Aliya SAPERSTEIN

Bio :

Aliya Saperstein, Assistant Professor at Stanford University, is LIEPP-OSC Visiting Professor from November 14th to December 14th 2016. She received her B.A. in Sociology from the University of Washington and her Ph.D. in Sociology and Demography from the University of California-Berkeley. In 2016, she received the Early Achievement Award from the Population Association of America. She has also been a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation.

Her research focuses on the social processes through which people come to perceive, name, and deploy seemingly immutable categorical differences - such as race and sex -and their consequences for explaining, and reinforcing, social inequality. Her current research projects explore several strands of this subject, including:

• The relationship between individual-level racial fluidity and the maintenance of group boundaries, racial stereotypes, and hierarchies.

• The implications of methodological decisions, especially the measurement of race/ethnicity and sex/gender in surveys, for studies of stratification and health disparities.

This research has been published for social science audiences in the American Journal of Sociology, the Annual Review of Sociology, Demography,and Gender & Society, among other venues, and for general science audiences in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and PLoS One. It also has been recognized with multiple article awards, and gained attention from national media outlets, including NPR and The Colbert Report.

During her stay in LIEPP/OSC, she presented her paper entitiled Racial Mobility: The Dynamics of Race and Inequality, in a seminar organised by LIEPP/OSC on November 18th 2016, and participated at the Workshop: Gender Inequality in Interdisciplinary Perspective organised by LIEPP on December 8th 2016.