People

Affiliated Faculty

Michel Anteby

(Co-Director of Precarity Lab)

Professor of Management & Organizations and Sociology, Boston University

Michel’s research looks at how individuals relate to their work, their occupations, and the organizations they belong to. He examines more specifically the practices people engage in at work that help them sustain their chosen cultures or identities. In doing so, his research contributes to a better understanding of how these cultures and identities come to be and manifest themselves. Empirical foci for these inquiries have included airport security officers, clinical anatomists, factory craftsmen, ghostwriters, puppeteers, and subway drivers.

Alya Guseva

(Co-Director of Precarity Lab)

Associate Professor of Sociology, Boston University

Alya is an economic sociologist with interests in money, finance, morality, and market emergence. She is also a medical sociologist with a long-standing interest in biomedical markets (human reproduction, human organs, tissues and gametes, clinical labor, etc.), healthcare and healthcare policy. She is currently working on her third book, which is tentatively entitled Medicine, Markets and Morality.

Ashley Mears

(Co-Director of Precarity Lab)

Professor and Chair of Cultural Sociology and New Media, University of Amsterdam 

Working primarily at the intersections of economic, cultural sociology, and gender, Ashley studies how societies value people and things. She writes about the cultural and gendered foundations of markets, aesthetic labor, zero-priced goods and “free stuff,” consumption and elites, and theoretical implications of qualitative methods.

Jonathan Mijs

Assistant Professor of Sociology, Boston University

His work draws on ethnography, longitudinal data analysis, survey experiments, and computational methods to investigate how people perceive, explain and confront social inequality. His book project, under contract with University of California Press, asks why growing levels of economic inequality have been met with only minimal public consternation. It describes how widening racial and economic fault lines lead to insulate people from seeing the full extent of inequality.

Sanaz Mobasseri

Assistant Professor of Management & Organizations, Boston University

Her research investigates how organizational and social network processes shape race and gender differences at work. She does this by examining the roles of culture, cognition, and emotion in organizations using field experimental and computational research methodologies.

Affiliated Graduate Students

Elif Birced

Sociology, Boston University

Elif Birced is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology at Boston University. She is driven to understand the impact of digital technologies on the future of work and study global platforms as an economic, cultural, and labor sociologist. Using interviews and ethnography, she is interested more specifically in how social media platforms are reshaping work with a focus on cultural producers in countries beyond the Global North. Using content creation on YouTube in Turkey as a case, her  dissertation examines how content creators navigate control over their labor process when they are governed by multiple companies (e.g., social media platforms and brands).

Ya-Ching Huang

Sociology, Boston University

Ya-Ching’s research interests include economic sociology, cultural sociology, morality, and gender. She is particularly interested in economic activities that are legally debatable and have different moral reasoning across cultures or countries. Her previous research focuses on Taiwanese pigeon racing, encompassing both the races and illegal gambling on them. She is currently exploring the production and distribution of mask-making amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Pulum (Eunice) Kim

Management & Organizations, Boston University

Pulum (Eunice) Kim is a PhD student in Management and Organizations. She is broadly interested in understanding how people perceive their work and the challenges associated with their work, relative to their backgrounds and social contexts. She is currently working on three projects that involve test-prep instructors, real estate agents, and people who identify as sell-outs.

Thao Nguyen

Sociology, Boston University

Her research interests center on gender & sexuality, sociology of work & organizations, economic sociology, and global/transnational sociology. Specifically, she is interested in exploring how social inequality and stratification manifest in the context of gendered, sexualized, and racialized labor forces globally. A majority of her work focuses on the topic of sexual commerce. Outside of academia, she is invested in translating the insights of her research into practical solutions for communities and organizations.

Qi Song

Sociology, Northwestern University

Qi Song is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at Northwestern University. Her dissertation investigates the rise of the platform economy in emerging economies and the impacts of the platform economy on market relations and inequality, with digital platforms in China’s freight transportation sector and real estate sector as comparative cases.

Allison Wigen

Sociology, Boston University

Allison Wigen’s research and writing focus on culture, work and occupations, education, stratification, and social theory. Her current work explores relationships between class and cultural production, with an emphasis on the role of creative actors in producing social change.

David Joseph-Goteiner

Sociology, University of California Berkeley

David is a PhD candidate at UC Berkeley working at the intersection of economic sociology, work, and technology. His dissertation looks at the moral and cultural dimensions of platform work, including the experiences and motivations of American “data workers,” who get paid to generate the data that fuels academic research and the development of artificial intelligence. He has been grateful to the Precarity Lab’s participants for creating a space to share work, resources, and good times.

