I am an Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. I write and teach on cities and regional political economy, social inequality, and the history of race and racism in the United States.
Research
My current book project traces the history of fiscal crisis and urban austerity in the Rust Belt state of Michigan from the 1970s to the 2010s. I use historical and mixed (qualitative and quantitative) methods to document how austerity became the dominant (and often bipartisan) policy response to urban crisis.
Other projects explore questions of race and racism in political economy perspective. In particular, I am interested in the relationship between race and class: (a) as it is conceptualized in sociological theory, and (b) as it manifests empirically. How have social scientists conceptualized the relationship between race and class over time, and what explains this intellectual history? And how does the relationship between race and class continue to shape social inequality in the United States?
Recent publications
Separate from Class? Toward a Theory of Race as Resource Signal, Social Problems
Against Race, Toward the Abolition of Racism, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity
Detroit (with D Kornberg), Oxford Bibliographies in Urban Studies
Banks, Alternative Institutions and the Spatial-Temporal Ecology of Racial Inequality in US Cities (with ML Small, A Akhavan, and Qi Wang), Nature Human Behavior
Recent teaching
Municipal Socialism (PubPol 475) *AY26-27
Race, Place, and Inequality (Soc 495, PubPol 475, PubPol 750)
Qualitative Methods (PubPol 633) *AY26-27
Sociology of Race and Ethnicity (Soc 303, AAS 303)
Values & Ethics: Racial Justice (PubPol 474) *AY26-27