Kritika Pandey
PhD Date: May 2027 (expected)
Dissertation Title: Culture(s) of Activism: Investigating Domestic Worker Organizing in India and the US.
Areas of Research/Teaching: Gender and Migration, Economic Sociology, Sociology of Culture, Political Sociology, Labor Movements, Qualitative Methods, Feminist Ethnography, Global and Transnational Sociology
Dissertation Committee: Hajar Yazdiha (co-chair, USC), Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, (co-chair, Princeton), Nina Eliasoph and Manuel Pastor
Email: kpandey@usc.edu
Recent publications:
Pandey, Kritika. 2026. Between hostile worlds and connected lives: Navigating contentions in domestic worker organizing. Economy and Society, 55(2), 254–276. https://doi.org/10.1080/03085147.2026.2631332
Pandey, Kritika. 2024. Book Review of Aid and the Help: International Development and Transnational Extraction of Care By Dinah Hannaford, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 38(1), 115–116. https://doi.org/10.1111/maq.12826
Sabio, Gianne Sheena, Kritika Pandey, and Rhacel Salazar Parreñas. 2022. Global Care Chains. In Routledge Handbook of Immigration and Refugee Studies, Second Edition (pp. 172–183). https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003194316-21
Pandey, Kritika*, Rhacel Salazar Parreñas* and Gianne Sheena Sabio*. Essential and Expendable: Migrant Domestic Workers and the COVID-19 Pandemic. American Behavioral Scientist, 65(10): 1287-1301. https://doi.org/10.1177/00027642211000396
*This article was an equal coauthorship
Works in Progress:
‒ “Tactical Solidarities in Precarious Labor: Navigating Caste, Gender and Class Hierarchies in Paid Domestic Work in India”
‒ “Contradictory Positionalities: Power, Privilege and Marginality in Transnational Feminist Ethnography”
Maggie Davis
PhD Date: May 2027 (Expected)
Dissertation Title: Making Methane Flow: Compression and the Governance of Unruly Publics, Materials, and Futures along the Mountain Valley Pipeline
Areas of Research/Teaching: Political Sociology, Science and Technology Studies, Environmental Sociology, Qualitative Methods
Dissertation Committee: Andrew Lakoff (chair), Nina Eliasoph, Dan Lainer-Vos, Christina Dunbar-Hester
Email: davisms@usc.edu
Works in Progress:
“Compression: Knowing Integrity, Governing Risk along the Mountain Valley Pipeline”
“Sensing Windows: Temporal Bounds of Pipeline Monitoring”
Arnab Chakraborty
PhD Date: May 2027 (Expected)
Dissertation Title: A Moral Economy of Dignity: How Workers in the 21st Century Mobilize for a Future Beyond Precarity
Areas of Research/Teaching: Sociology of Culture; Economic Sociology; Labor and Labor Movements; Organizational Theory; Political Sociology; Qualitative Research Methods; Ethnography; Precarious Work; Moral Economy; Dignity at Work; Solidarity Formation
Dissertation Committee: Paul Lichterman (Chair), Nina Eliasoph, Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, Lyn Spillman
Email: arnab@usc.edu
Recent Publications:
Chakraborty, Arnab. 2026. “Combating Tokenism: Highlighting the Role of Power in Making Inclusion Meaningful”. Qualitative Sociology. 49: 375–396. ( https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-025-09628-7 )
Chakraborty, Arnab and Paul Lichterman. 2022. “Ethnographic Approaches to the Study of Political Participation”. Oxford Handbook of Political Participation. New York: Oxford University Press.
