Department of Sociology

My research and teaching interests include race, immigration, childhood, and family, with an eye towards understanding how children of immigrants respond to social exclusion.

My current project examines the lives of Mexican-and Korean-Americans language brokers. Today, immigrants and their children comprise nearly a quarter of the population. The majority of these children have at least one parent who has difficulty speaking English. The lack of translation services within the United States prompts bilingual children of immigrants to translate and advocate for the familywork many Americans think of as an adult responsibility. Tracing youths racialized and classed encounters, ranging from interactions with landlords to life-threatening situations involving health care and police protection, I argue that translation encapsulates far more than verbal exchanges. For these children, translating involves what I call inclusion work or presenting their parents as normal Americans deserving of equal rights and full citizenship. In a socio-historical moment where immigrants of color are depicted as threats to the economic stability of true Americans, my work offers a much needed critique of American culture, exposing the contradictions between the ideal of equality and the actual practices of race, class, and language-based exclusion. My work appears in Childhood, Social Problems, and Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, and received awards from the American Sociological Association and the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction. I am currently working on my book manuscript tentatively entitled, Translating Race, Class, and Immigrant Lives.