DEPARTMENT OF SOCIOLOGY

Area(s) of Interest

Sociological methods and epistemology, race theory, anti-colonial thought, empire, race and racism, global sociology

Specialities

Historical Sociology
Inequality/Stratification
Law and Society
Political Sociology
Qualitative Methodology
Race, Gender, and Class
Social Movements
Theory

Current Research 

I am a transnational sociologist of inequality who examines cases of grassroots resistance to inegalitarian governance to clarify the relationships between discourses of oppression and material inequality. As a methodological pluralist with a current expertise in historical and survey methods I use both qualitative and quantitative methods to trace how people’s political imaginaries shape their strategies of resistance, how these strategies actually impact laws and policies, and how these laws and policies change or reproduce material inequality. Though not without exception, I primarily study instances where racial beliefs impact racial inequalities through social movements as case studies revealing how political imaginaries relate to material inequalities. I also write on sociological epistemology, determining how the ideas produced by social scientists reproduce and deconstruct social inequality in both discursive and material ways.

Relying on conceptual tools from historical sociology, global sociology, sociology of race, critical social theory, and anti-colonial thought, my dissertation puts forth a novel sociological theory of race that accounts for the relationship between race as an idea and race as instantiation of material inequality. In “Specifying Race: Defining Race Using a Post Colonial Set Theoretic Framework,” currently in revision at Sociological Theory, I argue that available sociological definitions of race essentialize and naturalize racial difference across the materialist/symbolist cleavage in the literature by declaring or implying that racial categories are based on phenotype and ancestry. I offer an alternative definition of race that thoroughly denaturalizes race, arguing that race is a subset of structures (systems of rules which determine social role identities which determine resource allocation) of descent-based difference. Within this framework, the substance of racial categories distinguishes race from other structures of descent-based difference; racial categories, I argue, were generated during early Modern Western European colonial expansion based on local determinations of use-value to Western European Empires.

Based on data collected in Chicago using a survey instrument I co-constructed within a team led by race sociologists at the University of Illinois at Chicago, “ What are they So Afraid of? Racial Cognizance and White Political Action in Support of Racial Equity”, in revision at Theory and Social Inquiry, uses novel survey questions to pull apart the long-since equivalence of person-centered (versus structural) blame and white (versus minority) blame. I demonstrate how blaming white people for racial inequality, as opposed to simply blaming structural causes, is a central and uniquely powerful predictor of participatory support in Black racial justice social movements.

Publications

Brown, Karida and Luna Vincent. 2022. “American Pragmatism and the Dilemma of the Negro.” Pp 364-176 in The New Pragmatist Social Science: Agency, Inquiry, and Democracy. Edited by Neil L. Gross, Isaac Ariail Reed and Christopher Winship. New York: Columbia University Press.

Vincent, Luna. In Revision.“ What are they So Afraid of? Racial Cognizance and White Political Action in Support of Racial Equity” Theory and Social Inquiry

Vincent, Luna. In Revision. “ Specifying Race: A Set Theoretic Analytical Framework for a Post Colonial Sociology of Race” Sociological Theory.