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Climate change is no longer a future worry–gradually shifting the landscape around us punctuated by sudden, devastating disasters. Though sociologists study the outcomes of disasters and long-term demographic trends in response to environmental hazards, we know very little about how individuals manage climate change in their daily lives. In places with limited institutional responses to climate change, people facing climate stressors must manage on their own based on their risk perceptions, resources, and overall resilience. This dissertation examines the everyday management of climate change impacts. I ask two central questions: How are people adapting to climate change in everyday life? And, how do social and institutional contexts influence microlevel adaptation? I present three case studies in climate stressed communities: rural Colombia, coastal North Carolina, and the informal settlements in the megacity of Lagos I combine ethnographic field work, in-depth interviews, and archival data to paint a nuanced picture of individual and contextual responses to global climate change. Using archival data from all three sites including planning for physical adaptation projects, resilience and adaptation policy documents, and ethnographic data on social infrastructure, I develop the concept of the “Climate Safety Net” – a combination of physical resilience (built environment/engineering), social infrastructure, and policy relief. I argue that the climate safety net is what enables continued settlement in zones of climate stress. I then empirically analyze everyday adaptation using ethnographic data from coastal North Carolina, rural Colombia, and Lagos, Nigeria to offer a descriptive picture of how individuals and households adapt to climate change in their daily lives in different institutional contexts. This dissertation shows how climate change is increasing inequality by leaving communities to adapt either outside of, or in tension with, institutional adaptation actions. Individuals manage climate change through both adaptation in place and migration. The climate safety net allows for some continued settlement in climate stressed locations, but communities marginalized by historical legacies of power are those who slip through the holes in the net and are displaced by climate hazards rather than strategically relocating through adaptive migrations or managed retreat.

Anthropogenic climate change is altering the severity, frequency, and spatial patterning of extreme weather in the United States. Sociologists have argued that the resulting disasters exacerbate social inequality, yet several empirical limitations have left unanswered questions about generalizable causal effects and broader theoretical questions about concepts of vulnerability and risk. The empirical chapters in this dissertation address these limitations by using advanced statistical techniques on large-scale data sources. In particular, the dissertation focuses on disparities in two outcomes related to post-disaster community and individual well-being: neighborhood demographics and birth outcomes. In the first empirical chapter, I investigate the effect of disaster exposure on community-level changes in population demographics. Despite scholarly consensus that post-disaster population change is driven by differential vulnerability to hazards, contradictory evidence remains regarding both the direction and magnitude of the effect of natural hazards on local demographic change. I adjudicate between differing findings using data on the paths of 1,016 severe tornadoes linked to block-group-level population data to estimate the effect of disasters on net demographic change. I find that severe tornadic activity results in no net change in population size but compositional changes, whereby affected neighborhoods become Whiter and socioeconomically advantaged. Moderation models show that the effects are exacerbated for already wealthy communities and that a federal disaster declaration does not mitigate the effects. Given tornadoes’ exogeneity and locals’ inability to make residential decisions based on tornado risk, I argue that my empirical case allows me to isolate the demographic elements constitutive of social vulnerability, and I interpret the findings as evidence of a displacement process by which economically disadvantaged residents are forcibly mobile, and economically advantaged and white locals rebuild rather than relocate. In the second empirical chapter, I interrogate how political institutions, through the delivery and functioning of federal aid for housing, exacerbate post-disaster inequality. Prior research documents aggregate differences in disaster aid amounts. However, they tend to focus on aid types available to local governments and businesses with neighborhood-level data, missing key forms of assistance aimed at household recovery and lacking individual-level data to understand embedded processes. Using household-level data on every application for federal disaster aid after 13 hurricanes from 2005-2016 linked to local estimates of peak wind speed and flood depth from hurricane modeling systems, I estimate racial and socioeconomic disparities in access to FEMA aid. Results demonstrate that key institutional features—the conditions of eligibility and sufficiency, burdens of proof, and bureaucratic interactions with state inspectors—combine in a stepwise process to funnel permanent repair resources to homeowners in whiter communities, while temporary rental aid is granted disproportionately to households in communities of color. Disparities in aid amounts across communities then structures unequal socioeconomic growth during recovery. An approach to disasters as the realization of climate risks incorporates insights from political sociology and social stratification to elucidate how the state intervenes to produce inequalities through institutional processes. In the final empirical chapter, I examine how in utero exposure to extreme heat impacts birth weight. While some evidence suggests that heat negatively impacts newborn health, existing studies tend to analyze data from a singular study site over a narrow time frame. I use near-population-level data on live births to U.S.-born White, U.S.-born Black, and Mexican-born Hispanic mothers for two birth cohorts—1970-1974 and 2005-2009—to estimate how effects vary across maternal race and access to key adaptation resources, namely residential air conditioning. Results show that exposure to heat in the last pregnancy month lowers newborn birth weight, on average, but no effect is detected for immigrant Hispanic mothers—the group with the highest exposure due to spatial and temporal nature of risk. Moreover, I demonstrate that in the 1970s cohort, negative effects of hot minimum temperature on birth weight were both significant and meaningful in places with low residential AC coverage, a relationship that has likely been attenuated by increased AC coverage in American households by the 21st century.

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.

Over the past two decades, researchers have developed a shared understanding of how to study immigrants’ everyday lives in an era of restrictive American immigration law and enforcement. This literature on immigrant “illegality” emphasizes the accounts of immigrants punished for violating sometimes-arcane immigration laws in order to foreground all noncitizens’ vulnerability to the immigration enforcement system. Yet, this literature seldom considers how the majority of immigrants who lack punitive contact with this system perceive its risk to their lives. This dissertation draws on insights from the sociology of risk, which suggests how past experience shapes one’s perceptions of potentially-perilous situations, to explore how a diverse sample of immigrants understands and responds to immigration law and enforcement. I draw primarily on ethnographic and interview data collected over three years with 59 respondents in 28 Latin American households in Dallas County, Texas, as well as supplementary ethnographic data collected at the County’s immigration court and Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office. The findings underscore the importance of one’s prior contact with immigration law and enforcement for structuring immigrants’ risk perceptions of this system. Those with punitive contact generalize the fear stemming from this prior experience to all other domains of social life, regardless of legal status, and seek to evade institutions that may bring about future punishment. But, among those lacking punitive contact, I reveal how system embeddedness—whereby individuals included in the U.S. immigration bureaucracy’s formal records exhibit a heightened sense of risk—emerges as one under-theorized dimension of social control: The undocumented in this sample tend to downplay the risk that immigration law and enforcement pose to their lives because they are unknown to the U.S. immigration bureaucracy, whereas those with relatively-secure legal protections—e.g., discretionary or temporary visa holders, legal permanent residents, and even naturalized citizens under certain conditions—tend to report great risk for being embedded inside it. Finally, I examine the spillover consequences of immigration law and enforcement on U.S.-born Hispanics more broadly who, regardless of their legal status, nevertheless must confront this system by virtue of their social or spatial proximity to immigrant populations. I discuss the implications of my findings for broader sociological theories of surveillance, punishment, and inequality. In particular, I conclude by outlining the contemporary immigration system as a “total institution,” an all-encompassing social arrangement that not only sanctions immigrants who have violated immigration law through its enforcement arm but also instills a sense of risk among those known to its bureaucratic arm.

This study examines second-generation Latinos born in the U.S. after 1965 and their prospects of achieving traditional assimilation in the United States. Some social scientists argue that “classic” straight-line assimilation is a less likely path for Latino-Americans and that segmented or downward assimilation theory will characterize the trajectories of Latino-American youth in the 21st century. Other scholars argue that the path of “classic” straight-assimilation is still an empirically sound theory and that evidence suggests assimilation is taking place over time. Data collected on economic, social, cultural, and civic participation patterns among Hispanics identify key strides that are being accomplished among Latinos and their offspring. I revisit segmented assimilation theory to determine whether dissonant acculturalization is the most influential obstacle for Latino-Americans as they move from adolescence to young adults. I argue that second-generation Latinos are a young group and the studies that project a stagnant or downward path of assimilation are premature. They also create a stigma that negatively labels Latinos, who are a large part of America’s future. My analysis suggests that mobility is occurring for many second-generation Latinos and that this upward mobility will become more apparent over time, just as it did with the European immigrants that arrived in the early 20th century.

In the past two decades, changes in American housing policy have transformed the landscape of high-rise ghetto poverty. In its place, has emerged what I call the horizontal ghetto, where high-rise public housing has been demolished and poverty is turned on its side, spreading across the cityscape. Researchers are now beginning to document the reconcentration of voucher holders in moderately poor neighborhoods. This dissertation examines how residents come to live in this type of neighborhood, and how this new context shapes social organization for those who reside within it. I examine a case study neighborhood in Northwest Baltimore called Park Heights, in which I conducted 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork and 102 in-depth interviews. This neighborhood has a large population of working class black families who settled there in the late 1960's, a recent influx of voucher holders, and also a population of residentially unstable unassisted renters. I examine two complementary explanations for how and why voucher holders end up in neighborhoods like Park Heights. I propose that the landlord is an important piece of the puzzle; landlord practices sort the most disadvantaged voucher holders into some of the most disadvantaged neighborhoods, serving as a mechanism in the reproduction of spatial inequality and the concentration of poverty. I also consider how residents' experiences in contexts like Park Heights shape their decisions to remain in, and move to similar neighborhoods. Finally, I examine how the neighborhood context shapes social organization, and I argue that although poverty may be more moderate than in neighborhoods dominated by large-scale public housing, the horizontal context of instability and clustered voucher use may have deleterious consequences for social relations.

How do nations deal with their difficult, shameful, and traumatic past? I tackle this question by examining how the history of apartheid is taught to--and understood by--South African high school students. I further examine the consequences of these understandings for contemporary race relations. To address these questions around the production, reception, and consequences of history education in schools, the study draws on data collected during 18 months of fieldwork in two racially and socioeconomically diverse public high schools in Johannesburg, South Africa. The data collection involved a multi-method research design that included: 1) five months of daily observations in 17 distinct classrooms; 2) content analysis of official curricular documents and materials used in classes; 3) interviews with teachers (N=10); and 4) interviews with two samples of students: one prior to, and one following, exposure to apartheid history education (total N=160). I find that teachers present the country’s racially divisive past in ways that limit its salience for understanding contemporary social issues. I show that this is driven both by broad national imperatives concerning racial reconciliation and by more local imperatives related to minimizing race-based conflict in the classroom. Drawing on ethnographic and interview data, I demonstrate that the narratives presented in class leave students without the cultural tools they need to understand, identify, and respond both to contemporary racism and to the structural legacies of apartheid which they encounter on a daily basis. Theoretically, the study contributes to literature that focuses on schools as sites where racial inequalities are reproduced by highlighting the importance of attending to messages transmitted through the formal curriculum. In so doing, it identifies both institutionalized representations and micro-level understandings of racially divisive pasts as important loci for examining contemporary race and ethnic relations.

This project analyzes the influence of history and myths in the construction of ethnic identity narratives by intellectuals and elites, as well as the appropriation and negotiation of these identities among contemporary youth in Serbia and Croatia. By analyzing the multiple meanings assigned to identity at both the elite and individual level, I argue that none of the present theoretical models allows us to build a complete understanding of how ethnic identity actually works on the ground. This project moves away from treating ethnic identity as a given, instead examining how it is constructed and reconstructed at the “top” level, how it is lived and negotiated on the “bottom,” and how these understandings change over time. I first examine the identity narratives and dominant myths articulated by elites, leaders, religious institutions and intellectuals during Yugoslavia’s disintegration in the late 1980s and 1990s, utilizing discourse analysis of official history textbooks, key works of intellectuals, and rhetoric of political elites. I argue that identity is constantly in the process of construction, reconstruction and fine-tuning; attention should thus be paid to the content of dominant myths that weave together various narratives, and to strategies of myth articulation. Second, I examine the extent to which these narratives have persisted among contemporary youth. Relying on two years of ethnographic research, including 160 in-depth interviews, 1200 surveys, focus groups and participant observation in Serbia and Croatia, I find that “lived” identity narratives are contextual, frequently contradictory, and have important generational, class, gender, and regional cleavages. This research has broad implications for theories of ethnic identity construction, in addition to calling for a reconsideration of the methodology commonly used in studying ethnic identity.

