{"id":47,"date":"2021-08-04T22:21:17","date_gmt":"2021-08-05T02:21:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/precarity\/?page_id=47"},"modified":"2026-01-27T17:46:44","modified_gmt":"2026-01-27T22:46:44","slug":"people","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/precarity\/people\/","title":{"rendered":"People"},"content":{"rendered":"

Affiliated Faculty<\/h4>\n

\"\"Michel Anteby<\/a><\/h4>\n
(Co-Director of Precarity & Inequality Lab)<\/h5>\n
Professor of Management & Organizations and Sociology, Boston University<\/h6>\n

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.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"AlyaAlya Guseva<\/a><\/h4>\n
(Co-Director of Precarity & Inequality Lab)<\/h5>\n
Associate Professor of Sociology, Boston University<\/h6>\n

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.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"AshleyAshley Mears<\/a><\/h4>\n
(Co-Director of Precarity & Inequality Lab)<\/h5>\n
Professor and Chair of Cultural Sociology and New Media, University of Amsterdam\u00a0<\/span><\/h6>\n

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 \u201cfree stuff,\u201d consumption and elites, and theoretical implications of qualitative methods.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"RodrigoRodrigo Canales<\/a><\/h4>\n
Associate Professor of Management & Organizations, Boston University<\/h6>\n

Rodrigo studies how individuals can purposefully change complex organizations or systems. His work explores how individuals\u2019 backgrounds, professional identities, and organizational positions affect how they relate to existing structures and the strategies they pursue to change them. His research contributes to a deeper understanding of the mechanisms that allow institutions to operate and change. He has done work in entrepreneurial finance and microfinance, as well as in the institutional implications of the Mexican war on drugs.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Jonathan Mijs<\/a>\"Jonathan<\/a><\/h4>\n
Associate Professor of Sociology, Boston University<\/h6>\n

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\u00a0people from seeing the full extent of inequality.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"JaneJane Pryma<\/a><\/h4>\n
Assistant Professor of Sociology, Boston University<\/h6>\n

Jane is a sociologist of health and medicine who explores how politics, medical technologies, and human rights shape what we know about pain and disability. Her book manuscript compares French and U.S. pain management and shows how networks of pain expertise institutionalized a \u201cright to pain relief,\u201d shaping pain management practices, rates of prescription opioid use, and the credibility of pain science in each country.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"PatrickPatrick Sheehan<\/a><\/h4>\n
Assistant Professor of Sociology, Boston University<\/h6>\n

Patrick\u2019s research agenda focuses on transformations to professional work in contemporary capitalism and examines how workers and organizations respond to technological change, shifting cultural expectations, and the heightened uncertainties that characterize economic life today.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"Julie Yen<\/strong><\/a><\/h4>\n
Assistant Professor of Management & Organizations, Boston University<\/h6>\n

Her research focuses on social impact and worker well-being in organizations, investigating how people and organizations navigate tensions, tradeoffs, and power dynamics as they pursue social objectives<\/span> using inductive, qualitative research methodologies.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Affiliated Graduate Students<\/h4>\n

\"\"Ya-Ching Huang<\/a><\/h4>\n
Sociology, Boston University<\/h6>\n

Ya-Ching\u2019s research interests include economic sociology, cultural sociology, morality, and health and healthcare. Her dissertation explores how medical professionals and parents ascribe meanings to children\u2019s life and death, and how these perceptions inform decisions about the involvement of pediatric palliative care, coordination of care provisions, and access to care services. Her previous research examined the production and distribution of mask-making amid the coronavirus pandemic.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/h4>\n

Pulum (Eunice) Kim<\/a><\/h4>\n
Management & Organizations, Boston University<\/h6>\n

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.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"Thao Nguyen<\/a><\/h4>\n
Sociology, Boston University<\/h6>\n

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.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"Allison Wigen<\/a><\/h4>\n
Sociology, Boston University<\/h6>\n

Allison Wigen\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"David Joseph-Goteiner<\/a><\/h4>\n
Sociology, University of California Berkeley<\/h6>\n

David<\/span>\u00a0is 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"Jenna Youjin Song<\/a><\/h4>\n
Management and Organizations, Northwestern University<\/h6>\n

Jenna<\/span>\u00a0is a postdoctoral fellow in the Golub Capital Social Impact Lab at Northwestern University\u2019s 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/h4>\n

Valerio Iannucci<\/a><\/h4>\n
Management & Organizations, Boston University<\/h6>\n
Valerio is a third-year PhD candidate in Management and Organizations. He primarily adopts qualitative methods to study how laypeople contribute to or interfere in professional work and organizations across a wide range of settings. He is currently exploring the organization of first-response groups that stepped up during the coronavirus pandemic.<\/span><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/h4>\n

