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 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.

In 1895, the U.S. Supreme Court validated the legality of racial segregation in their ruling for Plessy v. Ferguson. My dissertation reveals that the Creole Louisianan activists who organized Plessy v. Ferguson were challenging the constitutionality of racial distinction (as opposed to racial inequality) because they had grown up in the part of New Orleans characterized by French and Spanish colonial racial systems. I analyze the development of racial categories in French, Spanish and American Louisiana across 3 centuries as a case study of a set theoretic, post-colonial theory of race.

Forthcoming Peer Reviewed Articles

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

Peer Reviewed Journal Articles Under Revise and Resubmit

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

Book Chapters

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. Columbia University Press.

Grace, Prince, Michael Rodriguez Muñiz and Luna Vincent. Under Contract. “Racial Ignorance in Cultural Sociology”. The Racial Structure of Sociological Thought. Edited by Jennifer Mueller and Victor Ray. Temple University Press. *Available upon request

Grants and Fellowships 

National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship