Postdoc Fellows
Research Interests
- Social cohesion
- Construction and change of geopolitical identities
- Personality and identity development in response to intercultural contact
Research Interests
- Family Dynamics
- Family in eastern and western Germany
- Education to work transition
Research Interests
- Social Network Analysis
- Economic Sociology
Methods Expertise
- Natural Language Processing
- (Quantative) Network Analysis
- Econometrics
Research Interests
My research interests include, work and occupations, income dynamics (inequality, volatility, mobility), and urban sociology. While most work focuses on the United States, recent work focuses on Canada and Germany, and future work includes Britain and Sweden. Though the areas are broad, they are united by a focus on inequality; the underlying causes, consequences, and possible solutions.
Specifically, I examine the role of technological change as one important explanation for inequality, especially in the polarization of employment by skills. The evidence points to a capital-intensive economy characterized by a growing ability to produce economic output alongside a growing inability to connect that output to quality employment growth. One outcome of the disconnect between rising economic output and a decline in quality employment opportunities is rising levels of precarious employment and related income volatility. Another outcome of the gradual decoupling of economic and employment growth is that a main challenge of the future may shift from the question of how to generate new employment to the question of how to distribute our expanding output. A minimum income is a way to distribute rising economic growth without depending on rising employment growth.
As a separate research agenda, I am also interested in concepts of urban sociology with particular respect to discrimination and assets within the U.S. home ownership market.
Research Interests
Political Sociology
In the social sciences:
- Cross-cultural psychology
- Political culture
- Modernization/civilization
- Human development
- Linguistic relativity
- Historical grammar
- Dialect syntax
- (Alemannic, Gallo-Romance)
Research Interests
My research is at the intersection of international relations, conflict studies, and political sociology. Eastern and southern Africa, especially the Democratic Republic of Congo, are my areas of geographic specialization. In the Congo, I have conducted research on humanitarian military intervention, armed groups, and local structures of rule. More recently, I became interested in the dynamics between collective contentious action and forms of internationalized authority. My teaching and research interests also include development cooperation, sovereign debt politics, and post-conflict statebuilding.
Research Interests
International Relations
International Political Economy
EU External Relations
- Politics of global trade governance
- North-South relations, in particular EU-ACP trade and development cooperation
- China as a rising power
- Constructivist perspectives on international negotiations