DEPARTMENT OF SOCIOLOGY

Area(s) of Interest

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

Biography

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

Ryan's master’s thesis 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 & evaluation studies, and occupations research.

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.