Outstanding Graduate Student Paper Award, Decision-Making, Social Networks, and Society Section, American Sociological Association, 2025; Robert F Dentler Student Award, Sociological Practice and Public Sociology Section, American Sociological Association, 2025

link to working paper

Sociologists have extensively studied violence but paid less attention to how firearms shape the identities and life trajectories of those who carry them. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and life-course interviews in Chicago, I examine how individuals develop reputations as shooters and the obstacles they face in shedding this label. The erosion of gang control over gun markets, coupled with the status attached to being a shooter, heightens pressures to cultivate violent reputations. Youth move from acquiring a gun to becoming a shooter through rituals and public displays that transform gun carrying into a social identity. Three mechanisms make shooter identities particularly durable: the lethality of firearms creates lasting rival networks; social media preserves shooter reputations through permanent digital archives; and widespread firearm availability creates a security dilemma where former shooters cannot safely disarm while rivals remain armed. For former shooters, conventional turning points like school, romantic relationships, and work become sites of vulnerability rather than transformation. This study reveals how guns function as social forces that make exit from violence increasingly difficult even after behavioral change occurs.

Co-authored with Chris Blattman

This project documents the organizational structure, economic operations, and governance systems of Chicago's major street gang nations during their peak corporatization from the 1980s through the mid-2000s. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with former affiliates and community stakeholders, federal RICO court records, and historical archives, the study investigates how these organizations built formal hierarchies, managed drug markets, coordinated across sets, resolved internal conflicts, and established parallel institutions that displaced civic life in affected neighborhoods. The research addresses a critical gap in the empirical record: the era between the early nation-building period documented through the 1970s and today's fragmented, structureless crews remains largely unsystematized, and the generation with firsthand knowledge is aging out of reach. By combining organizational economics, personnel economics, and political economy frameworks, the project aims to produce the first broad, comparative account of how multiple gang nations actually functioned as institutions, with implications for violence reduction policy, democratic renewal in communities where criminal governance eroded civic participation, and comparative understanding of organized crime in cities from Medellín to Rio de Janeiro facing similar dynamics today.

Co-authored with Kathryn Edin, Jens Ludwig, Sendhil Mullainathan, and Timothy Nelson

Most Americans believe that poverty is caused by individual failure. Americans, more so than Europeans, think that how someone’s life turns out is a function of their own attitudes and behaviors. In this study we re-examine this perspective drawing on interviews with 99 current and past participants of Chicago’s Rapid Employment and Development Initiative (READI), a behaviorally informed violence prevention program, and six months of observation at READI sites. These data illustrate the impact on subjects of what appears to be a key barrier to their economic self-sufficiency – trauma – as well as the long shadow trauma plays in shaping every aspect of daily life. The results suggest the hypothesis that common interpretations of poverty as a downstream consequence of poor life choices ignore the role of trauma. Ending poverty in America may not be possible without researchers and policymakers paying greater attention to this underappreciated source of disadvantage.