Dr. Leah E. Gose

Dr. Leah E. Gose is ERI’s Turpanjian Chair in Civil Society and Social Change Postdoctoral Scholar for the 2023 – 2024 academic year. She completed her PhD in sociology at Harvard University in 2023. Her primary research interests center on the role of community organizations as vital aspects of the social safety net, in how they shape access to resources for individuals, opportunities to build social networks and promote civic engagement, and respond to governmental policy and funding influences. Dr. Gose’ scholarship contributes primarily to the study of organizations and inequality/poverty, but also engages with urban sociology, political sociology, social policy, and social networks.  

Her dissertation, “Feeding the Need: Charitable Food-Providing Organizations and Gaps in the Social Safety Net,” explored the landscape of community organizations providing charitable food to people in need in the metropolitan Atlanta area. She performed mixed-method analyses from data collected over five years through ~175 interviews and site visits, along with photos and website reviews. Utilizing a novel framework for differentiating between organizations and services and their operational variations, Dr. Gose highlights in her dissertation specific areas for inequitable food and service provision at the organizational-level. This work contributes not only to the study of food insecurity, but organizational theory, the study of inequality, and social policy. 

At USC, Dr. Gose is expanding on her dissertation work, looking to explore organizational-level service provision in Los Angeles and through a larger survey project to be disseminated across the United States. She also hopes to explore how individuals navigate organizationally-embedded resources through future qualitative projects working with Deaf communities and aging senior populations. Dr. Gose has extensive organizational-level analysis experience and enjoys sharing these skills to help communities and organizations improve the equity of service provision for all. From 2024 to 2026 she will be a Provost Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Southern California in the Department of Sociology, after which she will transition into an assistant professor position in the same department.   

Research topics:
Inequality, Organizations, Social Policy, Urban Sociology, Welfare Reform, Mixed Methods, Grants Reviewing, Organizational Program Evaluation

Publications:  

Small, Mario L. and Leah E. Gose. 2020. “How do low-income people form survival networks? Understanding the role of routine organizations.” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 689(1), 89–109. 

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0002716220915431 

Gose, Leah E. and Theda Skocpol. 2019. “Resist, Persist, and Transform: The Emergence and Impact of Grassroots Resistance Groups Opposing the Trump Presidency” Mobilization: An International Journal 24(3):293-317 

https://doi.org/10.17813/1086-671X-24-3-293 

Grants, fellowships, and awards:  

Graduate Fellow, Harvard Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies 2022-2023 

Center for American Political Studies at Harvard University Dissertation Research Fellowship on the Study of the American Republic 2021-2022 

Malcolm Hewitt Wiener PhD Scholar in Poverty and Justice, Multidisciplinary Program in Inequality & Social Policy (Fellowship) 2018-2021