Graduate Students on the Market
Introduction
Get to know our talented PhD students on the job market! UIC Sociology prepares graduate students for jobs in a variety of settings, including a range of higher education positions as well as research positions in government, for-profit industry, and non-profit and advocacy organizations.
Currently on the market:
Ni'Shele Jackson
Previous Degrees:
B.A. Wellesley College
Specialty Areas:
Race & Ethnicity, Gender & Sexuality, Social Movements
Research Interests:
My research entails interrogating how race, gender, class hierarchies get culturally and materially reproduced through notions of health and weight. As a mixed methods scholar, I employ both qualitative and quantitative methods such as interviewing, ethnography, and surveys in order to answer these questions. The overarching goal of my research is to give insight into ways we can create more just, communal, and empowering visions of embodied health and health programs.
Isaiah Jeong
Specialty Areas: Race and Ethnicity, Inter-minority Politics, Sociological Theory, Social Movements, Sociology of Religion
Research interests: I am a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Illinois Chicago. My work as an ethnographer examines race relations in the South Side of Chicago. For the last three years, I have detailed the interracial politics of Black and Asian Americans through participant observations, archival work, and interviews in Chicago’s historic Bronzeville and Chinatown neighborhoods. Through an intersectional lens (race, class, gender, and religion), I uncover the conditions that hinder or enable conflictual, neutral, and collaborative inter-minority relations across varied organizational contexts. Another major focus of work examines how religion shapes racial formation processes and political movements. I have published two peer-reviewed articles (Journal of Scientific Studies of Religion and Political Theology [forthcoming]) and two book chapters (Taylor and Francis and Oxford University Press). My research has been supported by several grants, including the American Sociological Association (ASA DDRIG), the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, and the Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy.
Angela Silva
Previous Degrees:
M.A. Sociology, University of Illinois at Chicago
M.A. Sociology, University of Texas at El Paso
B.A. Criminal Justice and Sociology, University of Texas at El Paso
Specialty Areas:
Race and ethnicity, racialization, racialized organizations.
Research interests:
My current research focuses on looking at how norms, behaviors, and cultures of organizations are racialized and gendered in how they shape the experiences of women of color in higher education.
Mariya Khan
Previous Degrees:
B.A. in Religion and Sociology, Hamline University
M.A. in Sociology, University of Illinois at Chicago
Areas of Specialization: Race and Ethnicity, Sociology of Medicine, Sociology of Health
Mariya Khan is a doctoral candidate currently collecting data for her dissertation: “Puzzling Persistence: State-Operated Psychiatric Institutions and the Criminalization of Mental Illness in the Post-Deinstitutionalization Era.” Her dissertation uses a combination of archival sources, institutional data, ethnography, and first-person interviews with stakeholders and health professionals to examine the ways state-operated psychiatric hospitals and state-mandated psychiatric treatment have changed in the “post-deinstitutionalization” era. In particular, she aims to explain the ways in which post-deinstitutionalization criminalization of mental illness, and the discourse around criminalization, has contributed to changes within and to the continued persistence of state hospitals into the late 20th and early 21st centuries, despite the “community care” paradigm established in this same period.
Mariya has also served as a research assistant and project coordinator for the Skin Tone Identity and Inequalities Project (STiiP) research group, contributing to the development of novel field survey techniques in the study of colorism inequality. In this role she coordinated a pilot study whose findings have been published in the Journal of Survey Statistics and Methodology, and afterwards collaborated on a grant application for National Science Foundation funding which, when received, she continued to support as lead coordinator of research activities. She continues to collaborate on multi-author journal submissions with the team.
Mariya has also taught several courses either as lead instructor of record or as a teaching assistant/lab instructor. These include undergraduate courses ( Intro to Methods, Intro to Statistics, Intro to Sociology, Social Problems, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity) as well as graduate level courses (Intro and Intermediate Statistics). She has also served as a graduate student representative on multiple departmental committees
Nancy Toure
Specialty Areas: Race & Ethnicity, Racialization, Gender, Organizations, Critical Race Theory
My research contributes to scholarship on race, gender, work, and organizations by examining how structural mechanisms within institutions perpetuate racial inequality, even in contexts that appear equitable in terms of mission or demographics. Across my projects, I employ advanced quantitative methods, including confirmatory factor analysis, multilevel structural equation modeling, latent profile analysis, and multinomial logistic regression. My broader research agenda integrates theories of racialized organizations and institutional inequality with empirical analyses of large-scale administrative and survey data to reveal how inequality is reproduced and maintained within the U.S. federal workforce.
Emily Via
Previous degrees:
B.A. Sociology and Gender Studies, New College of Florida
M.A. Sociology, University of Illinois Chicago
Specialty Areas:
Gender; Embodiment; Bodies; Queer Studies, Trans Studies, and Masculinities
Research interests:
Emily Via (they/them) is a doctoral student in Sociology with a graduate concentration in Gender and Women’s Studies. Their current research focuses on trans-antagonistic public policy and attitudes, and their effects on those who seek and provide gender-affirming healthcare. Emily received their Bachelor’s degree from New College of Florida in Sociology and Gender Studies, and their Master’s in Sociology from UIC. Their upcoming collaborative book chapter in Families as They Really Are interrogates non-binary people’s family relationships, and their master’s paper investigates how non-binary people relate to the label and category of “transgender.”
Alexia L. Palomino-Cortez
