About Me
Well, hello there! My name is Nahrissa and I am a Sociology Ph.D. student at The Ohio State University. Broadly speaking my interests are in race, identity, place, and politics. I am a qualitative researcher at heart, finding that the questions I ask are best answered via interviews, focus groups, and ethnography. To me, there is something very special about telling other people's stories in their own words.
My approaches to sociology, teaching, advising, and mentoring are one in the same: make information accessible, pay attention to the nuance, and meet people where they are. As a budding public sociologist, I am committed to ensuring that the work I do goes beyond the creation of knowledge for knowledge's sake. What's the point of studying society, if we, as sociologists, do not engage with it?
Outside of my graduate program I enjoy daily walks, birdwatching, crossword and jigsaw puzzles, making new dog friends, mastering new versions of Solitaire, my houseplants, chatting, and Internet rabbit holes.
Projects
Utilizing online focus groups, my current project examines the role of familial racial composition in racial identity formation and experience for Black-white biracial adults. The primary goal is to understand if there is a difference in identify formation and experience for someone who has a Black mother and white father, or white mother and Black father. The basic family structure of parents and siblings will be considered, though there is ample room for future research to explore additional familial compositions.
Previous projects include my undergraduate thesis which studied organizational response to conflict, using a grocery cooperative as a case study. Employees and others were interviewed to assess the ways in which the organization chose to either avoid conflict altogether or address it head on, as well as how various actors within the organization viewed different points of conflict. The thesis received the Best Undergraduate Thesis Award from the Sociology Department at the University of Minnesota in 2020.
Copies of this thesis are available upon request.