Beginning in 1998, selective colleges began adopting no-loan admissions policies to increase socioeconomic diversity. These colleges, however, get their new diversity from old sources. I show how half of lower-income black undergraduates at elite colleges graduate from boarding, day, and preparatory schools like Exeter and Andover, those whom I call the Privileged Poor, while their peers enter from local, typically troubled public schools—those whom I call the Doubly Disadvantaged (Jack 2014, 2015a). This dissertation draws on in-depth interviews with 103 black, Latino, and white undergraduates and two years of ethnographic observation at pseudonymous Renowned University to explore what sociologists Stevens, Armstrong, and Arum (2008) call, “the experiential core of college life,” the often-overlooked moments between college entry and exit when undergraduates employ different cultural competencies to navigate college and how university policies facilitate this process. Each chapter examines moments of social contact: (1) micro-interactions between peers, (2) engagement between undergraduates and college officials, and (3) undergraduates’ experiences navigating university policies. There are instances where lower social class status is oppressive, but also there are times when cultural resources serve as social buffer to class marginalization. Equally important, I document not only how university practices can exacerbate preexisting inequalities, but also how their effects are unequally distributed. Where the Privileged Poor and Doubly Disadvantaged’s experiences differ, disparate cultural endowments play a larger role in shaping undergraduates’ well-being. Where their experiences align, shared economic disadvantage is more salient. Examining the experiences of those who travel different trajectories to college extends theories of social reproduction and deepens our understanding of both the reproduction of inequality in college and how university policies facilitate these processes., Sociology

U.S. suburbia is rapidly changing, becoming home to increasing numbers of poor families and immigrants. However, traditionally disadvantaged students who attend well-resourced middle-class suburban schools have been largely neglected in educational inequality research. In this study, I spotlight this overlooked population and find that class background takes on heterogeneous meanings and significance, as it is situated in contextualized hierarchies, systems of meaning, and boundaries that are forged within everyday school interactions. I illuminate the heterogeneity in the effect of class among youth who share demographic background characteristics but attend diverse suburban schools. These racial and contextual contingencies in the effects of class background—or how class “works”—shape the experiences and outcomes of traditionally disadvantaged students so that two students who share the same demographic background but attend different schools have different social and academic outcomes. The power of social background and school-level forces in shaping educational outcomes are among the most robust findings in the sociology of education literature. What is missing from this quintessential portrait of American educational inequality, however, is a nuanced understanding of a race-class-context interaction that abandons the assumption that race and class intersect to produce uniform effects, and that school contextual effects are uniform for all students. Through mixed methods, I show that race, class, and context interact in a two-stage process whereby (1) race and class interact with each other, and then (2) jointly interact with school context, to exert non-uniform effects on how traditionally disadvantaged students integrate into suburban schools. In this context, what it means and how it feels to be an economically disadvantaged student varies greatly depending on who you are and where you are. For immigrant students, who are an important subset of this population, these dynamics further shape incorporation processes and pathways into the minority middle class. Through studying how social background and school-level forces interact in complex ways to impact how immigrants forge identities vis-à-vis natives and coethnics, I complicate the assumptions underlying segmented assimilation theory and the predictions that follow from it. In doing so, I highlight the need for an updated understanding of immigrant incorporation that reflects the heterogeneity of 21st century immigrants. Finally, in studying school-level forces, I expand on traditional school-level forces and foreground campus spatial layout as an overlooked yet agentic force that regulates group dynamics. Specifically, I argue that spatial layout and organizational practices like tracking interact to structure social relations, differentially predisposing some schools to more unequal group relations than others. This research has broad implications for theories of educational inequality and immigrant incorporation, as well as for the contours of social inequality amidst a rapidly changing social landscape., Social Policy

