About

I am currently Professor of Sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and an affiliated faculty member in the Gender and Women’s Studies Program. I earned my PhD in Sociology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (2008). Broadly, my research focuses on the social construction of health and illness, the sociology of pandemics, the politics of knowledge production, and peoples’ grounded experiences with healing and health care systems. 

I study pandemics because they reveal pre-existing structural inequalities and the state’s uneven investment in its residents. Epidemics also invite contestations over knowledge, thus exposing the political structure of science and medicine. But my entry point for the analysis of epidemics involves centering the experiences of the most marginal – who are always most vulnerable to exposure and risk. Centering the narration of disease on the margins, allows me to develop a critique of the racial, economic, national and corporeal hierarchies that get inscribed in mainstream approaches to illness and health. Following Michel Foucault, my work is archaeological in that it seeks to unpack the ways in which scientific truths are constructed and naturalized, and it is genealogical because it excavates knowledges that have been subjugated in the process.

I have received numerous awards for my scholarship and teaching. I was awarded the 2024 Distinguished Researcher Award from the University of Illinois at Chicago, the 2022 Lewis A. Coser Award for Theoretical Agenda-Setting from the Theory Section of the American Sociological Association and the 2023 Robin M. Williams, Jr. Lecturer Award from the Eastern Sociological Society. I have also received the Junior Theorist Award, the Robert K. Merton Prize and the Star Nelkin Award. I have received two awards for excellence in teaching from UIC, as well as the 2018 Graduate Mentoring award.