DEPARTMENT OF SOCIOLOGY

Area(s) of Interest

Sociology of Knowledge and Culture; Race, Ethnicity, and Panethnicity; Political Sociology; Science and Technology Studies; Qualitative and Ethnographic Methods

Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz is on leave for the academic year 22-23.

Biography

Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz was born and raised on Chicago’s northwest side. Prior to graduate school, he led and participated in several Puerto Rican-focused grassroots and activist projects in the Humboldt Park/West Town area. He received his PhD from Brown University, his MA from the University of Illinois-Chicago, and his BA from Northeastern Illinois University. Michael joined Northwestern’s Department of Sociology and Latina/o Studies Program in 2016.

His first book is Figures of the Future: Latino Civil Rights and the Politics of Demographic Change (Princeton University Press), which is based on his award-winning dissertation. In addition, he has published on censuses, poverty knowledge, Latino identity formation, and the relationship between critical sociologies of race and science and technology studies. 

He is currently engaged in a collaborative interview-based project on race and political trust. His next book project will explore the history and afterlives of political repression against Chicago’s anti-colonial Puerto Rican movements. This project involves efforts to create a community-based archive.

He teaches courses on race and racial knowledge, qualitative/ethnographic methods, and Latino identity and politics, among others.

Selected Publications

Rodríguez-Muñiz, Michael. 2021. Figures of the Future: Latino Civil Rights and the Politics of Demographic Change. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Mora, G. Mora, Julie Dowling, and Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz. 2021. “‘Mostly Rich White Men, Nothing in Common’: Latino Views on Political (Under)Representation in the Trump Era.” American Behavioral Scientist

Rodríguez-Muñiz, Michael. 2017. “Cultivating Consent: Nonstate Leaders and the Orchestration of State Legibility.” American Journal of Sociology 123:385-425. 

Rodríguez-Muñiz, Michael. 2020. “Towards a Political Sociology of Demography.” Pp. 384-407 in The New Handbook of Political Sociology: States, Parties, Movements, Citizenship and Globalization, edited by Thomas Janoski, Cedric de Leon, Joya Misra and Isaac Martin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Rodríguez-Muñiz, Michael. 2019. “Racial Arithmetic: Ethnoracial Politics in a Relational Key.” Pp. 278-295 in Relational Formations of Race: Theory, Method and Practice, edited by Natalia Molina, Daniel Martinez HoSang, and Ramón Gutiérrez. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Rodríguez-Muñiz, Michael. 2016. “Bridgework: STS, Sociology, and the ‘Dark Matters’ of Race.” Engaging Science, Technology & Society 2: 214-226. 

Rodríguez-Muñiz, Michael. 2015. “Intellectual Inheritances: Cultural Diagnostics and the State of Poverty Knowledge.” American Journal of Cultural Sociology 3: 89-122.