DEPARTMENT OF SOCIOLOGY

Area(s) of Interest

Race and racism; political sociology; global and transnational race; historical sociology; qualitative methods; computational text analysis

Current Research 

Kristina E. Lee is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology and a Fellow in Northwestern’s Latin American and Caribbean Studies Cluster. Common themes in her research are questions of transnationalism, race, Blackness, Latin America, and the state. She has conducted a comparative-historical analysis of Mexican and Peruvian state responses to the 2001 UN World Conference Against Racism mandate to formally include Afro-descendants and written a review of literature pertaining to the topic of transnational race in the discipline of sociology. Her dissertation research builds on these projects through a relational-historical examination of Afro-descendant state inclusion throughout Latin America which considers the role of the modern state in maintaining race as a transnational system of power. She is also currently working on an ethnographic and interview-based project documenting the role of mutual aid groups in Chicago as a community response to the COVID-19 pandemic.