DIRECTORY LISTING
Biography
I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Lehman College. I earned by Ph.D. in Sociology from Columbia University in 2020. I also hold a M.P.A. in Urban Policy from Columbia.
My research specializations include race and ethnicity, social inequality, education, and urban sociology. In my scholarship, I examine the contours of racial inequality among youth in the American education and justice systems—especially as it concerns their interactions with authority figures. In my primary project, I study the role of trust in student-educator relationships, the salience of trust for student outcomes, and racial differences in trust among youth. This work draws on longitudinal data from the NYC Department of Education and interviews in high schools.
In a second strand of my research, I investigate how youth manage involuntary contact with police officers and how they cope in the aftermath of an encounter. A third strand of my work surveys Sociology’s stance on inequality reduction and the discipline’s impact on this effort. This project has been especially valuable to my own thinking about research-driven strategies to reduce youth inequality. My research has received funding support from the National Science Foundation and MDRC. For more information, please visit: www.brittanyfoxwilliams.com.