FAS Theses and Dissertations

Children often reproduce their parents' economic (dis)advantages when they become adults, but through different pathways. Gender conditions these pathways, limiting women’s chances at maintaining or improving upon their economic conditions through the labor market, where they tend to earn less than men. Instead, women typically do so through the family, via the earnings of a (male) partner. Yet over the past half century, labor market shifts and changes to the economic foundations of the family have transformed how women and men attain their economic resources. This dissertation examines the implications of these transformations for the persistence of economic (dis)advantages across generations in the United States. Across three empirical chapters, I use data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to compare the gendered relationship between children’s economic resources during childhood and their income attainment in adulthood. In Chapter 2, I develop a framework to quantify the extent to which earnings can account for the intergenerational persistence of family incomes. This chapter reveals substantial shifts in the relationship between parents and their daughter’s positions in the distribution of economic resources: though this relationship remained stable across cohorts, it became increasingly intertwined with women’s personal earnings in later cohorts. Chapter 3 explores how personal earnings and partner earnings contribute to women’s and men’s upward economic mobility across the economic spectrum. I find that personal earnings make substantial contributions to women’s mobility outcomes, and partner earnings to men’s, but partner earnings contribute more to women’s and men’s economic mobility at the middle and top of the childhood income distribution: though those at the bottom stand to gain the most from partner earnings because the threshold for upward mobility is lower, they are less likely to be partnered and their partners less likely to be consistently employed. In Chapter 4, I examine how personal earnings and partner earnings contribute to women’s and men’s cumulative family incomes across the origin distribution. This chapter takes a life course approach to reveal how gender inequalities in the labor market interact with family processes to create long-run economic disparities within and across generations. I show that gender earnings differences widen with age but are offset within families by partner’s growing earnings: though women from advantaged origins accrue larger earnings gaps compared to men, they also accrue more partner earnings to make up for these differences. By contrast, families amplify intergenerational inequalities, such that women and men from advantaged origins accrue greater benefits from both their own and their partner’s growing earnings compared to their disadvantaged counterparts. These findings underscore that as women’s and men’s social and economic roles converge, labor market and family dynamics interact in new ways to stratify and equalize women and men’ life chances, changing the gendered landscape of economic opportunity.

The scholarship on elite education has focused on the processes through which elite education consecrates students as “the best and the brightest” and justifies elites’ privilege (Bourdieu 1979, 1996; Cookson 1985; Gaztambide-Fernandez 2009; Henriot-van Zanten 2015; Howard 2008; Khan 2011). This dissertation problematizes an understudied educational structure found in elite higher education in China: the valorization of exceptionalism (i.e., exceptional competence / intelligence) and the elevated status bestowed on top students. While elite institutions’ merit-legitimizing effect applies to anyone who has been associated with them, my use of the concept of exceptionalism specifies an elite higher education system where the construction of “exceptional competence / intelligence” distinguishes a select few students from the rest of the high-achieving student body and confers on them disproportionate rewards and recognition. This dissertation argues that such valorization of exceptionalism in elite higher education produces class and gender inequality.

Drawing on 133 in-depth interviews, conducted in Beijing in 2021 and 2022, with junior and senior students at the two most prestigious elite universities in China—Peking University (PKU) and Tsinghua University (THU), this study shows that, combined with peer-to-peer status competition during university, the construction of exceptionalism influences students’ self-assessment of competence and in turn influences their expected class position after graduation. Such an educational structure produces class inequality, as privileged students enjoy an advantage in crafting a narrative of excellence. It also produces gender inequality by activating the male-brilliance stereotype (Bian, Leslie, and Cimpian 2017; Leslie et al. 2015)—the idea that men possess innate intelligence while women are more hard working than innately talented in high-level work, leading women (especially the less privileged) to have lower self-assessment of competence.

This research contributes to the scholarship of comparative higher education, elite education, and comparative research on inequality by clarifying how merit is valorized in different educational systems and how educational institutions work in tandem with social categories such as class and gender to form social stratification in different societies (comparing the Chinese case with more well-documented Western elite education in the literature). I detail the rules of the game in China’s elite higher education and contribute to understanding the relationship between higher education and a society’s class cultures and gender relations (Stevens et al. 2008). This dissertation also contributes to unpacking the complicated gender dynamics in education. Women have been gaining an advantage over men in educational attainment and academic performance in middle-income and high-income countries (DiPrete and Buchmann 2013), but I show that elite higher education can disadvantage women when it promotes exceptionalism. Leveraging a very privileged slice of the college student population in China, this dissertation contributes to updating our understanding about higher education, class, and gender in China. Moving beyond popular discussions on test-oriented education, it shows how valorization of exceptionalism is important for understanding Chinese education. Taken as a whole, this dissertation challenges the construction of “exceptional competence” in education and deepens the ongoing conversations about the purpose of elite higher education.