Jenna Youjin Song

Management and Organizations, Northwestern University

Jenna is a postdoctoral fellow in the Golub Capital Social Impact Lab at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. Her research combines economic sociology and management scholarship by showing how relational work can help shape social evaluations, enhancing performance outcomes for economic actors that depend on audience support. She uses both qualitative and quantitative methods and is currently focused on the context of BookTube, the YouTube community centered around book-related content.

Valerio Iannucci

Management & Organizations, Boston University

Hyo Young Lee

Management & Organizations, Boston University

Kate Nissen

Management & Organizations, Boston University

Alumni

Yun Ha Cho

Assistant Professor (starting in Fall 2024), University of Indiana

Yun Ha Cho is a PhD candidate in Sociology and Business Strategy at the University of Michigan. She studies cultural dynamics in businesses and markets in the rapidly changing world, such as the role of authenticity discourse in the platformized cultural production industry and the role of the American Dream narrative in immigrant entrepreneurship. She is deeply interested in how the evolution of the socio-technological environment interacts with cultural ideas to shape activities in organizations and markets, with implications for social inequality.

Dilan Eren

Assistant Professor (starting in Fall 2024), Ivey Business School

Dilan works at the intersection of work, occupations, and organizations by adopting a cultural sociology lens to examine topics of social inequality. Her dissertation, “The Self-Taught Economy: Open-Access and Inclusion in the Tech Industry,” studies how aspiring developers without a computer science degree make sense and use open-access to coding skills initiatives to get jobs in tech. She adopts a longitudinal perspective and uses multiple methods (including surveys, in-depth interviews, and digital ethnography and observations) to understand how open access to coding initiatives may alter or not the existing regimes of inequalities and make tech more or less diverse.

Meghann Lucy

Assistant Professor (starting in Fall 2024), Truman State University

Meghann is interested in discourse, valuation, gender, organizations, the sociology of health, medical sociology, consumption, and how these intersect. More specifically, she studies the medicalization of particular consumption and accumulation patterns, namely, hoarding behaviors, and representations of normative consumption.

Micah Rajunov

Postdoctoral Researcher (starting in Fall 2024), University of Alberta

With a broad interest in occupations, technology, and the future of work, Micah’s current projects include an analysis of physicians during the AIDS epidemic, and a study on the careers of competitive video gamers.

Gokhan Mulayim

Adjunct Lecturer (starting in Fall 2024), Truman State University

Working primarily at the intersection of economic and cultural sociology, organizations, occupations and work, and urban studies, he studies how the so-called extra-economic is translated into the economic. He looks specifically into how peculiar goods and services are being economized, and how the markets for those goods and services are being constructed. Using ethnographic research tools, his dissertation examines the economization of security as a political, social and affective good and service in the market for private security in Istanbul.

Ladin Bayurgil

Assistant Professor (Starting from Fall 2024), Turkish-German University, Istanbul, Turkey

Dr. Ladin Bayurgil is a postdoctoral researcher at KU Leuven’s Center for Sociological Research working on a European Research Council supported project that focuses on platform work across three sectors, gig, care, and creative, and across eight European countries, with a focus on precarity at the continuum between paid and unpaid work. Ladin’s work spans urban and econ omic sociology, sociology of work and occupations, and particularly asks questions around urban precarious labor. Before her position at the KU Leuven, Ladin has received her PhD in Sociology from Boston University, and BA in Sociology, and Political Science and International Relations from Bogazici University in Turkey.

Anna Gibson

Postdoctoral researcher, MIT

Anna Gibson is currently a postdoctoral associate in Comparative Media Studies/Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology after graduating with her PhD from the Department of Communication at Stanford University. Her research examines the political, social, and labor implications of the free and precarious work of online group moderators.

Audrey Holm

Assistant Professor in Management & Human Resources Department, HEC Paris

Audrey’s research focuses on shifting work dynamics at the individual, relational and occupational levels, with a particular interest in issues related to labor market inclusion and inequality. She primarily adopts an ethnographic approach to reflect on how people experience and relate to their work, organizations and occupations. In her dissertation, Audrey examined the work of counselors specialized in helping formerly incarcerated jobseekers. Audrey recently graduated with her PhD in Management at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business. She is an Assistant Professor in Management & Human Resources Department at HEC Paris.

Patricia Ward

Postdoctoral Researcher, Technische Universität Dresden

Patricia Ward is a postdoctoral research associate at the Center for Integration Studies and the Institute of Sociology (by courtesy) at the Technische Universität Dresden. Her research interests are in the areas of transnational labor, migration/mobility, and humanitarian aid and development. Patricia was previously with the Department of Ethics, Law and Politics at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, and obtained her doctorate from Boston University in 2020. Her latest article, titled “The Worth of their work: The (in)visible value of refugee volunteers in the transnational humanitarian aid sector”, is forthcoming in Work, Employment and Society.