Hyo Young Lee<\/a><\/h4>\n
Management & Organizations, Boston University<\/h6>\n
Hyo is a PhD student with a research focus on the practices and processes of how people interact during crises at various levels\u2014individual, organizational, and social. She is currently conducting ethnographic research on how frontline workers supporting refugee resettlement address the comprehensive needs of refugees amid resource constraints. Additionally, she is working on research related to crisis management in public health systems, North Korean refugee entrepreneurs, and the experiences of working mothers reentering the workforce after extended parental leave.<\/div>\n

<\/h4>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"Edna Nazarov<\/a><\/h4>\n
Management and Organizations, Boston University<\/h6>\n

Edna is a PhD student in Management and Organizations. Her research draws on economic sociology and organizational theory to explore how individuals in precarious and stigmatized occupations make sense of their identities within complex organizational and professional environments. Edna primarily employs qualitative and ethnographic methods to understand how people experience and interpret their everyday organizational realities.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Zosia Cooper<\/a><\/h4>\n
Sociology, UC San Diego<\/h6>\n
Zosia Cooper is a PhD student in Sociology at UC San Diego. She is interested in how people think about work and the economy in their everyday lives.<\/span> Zosia’ dissertation focuses on Gen Z\u2019s investment in financial markets, especially highly volatile assets such as cryptocurrency and NFTs.\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

<\/h4>\n

Alumni<\/h4>\n

\"\"Elif Birced<\/a><\/h4>\n
Postdoctoral Associate, MIT Sloan School of Management and the Schwarzman College of Computing<\/h6>\n

Elif earned her Ph.D. 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\u00a0 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).<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"Yun Ha Cho<\/span><\/a><\/h4>\n
Assistant Professor<\/span>, University of Indiana<\/span><\/h6>\n

Yun Ha Cho graduated with a PhD in Sociology and Business Strategy from 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 organizations and markets, with implications for inequality.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"Dilan Eren<\/a><\/h4>\n
Assistant Professor, Ivey Business School<\/h6>\n

Dilan works at the intersection of work, occupations, and organizations by adopting a cultural sociology lens to examine topics of social inequality. <\/span>Her dissertation, \u201c<\/span>The Self-Taught Economy: Open-Access and Inclusion in the Tech Industry<\/em><\/span>,\u201d 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"Meghann Lucy<\/a><\/h4>\n
Assistant Professor, Montana State University<\/h6>\n

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. She graduated in 2024 with a PhD in sociology from Boston University.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"Micah Rajunov<\/a><\/h4>\n
Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Alberta<\/h6>\n

Micah graduated in 2024 with a PhD in Management & Organizations from Boston University’s Questrom School of Business. With a broad interest in occupations, technology, and the future of work, Micah\u2019s current projects include an analysis of physicians during the AIDS epidemic, and a study on the careers of competitive video gamers.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\" <\/strong><\/a>Qi Song<\/strong><\/a><\/h4>\n
Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Toronto<\/h6>\n

Qi Song graduated from 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"Gokhan Mulayim<\/a><\/h4>\n
Adjunct Lecturer, Truman State University<\/h6>\n

Working primarily at the intersection of economic and cultural sociology, organizations, occupations and work, and urban studies, Gokhan 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 examined the economization of private security as a political, social and affective good in Istanbul.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Ladin Bayurgil<\/a><\/h4>\n
Assistant Professor, Turkish-German University, Istanbul, Turkey<\/span><\/h6>\n

Ladin<\/span> Bayurgil examines<\/span> 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<\/span>\u2019s work spans urban and economic sociology, sociology of work and occupations, and particularly asks questions around urban precarious labor. Ladin<\/span>\u00a0has received her PhD in Sociology from Boston University, and BA in Sociology, and Political Science and International Relations from Bogazici University in Turkey.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"Anna Gibson<\/a><\/h4>\n
Postdoctoral researcher, MIT<\/h6>\n

Anna<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>Gibson<\/span>\u00a0is 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/h4>\n

Audrey Holm<\/a><\/h4>\n
Assistant Professor in Management & Human Resources Department, HEC Paris<\/span><\/h6>\n

Audrey\u2019s 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. Her dissertation looked at counselors specialized in helping formerly incarcerated jobseekers. Audrey graduated with her PhD in Management at Boston University\u2019s Questrom School of Business.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/h4>\n

Patricia Ward<\/span><\/a><\/h4>\n
Postdoctoral Researcher, Technische Universit\u00e4t Dresden<\/span><\/h6>\n

Patricia Ward is a postdoctoral research associate at the Center for Integration Studies and the Institute of Sociology (by courtesy) a<\/span>t the Technische\u00a0<\/span>Universit\u00e4t Dresden.\u00a0Her research interests are in the areas of transnational labor, migration\/mobility, and humanitarian aid and development.\u00a0Patricia 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.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Affiliated Faculty Michel Anteby (Co-Director of Precarity & Inequality 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19623,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":4,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/precarity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/47"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/precarity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/precarity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/precarity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19623"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/precarity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47"}],"version-history":[{"count":52,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/precarity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/47\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":465,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/precarity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/47\/revisions\/465"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/precarity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}