Dr. Jayanti Owens

Jayanti Owens is the Mary Tefft and John Hazen White, Sr. Assistant Professor of Sociology and International and Public Affairs at Brown University. She received her BA in Political Science and Sociology/Anthropology with High Honors from Swarthmore College in 2006, where she was a proud member of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship (MMUF). She then received her Ph.D. in Sociology and Demography from Princeton University in 2013. From 2013-2015, she was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health and Society Scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has worked at organizations such as the Urban Institute, Mathematica Policy Research, and the U.S. House of Representatives.

Her research interests lie at the intersections of social stratification, education, organizations, social demography, and population health. She studies social disparities in how persons in positions of power evaluate behaviors and competence and, ultimately, how these evaluations lead to racial/ethnic and gender disparities in educational and labor market outcomes at the population level. In one current project, she investigates the drivers of racial disparities in school discipline, finding that Black and Latinx children are more harshly sanctioned in school even when they enter school with the same behaviors and competencies as their White counterparts.

Jayanti’s research has been funded by the Spencer Foundation, the National Academy of Education, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Social Science Research Council, the Andrew Mellon Foundation, and the Institute for Clinical and Translational Research at the University of Wisconsin. Resulting work has been published in Social Forces, Sociology of Education, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Social Science Research, Sociology of Religion, and the Peabody Journal of Education.

Dr. Laurence Ralph

Laurence Ralph is a Professor Anthropology at Princeton University. Before that, he was a Professor of Anthropology and African American Studies at Harvard University, where he taught for nearly a decade. He earned his Ph.D. and Masters of Arts degrees (2006) in Anthropology from the University of Chicago, and a Bachelor of Science degree (2004) from Georgia Institute of Technology where he majored in History, Technology, and Society. His research and writing explores how police abuse, mass incarceration, and crime make disease, disability, and premature death seem like natural outcomes for people of color, who are often seen as expendable by “polite” society. His books include Renegade Dreams: Living Through Injury in Gangland Chicago (2014) and The Torture Letters: Reckoning with Police Violence (2019), both published by the University of Chicago Press.