The study of digital inequality has advanced our understanding of how existing socioeconomic disadvantage – such as by income, education, age, gender, and race – translates into disadvantage in the digital realm. Yet, our understanding of the relationships between the diffusion of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and broader processes...
In this dissertation, I combine quasi-experiments and computational tools with large-scale data in new ways to address questions that revolve around the Matthew Effect of status. My dissertation is a collection of four empirical papers on status at both the organizational and the individual levels. I employ two distinct empirical...
Automobile transportation is among the leading sources of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, and reducing vehicle miles traveled must be part of our climate change mitigation efforts. One recent trend that, if accelerated, could aid in this effort is the increase in bicycling for transportation in large US...
This dissertation examines the birth and rise of orthorexia nervosa, a proposed psychiatric diagnosis described as a pathological fixation with healthy eating. Orthorexia made its first public appearance in the pages of a popular magazine for yoga practitioners in 1997, and later in a self-help book on the subject. Despite...
In an 18-month ethnographic and interview-based study of Afghan Americans in the greater Bay Area, California, I explore the relationship of culture and religion amongst this refugee community. As a majority of refugees in the past decade have been Muslim, it is important to understand what their process of integration...
Viral Verses investigates the influence of social media publication on the relationship between poetry and community formation in southeastern Africa. As more artists in the global South reach wider audiences through online publication, poetic form has shifted to reflect social media’s aesthetic norms, embracing urgency, contemporaneity, and populism. Digital media...
“Speculative Justice” asks how U.S. terrorism cases with numerous indicators of entrapment prevail in federal court despite case law designed to prevent these very policing practices. Drawing on a combination of two case studies, an original archive of digital court filings from over 250 defendants, and a collection of over...
Standard-based accountability policies have profoundly shaped the landscape of public education in the United States. At the heart of these policies are standardized assessments, administered annually, which are used to evaluate schools and, at times, teachers. While always controversial, opposition to these policies increased following the widespread adoption of the...
The purpose of this multiple-case study was to examine the lived experiences of current collegiate music education majors, both students from under-represented minorities and their well-represented peers, with attention to racial/ethnic identity and social class. Dyads of current music education students at 8 separate colleges/universities—a student from an under-represented racial...
Bias pervades all stages of the American criminal justice system. The system is a human creation, run by fallible people who bring prejudices and biases to their work just like everyone else. The first step to ridding the system of those biases is to fully understand the way they manifest...