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

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 Kathryn Edin, Jens Ludwig, Sendhil Mullainathan, and Timothy Nelson

Violence is concentrated in communities marked by economic distress, segregation, and institutional disinvestment. Yet even within these environments, individuals differ significantly in their involvement with violence. There is large within-person variation as well. Why? We draw on data from 99 in-depth interviews with young men in Chicago to inductively identify three core social cognitions that may help explain within-neighborhood and within-person variation in violence: misconstruing ambiguous cues as threats, defaulting to a narrow set of behavioral responses, and attributing violent behavior to fixed personal traits rather than situational factors. These findings bridge structural theories of violence with the dual-systems model of cognition to reveal how past environmental exposures become encoded in automatic cognitive processes. These social cognitions appear to be shaped by current, but also past, contexts, yet are not immutable; targeted interventions can shift them in ways that reduce violence engagement, suggesting new directions for violence theory and prevention.

Forthcoming in Criminology, November 2025 [working paper]

This study draws on 95 interviews and observations with gang-affiliated individuals in Chicago to examine how gang structures shape disengagement and desistance from crime. Over the last two decades, the city’s gangs have experienced a decline in group closure, or their capacity to regulate membership and member behavior, and a blurring of boundaries between those active in a gang from all others. In the past, Chicago’s gangs maintained closure and bright boundaries that made gang affiliations, norms, and territories clearly defined. Leaving these gangs required costly exit rituals that signaled an unambiguous departure while facilitating desistance. Today, with weaker gang structures and blurry boundaries, leaving a gang is no longer a distinct event. However, the ease of gang disengagement makes desistance harder, as inactive members struggle to knife off past ties and access turning points. In this uncertain landscape, desistance tactics can backfire, sending blurred signals—behaviors intended to create distance from former affiliates and rivals but appear as wavering commitment to supporters—that trap individuals in a liminal space between social worlds. Contrary to leading desistance theories that emphasize individual readiness, opportunity, and pro-social bonds, this study underscores how group structures critically shape pathways out of crime.

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.