The Otto and Gertrude K. Pollak Scholarship Fund was established by the late Otto and Gertrude (Trudie) Pollak in 1998.
Dr. Otto Pollak completed his Ph.D. in Sociology at Penn and was hired as an assistant professor in 1947. He was promoted to associate professor in 1952 and to full professor in 1957. Teaching and writing on social adjustment and aging, he published more than 80 articles before he became an emeritus professor in 1978, and continued to teach into his retirement years.
As a result of this generous gift, the department provides research grants and summer stipends to our graduate students through our “Pollak Fellows” program, and a lecture series on issues associated with professionalization, getting through graduate school, and the job market by our “Pollak Lecturers.” We are deeply grateful for this unique resource and the opportunities it provides for our graduate students.
The Otto and Gertrude K. Pollak Summer Research Fellowship Recipients
Graduate students in the Sociology Department, including joint students, are eligible to apply for Pollak Summer Research Fellowships. This award provides a summer stipend and/or research funds.
2024
Rehana Odendaal: Who Decides in Today's Society? A Three-Country Network Analysis of African Education NGOs.
Abstract: This research project is interested in exploring the concepts of epistemic diversity and situated
knowledge in the context of global and local education orientated non-governmental organizations
(NGOs) operating in three African countries: Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa. Specifically, the
paper explores the extent to which people who are educated in Africa are included in the
governance structures of Education NGOs. Using “educational location” (i.e., where an individual
received their post-secondary education) as a proxy for situated knowledge. I use bimodal network
analysis to determine whether an inner circle of influential individuals exists among the board
members of these education NGOs, and how epistemically diverse it is. To determine epistemic
diversity, I evaluate not only the proportion of board members educated in different regions of the
world, but also rank their influence using a composite measure of network centrality. This work
builds on my second-year paper, “Who is funding African youth leadership education? A board
member and funder analysis” analyzed a relatively small database of exclusively leadership-
education focused organizations on the same case countries. This revised paper will focus only on-
board members but include a broader scope of NGOs associated with the United Nation’s
sustainable development goal 4 (Education).
Kai Feng: Bridging or Widening the Gap? Investigating the Role of Economic Development in Gendered STEM Career Choices
Abstract: Countries known for higher levels of gender equality and economic advancement often
have lower levels of female representation in STEM fields. This paradox of affluence is part of a
broader observation that in countries with higher gender equality, women and men often make
more traditionally gendered choices in their academic and career pursuits. The theory of
“indulging gendered selves (Charles and Bradley 2009)” posits that in advanced industrialized
countries, the emphasis on self-expression, strengthened by material security, inadvertently
intensifies gendered career choices, leading women towards female-dominated fields. On the
other hand, women in developing or transforming societies have relatively stronger instrumental
motivation than women in advanced industrialized countries to choose lucrative majors and
career paths, most of which are male dominated. The theory further implies that as societies
experience economic growth, they may become more gender-segregated. However, the validity
of the indulging gendered selves theory cannot be fully evaluated on the basis of cross-sectional
data. Using new waves of the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS),
my study directly tests the hypothesis that economic development increases the gender gap in
STEM aspirations using student-level data from 34 countries. Preliminary evidence from mixed-
effects multilevel models reveal that economic development does not consistently deter girls
from pursuing STEM careers as prior studies claimed (Charles 2017).
Sukie Yang: Greening the Next Generation: Examining Climate Change Education Worldwide
Abstract: As climate change intensifies, education plays a crucial role in preparing societies and youth to
address this crisis. This dissertation leverages the unique and newly-available UNESCO
national curriculum database and Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) to
examine how climate change curricula influence educational outcomes. Chapter One focuses
on the global landscape, analyzing how curriculum inclusion of climate change impacts PISA
measures of environmental literacy, sense-of-purpose, and pro-environmental behaviors across
more than 70 countries, considering differential environmental exposure and socioeconomic
status. Chapter Two explores longitudinal curriculum changes alongside trends in students'
environmental literacy and awareness over time using PISA 2006-2022. Chapter Three presents
an in-depth case study of China, a major carbon emitter, by analyzing national/provincial
curriculum policies, subject syllabi, and textbooks using text mining. It will reveal how
curricula contents and changes contribute to PISA climate education outcomes, and situate the
Chinese case in the global picture. Interviews and fieldwork will supplement and improve the
interpretation of the quantitative results. This global comparative study will comprehensively
evaluate climate change education efficacy and can inform international efforts to improve
climate literacy and youth environmental engagement.
Ashleigh Cartwright: How Institutions Obscure Processes of Racial Capitalism
Abstract: This three-article dissertation explores how diverse institutions facilitate and obscure the
reproduction of racial and economic hierarchies. Scholars of racial capitalism have called for the
development of specific case studies that illuminate processes of racial capitalism. My dissertation—
which explores the roles of educational, legal, and financial institutions—seeks to contribute to this
body of literature by empirically examining the processes through which varied institutions
reproduce racial capitalism. In the first chapter, I use local newspaper articles and committee
meeting minutes of towns across New England to demonstrate how white people in the US North
controlled and profited from the process of public school integration in the 1960s and 1970s. The
second and third chapters are based on 20 interviews and six months of participant observation I
conducted in communities of high-net-worth Black Americans. In the second chapter, I explore
how the Black sociopolitical position shapes upper-class Black people’s values about their money
and how those values affect their financial decisions and outcomes. The third chapter closely focuses
on giving patterns among high-net-worth Black Americans and how their engagement with financial
and legal institutions exacerbates the racial wealth gap. This dissertation seeks to explore what
closely examining different kinds of institutions in tandem can reveal about racial capitalism and the
institutional reproduction of racial inequality.
