Some very convincing evidence that a selection of unnamed but potentially internationally known brands care about diversity and other values.

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