Work in Progress:
Chakraborty, Arnab. “Constructing Dignity Claims: How Precarious Workers Mobilize by Utilizing Legal Knowledge and Ideas about Craftsmanship” (Ready for Submission)
Chakraborty, Arnab. “Bringing the Worker Back into Discussions of Future of Work: A Moral Economy of Dignity” (Ready for Submission)
Raquel Delerme
PhD Date: May 2027 (Expected)
Dissertation Title: Set Ablaze: Racialized and Gendered Labor Processes of California’s Incarcerated Women Firefighters
Areas of Research/Teaching: Race-Gender-Class, Punishment and Incarceration, Environmental Sociology, Qualitative Methods
Dissertation Committee: Jennifer Hook (co-chair) Hajar Yazdiha (co-chair), Manuel Pastor, Camille Gear-Rich
Email: delerme@usc.edu
Recent Publications:
Delerme, Raquel. 2025. “‘It’s Heartbreaking. It’s Expensive. It’s Hard’: How the Carceral Care Economy Harms Black and Latine Mothers.” Gender & Society, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/08912432251331534
Friedman, Brittany and Raquel Delerme. 2025. “We study mass surveillance for social control, and we see Trump laying the groundwork to ‘contain’ people of color and immigrants.” The Conversation.
Michael Sierra-Arévalo, José J. Alcocer, Lauren Brown, Raquel Delerme, Benjamin A.T. Graham, Harry G. Muttram, Jackson Trager, and Nicholas Weller “Police as Policymakers: How Experiences with Policy Implementation Shape Policy Representation.”
– “On Drugs: How Clinical and Carceral Logics Converge to (Mis)manage Addiction Among Incarcerated Women”
– “Making a Worker: Amenability to Penal Labor through News Media Coverage of Incarcerated Women Firefighters, 1977-2025”
PhD Date: May 2026
Dissertation Title: Imagining Inclusion: How Muslim Advocates Craft Public Images in U.S. Civic Life
Areas of Research/Teaching: Culture; Political Sociology; Sociology of Religion; Civic Inclusion; Qualitative Methods; Ethnography; American Muslims; Islam; Advocacy; Race and Ethnicity; Social Theory; Pragmatism
Dissertation Committee: Paul Lichterman (Chair), Nina Eliasoph, Hajar Yazdiha, Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, Cavan Concannon
Email: cantori@usc.edu
PhD Date: May 2026
Dissertation Title: Global Elites Made in China: How do Wealthy Chinese Families Navigate Foreign College Education?
Areas of Research/Teaching: Sociology of Culture; Social Stratification; Transnational and Global Education; Contemporary China; Transnational Asia/Asian America; Economic Sociology; Organizational Theory; Qualitative Research Methods; Quantitative Research Methods
Dissertation Committee: Ann Owens (co-chair, UCLA), Dan Schrage (co-chair, USC), Elizabeth Currid-Halkett (Internal member outside of department, USC Price), Laura Miller (External member, Brandeis)
Email: ruiyili@usc.edu
Work in Progress:
Li, Ruiyi. “How do organizational characteristics shape grassroots organizations’ survival strategies in China?” (Under Review)
Li, Ruiyi. “Assistive Parenting: How Chinese Elite Families Prepare for Studying Abroad?” (Ready for submission)
PhD Date: May 2027 (Expected)
Dissertation Title: Culture(s) of Activism: Investigating Domestic Worker Organizing in India and the US.
Areas of Research/Teaching: Gender and Migration; Economic Sociology; Sociology of Culture; Political Sociology; Labor Movements; Qualitative Methods; Feminist Ethnography; Global and Transnational Sociology
Dissertation Committee: Hajar Yazdiha (co-chair, USC), Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, (co-chair, Princeton), Nina Eliasoph, Manuel Pastor, and Eliz Sanasarian
Email: kpandey@usc.edu
Recent Publications:
Pandey, Kritika. 2025. “Caught between hostile worlds and connected lives: everyday inequalities, fraught intimacies and the fight for domestic worker rights”. (Under review at Economy and Society)
Pandey, Kritika. 2023. “Aid and the Help: International Development and Transnational Extraction of Care” (By Hannaford, Dinah), Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Med. Anthropology Quarterly.
2022 “Care Chain.” with Rhacel Salazar Parreñas and Gianne Sheena Sabio, in Routledge Handbook on Immigration and Refugee Studies. Eds. Anna Triandafyllidou. Routledge.
Pandey, Kritika*, Rhacel Salazar Parreñas* and Gianne Sheena Sabio*. 2021. “Essential and Expendable: Migrant Domestic Workers and the COVID-19 Pandemic.” American Behavioral Scientist, 65(10): 1287-1301. (*This article was an equal coauthorship)
