Demetrius Murphy

Demetrius Miles Murphy is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Southern California. He earned his B.B.A. in Management Consulting and Africana Studies at the University of Notre Dame and his M.A. in Latin American Studies at Vanderbilt University. His research interests lie in the areas of race and ethnicity, urban sociology, economic sociology, and sociology of culture. He focuses on flourishing, the Black class structure, and Black placemaking. He has two ongoing lines of research. One research line investigates Blackness and responses to anti-Blackness in Brazil. The latest manuscript from this line of research explores police killings and racial ideologies in Brazil using social media data. His primary line of research is his dissertation, Remaking Black LA: Flourishing in the Anti-Black Metropolis. He examines how Black people across the class spectrum create and experience flourishing in Los Angeles County through community development, business, and art.

Murphy’s first manuscript, “Aquilombamento, Entrepreneurial Black Placemaking in an Anti-Black City,” received the Devon T. Wade Student Paper Award from the Association of Black Sociologists, the James E. Blackwell Graduate Student Paper Award from the ASA Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities, and an honorable mention from the Cristina Maria Riegos Distinguished Student Paper Award from ASA Latina/o Sociology Section and is published in the ASA journal Sociology of Race and Ethnicity. His second manuscript, ““Quem pode ser a dona?”: Black Women Entrepreneurs and Gendered Racism,” received the SSSP Kauffman Foundation Best Student Paper Award in Social Entrepreneurship and Innovation and is published in Gender, Work & Organization. His third manuscript, ““Affirming Blackness in a “Colorblind” Anti-Black Nation: How Brazilians Negotiate Police Killings of Afro-Brazilians,” received the SSSP Global Division Student Paper Competition Award and has an R&R. 

• M.A. , Vanderbilt University, 2019
• BBA , University Of Notre Dame, 2015