This dissertation examines how gentrification—a class transformation—unfolds along racial and ethnic lines. Using a new conceptual framework, considering the city-level context of immigration and residential segregation, examining the pace and place of gentrification, and employing a new method, I conduct three sets of empirical analyses. I argue that racial and ethnic neighborhood characteristics, including changes brought by the growth of Asians and Latinos following immigration policy reforms in 1965, play an important role in how gentrification unfolds in neighborhoods in US cities. Nonetheless, these processes are conditional on the histories of immigration and the racial structures of each city. The first empirical analysis uses Census and American Community Survey data over 24 years and field surveys of gentrification in low-income neighborhoods across 23 US cities to show that the presence of Asians and, in some conditions, Hispanics, following the passage of the 1965 Hart-Celler Act, contributed to early waves of gentrification. The second empirical analysis introduces a method of systematic social observation using Google Street View to detect visible cues of neighborhood change and integrates census data, police records, prior street-level observations, community surveys, proximity to amenities, foreclosure risk data, and city budget data on capital investments. The analysis demonstrates that minority composition, collective perceptions of disorder, and subprime lending rates attenuate the evolution of gentrification across time and space in Chicago. The third analysis uses similar data in Seattle, where segregation levels are low and minority neighborhoods are rare, and shows that a racial hierarchy in gentrification is evident that runs counter to the traditional racial order that marks US society, suggesting changing racial preferences or new housing market mechanisms as Seattle diversifies. By deepening our understanding of the role of race in gentrification, this dissertation sheds light on how neighborhood inequality by race remains so persistent despite widespread neighborhood change., Social Policy

What role does organized crime play in determining the success of separatist movements? I explore the role of organized crime in the separatist movements of Kosovo in Serbia and South Ossetia in Georgia, two most similar cases that have generated different outcomes in levels of separatist movement success in 1989-2012 (inclusive). Through the comparison, I argue in six propositions that organized crime can both promote and retard separatist movement success. The explanatory propositions are: (1) organized crime can be formative of state structure, capacity and stability; (2) popular support for the separatist movement can directly depend on organized criminal activities; (3) organized criminal capacity can – through its relations to the host state and separatist movement – hinder or advance separatist success; (4) the ethnic heterogeneity/homogeneity of organized crime may determine its capacity and willingness to promote separatist success; (5) organized crime contributes to separatist movement success when it is (a) prepared and (b) predisposed to divert regional smuggling opportunities towards movement goals; and (6) whether host state repression helps or harms the separatist movement depends on the role that organized crime is fulfilling vis-à-vis the state and separatists. The argument is developed in four steps. First, I examine regional indicators of a connection between separatist success and organized crime, justifying a comparison of Serbia/Kosovo and Georgia/South Ossetia as most similar cases. Second, I process-trace changes in the relational triad of host state, separatist movement and organized crime over the 24-year history, contending that different trajectories in these relations account for different levels of success for the two separatist movements. Third, I examine under what conditions aggregate regional smuggling trends before critical junctures of movement success in fact contribute to that success; I model criminal “filtering” of the aggregate criminal flows as a determinant of whether separatist goals are advanced or hindered. Finally, I compare two nefarious criminal episodes – organ smuggling in Kosovo and nuclear smuggling in South Ossetia – that harmed the separatist movements; I show that superior organized criminal capacity in Kosovo (reflected in its infrastructure, autonomy and community) managed to contain the harm of exposure from the nefarious episode., Sociology

How do returning college students navigate the rapidly diversifying landscape of higher education options available to them today? Adopting a life course perspective, I argue that the college persistence of non-traditional students must be understood within historical, institutional, and personal context. I use longitudinal survey data from approximately 750 respondents and 130 in-depth life history interviews from over 100 participants in the Resilience in Survivors of Katrina (RISK) Project to document college decision-making leading up to and following 2005’s Hurricane Katrina. Using mixed methods, I outline the limitations of traditional measures for capturing the winding college pathways and future college plans of America’s most disadvantaged college students. I also contribute to an emerging literature on mixed-methods data analysis in social science research. I find remarkable levels of persistent college aspiration and enrollment, long past normative time to degree and far into young adulthood. The diverse institutional landscape of non-selective postsecondary education offers many opportunities for a return to college, but also complicates the pathway to earning a credential. I describe how these economically-vulnerable students understand the meaning and value of a college degree, finding that economic necessity and the positive moral valence of college-going combine to support continued aspiration. While the logic of human capital investment dominates policy and academic discussions of college’s value, I find the symbolic meaning of a college degree also shapes aspirations and decision-making into adulthood, particularly for the students who struggle the most. For these students, “valuing” a college degree involves both economic and moral calculations., Social Policy