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 GusevaAlya 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 MearsAshley Mears

(Co-Director of Precarity Lab)
Professor of Sociology and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Boston University

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 MijsJonathan 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

Bahar Aldanmaz

Sociology, Boston University

Bahar finds great excitement in questioning the effect of masculinities on gendered division of labor both at work and ‘home’. Bahar’s broader research interests are sexualities, intimacy and inequalities.

 

 

Elif Birced

Sociology, Boston University

Elif is conducting a dissertation research on YouTubers and the creator economy in Turkey. Her research aims to explore how content creators on YouTube navigate between the demands of multiple audiences such as their followers and brands and how third-party organizations like talent managers, MCNs, influencer marketing professionals play a role in this process. In her previous research, Elif analyzed how organizational practices and relationships affect the perception of work by focusing on the experiences of graduate students in the United States and Turkey. She is interested in economic sociology, sociology of work and organizations, and sociology of culture.

 

Yun Ha Cho

Sociology and Business Strategy, University of Michigan

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.

 

Diana Enriquez

Sociology, Princeton University

Diana Enriquez is a PhD candidate in Sociology at Princeton University. She studies labor, technology, informal economies, and law, particularly in the US and Latin America (Mexico and Colombia). Her dissertation research focuses on high-skill freelancers as a subset of the outsourced workforce and how they approach negotiation and pricing. Her first dissertation article on income variation among freelancers was presented at the Federal Reserve conference on Uneven Outcomes in the Labor Market (2021). Other research projects examine the impact of the Covid-19 shutdown on low income households (Socius 2020), pre-automation attempts via gig work platforms (Sociologica 2021), and the role of platforms in managing gig workers (under review). 

 

Dilan Eren

Sociology, Boston University

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.

 

Valerio Iannucci

Management & Organizations, Boston University
Valerio is a first-year PhD student broadly interested in radical protests, social movements and grassroot innovation. Currently, he is studying the different identities of accidental grassroot entrepreneurs who stepped up to address the Covid-19 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.

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.

 

Meghann Lucy

Sociology, Boston 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.

 

Gokhan Mulayim

Sociology, Boston 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.

 

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.

 

Micah Rajunov

Management & Organizations, Boston University

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.

 

 

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.

 

Alumni

Ladin Bayurgil

Postdoctoral Researcher, KU Leuven

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.

 

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 Research Associate, 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.