Catherine Sirois
Research
My research agenda seeks to answer a fundamental question: how does the state govern marginalized groups—particularly low-income Black and Brown families—and how do the dimensions of state governance, from everyday institutional interactions to population-level policies, intersect to shape the life chances of group members? Specifically, I study how the state manages children at the junction of child welfare and juvenile justice institutions; how the process of leaving prison influences people’s social and economic well-being; and the effects of state policy, from the mass incarceration of young men to restrictive immigration laws, on marginalized families. To examine these questions, I have deployed a range of qualitative and quantitative methods, including ethnographic observation, in-depth interviews, and analyses of survey and administrative data that leverage causal inference techniques. Taken together, my research contributes to the fields of poverty and inequality; punishment and society; race, class, and gender; health disparities; and methods for studying hard-to-reach populations. My work has appeared in American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Social Forces, American Journal of Epidemiology, Sociological Forum, and Social Science & Medicine.
My current book project—Interlocking Institutions: Welfare, Punishment, and the Governance of Crossover Youth—investigates how marginalized groups are governed given that the complexity of people's lives defies institutional boundaries. How does the state construct and classify people, for example, as patients or prisoners, healthy or disabled, legal or illegal? To answer this question, I study a case that spans bureaucratic borders: crossover youth, children at the junction of child welfare and juvenile justice institutions. Because crossover youth—perceived as both dependent and delinquent—challenge the legal, administrative, and moral boundaries of these two institutions, they present an ideal case for illuminating interlocking processes of state governance. To analyze how crossover youth are governed, I conducted over 300 hours of ethnographic observation within a California juvenile court and 40 interviews with court actors. This project has received support from the National Science Foundation, Josephine de Karman Foundation, and several funding sources at Stanford University. One article based on this project is published in American Sociological Review and recently received the Devah Pager Outstanding Article Award from the Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility Section of the American Sociological Association.
Teaching
Sociology offers the transformative opportunity to develop tools that help us better understand the relationship between our lived experience and broader society. As a teacher and mentor, I seek to guide students in this process by fostering their natural curiosity about the social world, helping them develop critical thinking skills, and building collaborative learning communities.
I have developed my teaching philosophy and practice in three different roles: as primary instructor for a junior seminar at Brown University on the governance of marginalized communities; as a teaching assistant at Stanford University for "Theoretical Analysis and Research Design," “The Social Determinants of Health,” and “America’s Poverty Course;” and co-coordinator of the Stanford Sociology Department’s Qualitative Methods Workshop, as well as a course I developed with fellow Ph.D. students—“What is a Good Life?”—for students incarcerated at a San Francisco County jail. As a project coordinator at Harvard Kennedy School, graduate student, and now postdoctoral fellow, I have also mentored over a dozen undergraduate research assistants, many of whom are now pursuing their own academic careers. My own experiences learning in community have motivated me to build supportive and intellectually stimulating environments for students moving forward.