DEPARTMENT OF SOCIOLOGY

Area(s) of Interest

Economic Sociology; Science & Technology Studies; Labor; Consumption; Education

Biography

Ryan Fajardo (he/him) is a Doctoral Candidate in Sociology at Northwestern University. Before Northwestern, Ryan earned B.A. degrees in Sociology and Economics at Williams College. Ryan's research focuses on the development of lay economic practices and beliefs in coordination with the introduction of novel technologies and structures.

Ryan’s dissertation investigates the legalization and regulation of digital sports betting in the United States. This project argues that the discussion of the emotional experience of betting among stakeholders (state governments, sportsbooks, sports leagues, problem gambling services, etc.) defines the nature and character of regulation. This project does so by examining three tensions present in regulation discussions: whether gamblers are motivated by money or by excitement; whether gamblers can control their emotions when gambling is available at any time and any place; and whether gamblers can control anger towards athletes online. This study relies on interviews with representatives of key stakeholders and ordinary bettors and a survey with a large nationally representative sample of bettors.

Ryan's master’s thesis, now published in the British Journal of Sociology, explores how popular online marketplace environments uniquely shape the perspectives and behaviors of users. To understand this process, Ryan examines the case of secondhand clothing marketplaces, a nascent but growing industry that relies on the labor of thousands of resellers to evaluate and price objects. Using interviews and ethnographic observations, Ryan identifies how resellers learn to blend value claims drawn from reselling communities and online marketplace technologies to justify their prices to themselves, their fellow resellers, and their customers. Theoretically, this project is situated within economic sociology, science & technology studies, valuation, and evaluation studies.

Ryan's previous research investigated the time use of workers who have unique work schedules or prolonged periods of time away from work. Specifically, Ryan took on the popularly reported social problem of teacher multiple job-holding: In the U.S., public school teachers are 2-3 times more likely to hold more than one job than the general public. He developed logistic regressions that leveraged differences in working schedules (e.g. summer break) to explore the effects of state funding and family characteristics on teacher multiple job-holding outcomes. Results from this study were published in Socius.

Publications

Fajardo, Ryan. 2024. “Settling secondhand sales: Pricing symbolic items in an emergent online marketplace environment.” British Journal of Sociology, 1-18.

Fajardo, Ryan. 2024. “Public Funding, Private Work Outcomes: Multiple Job Holding among U.S. K–12 Public School Teachers.” Socius, 10.