Michael Lachanski: Diverging Precarities: Using Formal Organizational Demography to Study the Evolution of Job Stability Inequalities
Abstract: The distribution of eventual job tenure plays an important role in economic sociology, inequality
and stratification research, and labor economics. Recent innovations in formal organizational
demography enable the indirect estimation of job survival curves. In this project, I will translate
additional demographic decompositions and statistical methods from human demography into
the organizational demography context to test a number of social science theories. For instance,
precarity researchers have advanced the “masked instability” hypothesis, which claims that
female workers’ increased labor force attachment obscures growing population-wide job
instability. Using formal organizational demographic methods, I show that male and female
expected job tenures at hiring have been similar from 1996 to the Great Resignation for all age
groups tested. Race and education, not sex, structure inequalities in U.S. job stability. Racial
inequalities in job stability have remained persistent and exhibit no sign of convergence in the
21st century. Educational inequalities have actually grown over the last three decades and are
now larger than racial gaps in expected tenure at hiring. The growth in educational inequality in
job stability arises from the period immediately after hiring and therefore most plausibly reflects
the effects of increased screening on the college educated population.
Elena Van Stee: Still Launching? Moral Understandings of Financial (In)Dependence in Young Adulthood
Abstract: My dissertation examines how young adults and their parents understand and negotiate financial
(in)dependence in the liminal stage popularly known as emerging adulthood. Existing research
shows that young adults face economic barriers to achieving financial independence, but
sociologists have paid less attention to the meaning family members attach to parents’ financial
assistance at this stage, or how such support is negotiated within families.
Addressing these gaps, my dissertation uses in-depth interviews with 68 young adult college
graduates (28–32 years old) and one of each of their parents to identify the moral meaning these
individuals attach to financial (in)dependence and the underlying cultural narratives from which
they draw. Informed by prior research on parenting, I focus on social class differences. I also
extend this literature by considering how class may operate differently across three theoretically
chosen racial/ethnic groups: Black, White, and ethnic Chinese families. These intersectional
comparisons are one of the project’s central contributions. They also require a large sample
(N=136), which is why I am seeking Pollak funding to pay research assistants to help with
transcription.
My dissertation will advance sociological understandings of morality, inequality, and the
evolving cultural norms governing parent/young adult relationships in the United States.
Ran Wang: The Bottom-Up Censorship: Attitudes and Practices Towards Censorship among Fandom Content Creators in China
Abstract: This project explores how content creators–in this case, fandom writers and illustrators–make
sense of and navigate through censorship on Chinese digital platforms. By rejecting the
conceptualization of censorship as a top-down uniformity, I propose a framework of the
“three-body problem” to understand the complicated yet dynamic state-platform-user
relationship in digital censorship. This project examines the three-body problem from the
perspective of users and investigates their interpretations and following practices when they
encounter censorship in digital activities of content activities. This project will use a mixed
method approach of qualitative interviewing and diary writing to collect data on both attitudes
and behaviors of fandom content creators in response to censorship and to assess any
discrepancy between the two. The comparative study of fandom writers and illustrators will
explore how different previous experiences with censorship, especially in the context of political
affiliation, influence their interpretations which in turn guide their interactions with censorship.
Focusing on the vagueness of censorship, this project opens up new possibilities to understand
individual agency under censorship by engaging theories of oppositional affordances and
everyday activism.
Richard Patti: A Multi-Level Analysis of Structural Intersectionality and the Social Determinants of Health
Abstract: An analysis of population health scholarship reveals three key themes 1) health is a life
course process 2) which occurs at multiple levels of exposure 3) and along multiple intersections of
identity. This dissertation will integrate these ideas to investigate the multilevel determinants of
intersectional health inequalities across a range of different health measures. At the macro-level, I
investigate the impact of state immigration policy and how it influences self-rated health and
anxiety at the intersections of race/ethnicity, citizenship, and legal status. At the meso-level, I
assess how neighborhood exposures across the adult life course impact measures of aging and
functional limitations. At the individual-level, I examine how individual stressors and stress
appraisal manifest as physiological outcomes in older adults at the intersection of race/ethnicity and
nativity. Drawing on longitudinal data from the Survey on Income and Program Participation
(SIPP) and the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) I employ a life course perspective to answer
important questions relating to the multi-level processes that affect individual health along multiple
axes of identity. Identification of how social determinants shape health trajectories across the life
course offer a promising direction in how to structure interventions to assist in the goals of health
equity.