How are individuals with Latin American origins sorting into—and reshaping—the U.S. ethnoracial structure, and what do these dynamics reveal about ethnoracial boundary change in an era of rapid demographic transformation? This dissertation examines how ethnoracial categories are constructed, contested, and made consequential among individuals with Latin American ancestry in the United States. Drawing on four nationally representative datasets, the dissertation conceptualizes race and ethnicity as multidimensional constructs operating across three key sites of race-making: the state, the family, and the self. Across these sites, I show that ethnoracial categories are not fixed or uniformly consequential, but instead emerge from the interactions of classification, categorization, identification, and lived experience. First, I demonstrate that state-imposed categories—here, census race classifications—often misalign with how individuals self-identify, challenging the assumption that official categories correspond to socially meaningful groups. Second, I examine ethnic attrition among individuals with Latin American ancestry, showing that exit from the Latino category is not driven by intermarriage alone, but by the interaction between intermarriage and racial categorization. This finding reveals that boundary crossing is conditional and stratified by racialization, rather than a diffuse process of assimilation. Third, I develop a multidimensional Latino symbolic-consequential ethnicity continuum to assess whether identification corresponds to meaningful shifts in lived experience across the population with Latin American ancestry. While individuals who attrit from the Latino category tend to exhibit highly attenuated ethnic attachments, most mixed-ancestry Latinos retain durable and consequential ties, indicating that ethnoracial mixing does not produce linear boundary erosion.

Taken together, these findings challenge dominant interpretations of Latino incorporation that treat categorical mobility as evidence of widespread boundary change. Instead, this dissertation demonstrates that diagnosing ethnoracial transformations depends on accounting for (mis)alignment between institutional classifications and everyday identifications, the racialized conditions under which boundary crossing occurs, and the extent to which identities continue to structure social life. By integrating theories of race-making and boundary work, this project advances a generalizable framework for evaluating when shifts in ethnoracial identification and/or categorization signal substantive changes in social boundaries—and when they do not.

This dissertation asks how transformations in the organization of work have shaped the course of American racial inequality. It tackles this question in three chapters. The first chapter traces the rise of racial and ethnic segregation by firm over the last fifty years. The second extends this analysis back to the early 20th century, and reveals a contrasting pattern: during this earlier era, more capital-intensive, higher-paying factories hired more black workers, but employed them in the lowest-rung jobs. The third chapter extends the outcome from pay inequality to exposure to unsafe work. It shows that black and Hispanic workers are over-represented in industries with higher injury and illness rates, but that the overall rates have dropped considerably since the 1990s.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is often framed as a powerful solution to society’s most pressing challenges. In critical domains such as healthcare, AI promises to enhance diagnostic accuracy, optimize clinical workflows, and expand access to care. Yet high-profile failures and persistent risks raise the question of how AI practitioners maintain momentum for uncertain and unproven technologies as solutions to healthcare problems. Drawing on a comparative ethnography of three research institutions, participant observation at other workshops, conferences, and professional events, interviews with clinical and technical experts, and analysis of media, policy, and scientific texts, I demonstrate how practitioners position AI as an ethical and legitimate healthcare response despite persistent limitations and uncertain impacts.

I argue that AI endures not because it is seen as the most effective healthcare intervention or because it has consistently produced clinical gains, but because practitioners moralize their work as serving a common good. I theorize moralization processes as a mechanism through which actors sustain momentum for technoscientific projects by presenting them as ethically grounded. Moralization refers to the social practices and institutional processes that align technological projects with ideals such as equity, care, and wellbeing. Across settings, practitioners manage uncertainty and doubts about technical efficacy by building relationships, adapting institutional narratives, and appealing to moral commitments. In this way, moralization stabilizes healthcare AI by generating consensus and shared purpose in a field marked by uncertainty and rapid change. At the same time, moralization can obscure technological limitations, diffuse accountability, and divert attention from alternative solutions. By situating healthcare AI within broader transformations in the cultures and organization of technoscience, the dissertation advances a new model of technoscientific authority grounded not in detachment or claims of neutrality, but in active alignment with other institutions, actors, and values. More broadly, it explains how moral claims, professional authority, and organizational dynamics sustain commitment to ethically fraught and uncertain technological solutions to collective problems.

