Join the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life (CITAP) for the next speaker in its spring speaker series. Hakeem Jefferson will give a talk entitled "“From Margin to Center’: Reorienting Our Approach to the Study of Race and Inequality in the Social Sciences.”
Studying race and inequality requires an approach that takes seriously the experiences, knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors of those who live on the margins of our society. Social science research often falls short, theoretically and empirically, because of a tendency to ignore the margins in favor of those who have, for far too long, occupied the center.
Jefferson is an assistant professor of political science at Stanford University, where he is also a faculty affiliate with the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity and the Stanford Center for American Democracy. Jefferson’s research focuses primarily on the role identity plays in structuring political attitudes and behaviors in the U.S., especially understanding how stigma shapes the politics of Black Americans, particularly as it relates to group members’ support for racialized punitive social policies. He also examines the psychological and social roots of the racial divide in Americans’ reactions to officer-involved shootings and evaluates the meaningfulness of key political concepts, like ideological identification, among Black Americans.