Research Statement
I am an interdisciplinary sociologist and higher education practitioner who advocates for a more public sociology. As a public sociologist I have the responsibility to disseminate knowledge, create awareness, and liberate communities. Having earned degrees in sociology, higher education administration, and psychology, I advocate for cross-disciplinary research to better understand unique social concepts. I have specialized and trained in a variety of methodological approaches including ethnography, autoethnography within institutional ethnographies, interviews, participant observations, and survey methods. I employ this training and specialization across my research projects and incorporate this expertise into the hands-on experiences I develop for the students I teach. Because ontology, epistemology, and methodology can transcend disciplinary boundaries, my research often incorporates and draws on theory and methods from sociology, anthropology, and education. My research has been influenced by my experiences working in higher education as an LGBT Resource Center Director where I work with queer and trans students who sought to positively influence the university community.
Currently, I apply sociological theory and methods to the more practical student affairs literature to improve the status of queer students, faculty, and staff of color at colleges and universities. My critical research has focused on the application of sociological methods, such as abductive institutional ethnography to: interrogate the experiences of queer and trans students, especially students of color, in higher education; policies for and about queer and trans people in higher education; and cultural taxation and cultural subsidy as experienced by queer professionals of color in higher education.
It is not happenstance that my research interests and projects have developed along this trajectory. As an undergraduate student, and later as a student affairs professional, I recognized the dialectical balance between resistance and neoliberalism that co-existed in programs and spaces created for queer students. These theoretical insights shaped my dissertation research; a national in-depth interview study of 41 QT resource professionals working within the context of higher education. On a structural level, there is (and was) a proliferation of ‘queer resources’ at the same time that colleges and universities were fostering practices and policies which systematically disenfranchised queer students. On an interactional level, the same spaces which promote ‘equity and inclusion’ for queer students, have not effectively incorporated or included queer students of color. My research infuses education and sociological literatures at the intersections of gender, race and sexuality, to imagine spaces that proliferate the voices of marginalized queer and trans students in higher education.
My interview research with Black Queer Higher Education Professionals is informed by critical race theory and centers the notion of cultural taxation in the academy (Padilla 1994). Cultural taxation describes the labor that faculty of color are expected to do that (1) is not a part of their job description, (2) is not compensated, and (3) does not count towards tenure and promotion (Padilla 1994). Often this looks like being asked to represent a certain population, or host ‘diversity, inclusion, and cultural competency’ trainings. Extending this framework to student affairs professionals, my study finds that Black and Queer higher education professionals experience cultural taxation at the intersections of their identity even when they don’t feel qualified to do the labor they are asked to do. I introduce the concept ‘cultural subsidy’ to frame the material outcomes afforded to those who are not expected to foster cultural competencies within higher education. Importantly, these experiences may also be extended to queer and trans students of color, a theme that I am interrogating in my dissertation research.
I have previously worked on the NSF grant funded PathTech projects. Through these projects we employed a mixed-methods life-course approach to understanding the pathways within, through and beyond advanced technology and engineering (ATE) programs at community and technical colleges across the United States. As a member of the research team, we received survey responses from more than 3,000 students in our first wave of data collection and have interviewed approximately 100 participants to identify their experiences within their programs, and how their lives have changed since attending their programs. This research is significant because it has helped to nuance the discussion about pathways for community college students and suggests that their unique lives have shaped their experiences before, during, and after their ATE programs. This research is indicative of the importance of bridging both disciplinary and epistemological divides, such that our research has helped technical programs better engage with and serve diverse student populations across the nation.
One challenge with doing interdisciplinary research is finding nuanced ways to infuse literatures from robust and dynamic fields. Particularly, the literature in higher education tends to focus on practice, while the literature in the sociology of education tends to emphasize the overly deterministic relationship between education and broader social systems. My ultimate goal is to bridge the disciplinary and epistemological gap between these fields. Situating research projects within and between these different literatures has led me to a more reflexive research process where critical sociological questions of meaning and processes can be infused into culturally competent ‘best practices’ in higher education.