Every day, millions of Americans tune in to conservative Christian radio, podcasts, and television, or what I call Christian Right broadcasting. These broadcasters have integrated mass media into the intimacy of local religious life, using national media platforms to rally pastors and churches behind the Republican Party. How do Christian Right broadcasters operate as political actors? How did the distinctive structure of Christian Right broadcasting first come into being? How did Christian Right broadcasting rise to power? To answer the questions, I focus centrally on the history and present-day operations of Salem Media Group, the biggest conservative Christian radio company in the U.S.

Drawing from novel archival and quantitative evidence, I trace Salem’s history and political engagement from the late 1940s through the 2024 election. This evidence reveals how Salem Media descends from, and draws upon, media models first innovated by segregationists striving to defend Jim Crow in the American South.

My theoretical account focuses on how the American South’s distinctive path to modernization enabled religious entrepreneurs on the far-right “fringe” to innovate new forms of community-based religious radio and turn them into big business. Advancing a historical institutionalist account of American media’s transformation across the past eighty years, I show how the South’s regional political economy—together with the weak capacity of federal broadcast regulators—enabled grassroots religious networks to create institutional pathways in American broadcasting that are still visible on the podcast charts and in party politics.

This study places religious communication at the center of the story of how conservative media became big business in the United States, contributing to scholarship on the determinants of democratic instability in the U.S. It also reorients scholarship on conservative media’s breakthrough in the 1980s and 1990s to focus on subnational, and distinctively American, processes of media development that unfolded in the post-WWII period.

Place is central to understanding inequality. However, recent decades have seen significant shifts in the urban layout of the United States. In this dissertation, I address changes in housing and immigration through a mixed-methods approach combining causal inference, decomposition methods, and qualitative approaches. In particular, I analyze three recent spatial dynamics: declines in housing development, variation in racial integration, and the suburbanization of immigration.

Chapter Two examines Massachusetts’ Chapter 40B, a state law designed to override exclusionary zoning and expedite affordable housing projects, to analyze how informal opposition shapes housing outcomes. Housing affordability debates often focus on zoning regulations, but informal opposition through bargaining, delay, and deterrence also plays a critical role in restricting development. Using data collected from observations and public meeting records of 48 40B projects, I identify three key dynamics: density primacy, where opponents link concerns to project size; issue shifting, where objections evolve to sustain opposition; and policy learning, where opponents refine arguments to align with regulatory constraints. These strategies allow local actors to extract concessions and reshape developments even when formal mechanisms for denial are unavailable. Findings highlight the limitations of zoning reform alone in addressing housing shortages and underscore the need for policy solutions that mitigate procedural barriers to housing production. While public meetings are intended to facilitate community input, they often amplify opposition in ways that hinder new housing construction.

In Chapter Three, I investigate whether increasing housing development reduces Black-White residential segregation. Debates over housing supply, from NIMBY opposition to YIMBY advocacy, have focused largely on the economic consequences of permitting new housing, but their broader social effects remain underexplored. Using a panel of metropolitan areas from 1990 to 2020, I find that metros permitting more housing experienced larger declines in segregation. To strengthen causal claims, I employ an instrumental variable approach leveraging geologic constraints on buildability. I also show that within metro areas, towns permitting more housing saw greater reductions in segregation, reinforcing the link between housing supply and integration. These findings highlight the broader social consequences of housing development policies, suggesting that increasing housing supply may be a key lever for fostering racial equity.

In Chapter Four, I identify and question three assumptions about the suburbanization of immigration. The majority of immigrants in the U.S. now live in the suburbs of major metropolitan areas. Recent work on this phenomenon has focused on the outcomes of immigrant suburbanization, examining how immigrants encounter and make sense of different residential contexts. However, I argue that the literature has largely neglected to investigate the underlying process behind immigrant suburbanization. I analyze three assumptions related to this process: that moves to new destinations are driving suburbanization, that immigrants are suburbanizing more quickly than the U.S.-born, and that a suburb-specific mechanism is driving increases in immigrant-native neighborhood inequality. I use a series of decompositions to model each of these questions, finding evidence that largely cuts against these underlying assumptions in the field. In doing so, I show the value of situating spatial trends in immigration in the context of broader demographic trends and help clarify possible mechanisms driving immigrant suburbanization.

