Department of Sociology

Spencer Headworth is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Indiana University and an Affiliated Scholar of the American Bar Foundation. His areas of research include law, social control, inequality, and transportation. He is currently working on several projects related to cars and driving. These include a study of race, class, and the geographic distribution of buy here, pay here car lots; a series of papers on the loss of driving privileges due to criminal legal contact; and a qualitative study of vehicle repossessions and their impact funded by the Russell Sage Foundation.

Dr. Headworth’s published work can be found in two books—Policing Welfare: Punitive Adversarialism in Public Assistance (University of Chicago Press, 2021) and Rules of the Road: The Automobile and the Transformation of American Criminal Justice (Stanford University Press, 2023)—as well as articles in American Sociological Review, Social Forces, Sociological Theory, Law & Society Review, Punishment & Society, and other venues. He has received the ASA Sociology of Law Section’s Distinguished Article Award and Honorable Mention for LSA’s Herbert Jacob Book Prize.