China’s one-child policy, which restricted the number of children allowed per family from its inception in 1979 until its conclusion in 2015, has attracted much scholarly attention. Sociologists have documented the policy’s various impacts, from the aging workforce and skewed sex ratio to the effects on women’s reproductive health and state-society relations. This dissertation examines one understudied impact of the one-child policy: the abandonment of female infants. Caught between state demands for a smaller family and familial demands for a son, and with no legal means to place children for adoption, thousands of Chinese families left their female infants anonymously in public places. Some children died before being found, while many were reabsorbed into Chinese society via informal, unregistered adoptions. The remaining unclaimed children were funneled into state orphanages, from which at least 150,000 were sent abroad to families in North America and Europe. Taking advantage of the author’s unprecedented access to families who abandoned daughters, this dissertation analyzes the context, process, and aftermath of infant abandonment from the perspective of the families themselves. The dissertation is composed of three essays that draw from ethnographic fieldwork in rural China and in-depth interviews with families who abandoned children and comparison families who did not. The first essay asks how states and institutions structure cultural aspirations for an ideal family; the second essay investigates the cyclical process of striving to realize this ideal family; and the third essay examines the emotional aftermath of infant abandonment as one particular cost of striving. Overall, this dissertation presents family formation as a socially patterned process, consequential for our understanding of aspirations, inequality, and grief.

Unpaid labor—such as caregiving and housework—remains foundational to the functioning of families and society, yet continues to be undervalued, invisible, and unequally distributed. This dissertation examines the lived experiences and consequences of unpaid labor focusing on three groups—grandparents, parents of minor children, and working parents—using nationally representative data. It asks: How do caregiving expectations shape labor force participation in later life? How do parenting practices aligned with intensive parenting norms relate to stress and fatigue? And how is unpaid labor timed across the workday in relation to paid work and subjective well-being? The first chapter examines how gendered dynamics unfold across generations to shape older adults’ labor force participation. The second chapter introduces “backdrop parenting”—moments of child presence without active care—and suggests that mothers experience greater fatigue than fathers from these experiences due to overlapping unpaid tasks. The third chapter explores how working parents schedule unpaid labor around paid work, revealing that stress and fatigue vary with its timing across the day. Together, these chapters offer a more contextualized understanding of unpaid labor, emphasizing not only how much time is spent, but also when care occurs, who is present, and how it is experienced. By highlighting less visible contours of unpaid labor—such as intergenerational interlocking of gender norms, backdrop parenting, and the temporal layering of tasks—this dissertation challenges conventional ideas about unpaid labor and underscores the need for intersectional, life course–oriented approaches to understanding unpaid labor.

The U.S. immigration enforcement system has institutionalized social control over the more than 22 million noncitizens residing in the country. Annual apprehensions, detentions, and deportations from the U.S. interior are all on the rise. Yet we lack a comprehensive descriptive account of how levels and rates of interior immigration enforcement have varied over time and across U.S. jurisdictions. In this dissertation, I establish these empirical facts and advance new explanations for the U.S. deportation boom and its geographic patterning. The first empirical chapter combines analysis of administrative data on immigration court proceedings and immigration removals with census data and archival records to trace the expansion of the interior immigration enforcement system between 1970 and 2010 and assess drivers of this trend. Findings reveal a far more sustained history of interior enforcement than previously documented. Levels and rates of interior enforcement have been high since at least the 1970s. Additionally, through a series of decompositions, this chapter shows that growth in interior removals between 1988 and 2010 can be explained both by changes in the size and composition of the U.S. noncitizen population and by an increase in apprehensions. The expansion of the immigration detention system, the curtailment of immigration judges’ discretion, and the reduction of noncitizens’ due process rights were not major drivers of interior removals in this period. The second empirical chapter provides the first systematic analysis of spatial variation in interior immigration enforcement practices. Analyzing the records of all immigration detentions in 2008 and 2009—a period when the volume of interior removals was at a peak—I estimate states’ immigration detention rates and examine geographic variation in detention outcomes, net of individual characteristics. Findings reveal substantial state heterogeneity in immigration detention rates, which range from approximately 350 detentions per 100,000 noncitizens in Connecticut to more than 6,700 detentions per 100,000 noncitizens in Wyoming. After detainment, individuals’ detention outcomes are geographically stratified, especially for detainees eligible for pretrial release. These disparities indicate the important role that geography plays in shaping individuals’ chances of experiencing immigration detention and deportation. Findings further show that states’ immigration detention rates do not map onto the geography of restrictive immigration laws and enforcement programs as scholars previously expected. Rather, states’ detention rates are associated with factors related to the composition of states’ immigrant populations, immigration officers’ use of discretion, and the presence of sanctuary ordinances. The third empirical chapter combines quantitative analysis of immigration apprehension data with qualitative fieldwork to examine on-the-ground immigration enforcement processes in Massachusetts and New Hampshire—two states that vary in their enforcement rates and immigration policies. Findings show how various institutional, demographic, and legal factors interact to shape the opportunity structure for immigration apprehensions in each state. Findings from this chapter also reveal the deeply unsettled nature of the present-day interior immigration enforcement field and point to contestation between immigrant rights advocates, local and state police, and the federal government as an important driver of change in immigration control.