Jack Thornton: Generous: The Labor of Philanthropy in Higher Education
Abstract: Research on philanthropy tends to focus on donors’ motivations, overlooking key
organizational and labor processes that sustain charitable giving. Using 114 interviews with
“major gift” officers and thousands of archival documents, this dissertation examines fundraising
work in US higher education as a contemporary and historical phenomenon. Also called
“development,” fundraising constitutes a form of interactive service work geared exclusively
toward wealthy individuals, yet it also takes place on behalf of public-serving organizations. I
find that fundraisers conceptualize their work as “relationship management,” rather than simply
“asking for money”; philanthropic gifts are co-constructed through practical efforts at matching
institutional priorities with donor interests. Analyzing these negotiations through a labor lens
reveals how the imperatives, incentives, and constraints that fundraisers face ultimately
determine the content, character, and consequences of elite donors’ mega-gifts.
2025
Michael Lachanski: Educational Expansion and Rising Job Stability in the 21st Century U.S.
Abstract:
The distribution of eventual job tenure plays an important role in economic sociology, inequality
and stratification research, and labor economics. A challenge to the dominant precarization
narrative in sociology is that job stability in the U.S. has continued to rise. In previous research, I
ruled out the “masked instability” hypothesis, which claims that female workers’ increased
employer attachment obscures growing population-wide job instability. In the proposed paper, I
hope to use recent innovations in formal organizational demography to investigate the role of
educational expansion on overall job stability trends. I have documented that the growth in
educational inequality in job stability arises from the period immediately after hiring, is now
larger than racial inequalities in job stability, and likely explains more than 1/3 of the job
stability increase.
Rehana Odendaal: Heated Up: Educational Ecosystems and Professionalization of Young Adult Climate Activists in Philadelphia, USA
Abstract: This research forms part of my larger dissertation project, exploring the experience of young
adult (18-35 years old) climate activists in Cape Town, South Africa, and Philadelphia, USA in
three papers. This proposal will contribute to both a stand alone chapter, and transnational
comparison (in a second chapter). Between 2010 and 2024, there have been visible and large-
scale scale movements across the world: Black Lives Matter, the Occupy Movement, and
the 2018/2019s Youth Climate Strikes. This phenomenon provides support for the established
literature on youth’s disengagement from institutionalized forms of political participation
towards more non-institutionalized forms of civic engagement . This study compares the
experiences of young adults with and without a formal college education in the city a major US
city with high levels of racial and economic inequality who have a record of sustained
involvement in climate activism. This project addresses two gaps in our understanding of civic
education and new social movements: furthering our understanding of non-college-educated
young adults' educational pathways (Fenn et al. 2024) and including racial and socio-economic
diversity absent from the extant literature on youth climate activism (Morris and Cogan 2001;
Walker 2020). Doing so offers to develop our understanding of biographic availability among
marginalized populations (resource mobilization theory) and how civic education happens
outside of the formal classroom.
Andres Villatoro: Precarious Pathways: Labor, Identity, and Mobility Among Second Generation Latino Men
Abstract: Situated against the backdrop of increasing economic precarity and structural changes in the U.S.
labor market, this dissertation study examines the lived experiences and identity formation of
native-born Latino working-class men aged 18-34 in the Chicagoland area, While existing
scholarship has predominantly focused on Black and white working-class populations, this study
aims to explore how Latino men navigate identity, labor market trajectories, and social belonging
in increasingly precarious labor market. It employs ethnographic methods including intensive
participant observation, with the researcher currently working part-time at a Best Buy in Berwyn,
Illinois, a Latino-majority suburb. The study will closely follow 8-15 young men within and
outside their workplace, supplemented by 40-60 additional interviews. Using a "go-along"
ethnographic approach, the researcher will shadow participants across various social spaces to
uncover nuanced insights into their experiences. The project seeks to contribute to broader
sociological debates about immigrant incorporation, segmented assimilation, and racialization
processes. By examining the second-generation Latino experience, the research hopes to assess
whether narratives of "downward assimilation" remain valid or if more complex patterns of
socioeconomic adaptation are emerging. Ultimately, the study aims to illuminate how individuals
navigate significant social and economic structural changes while maintaining their cultural
identities.
Niiaja Wright: A Holistic Assessment of Social Mobility
Abstract: Studies on social stratification are inconsistent in their measures of intergenerational social
mobility. The overrepresentation of single measures of intergenerational persistence and mobility
between parent and child often give rise to conflicting degrees of social mobility depending on the
variable chosen. In this research study, I propose to answer Easley and Baker's (2023) call to
provide a more holistic view of intergenerational mobility by examining a more comprehensive
measure of social and economic status. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth
97 (NLSY97), the study will conduct a latent profile analysis to examine intergenerational mobility
patterns across racial groups, utilizing multiple indicators of socioeconomic status (SES) such as
education, income, neighborhood characteristics, and wealth. This holistic approach will provide
insights into the cumulative (dis)advantages transmitted intergenerationally and the stratification
processes underlying unequal social attainment.
Charlotte Scott: A Comparative Historical Analysis of Wind Farm Successes and Failures
Abstract: The climate crisis necessitates environmental
infrastructure to generate clean energy for the future and counteract past emissions. However,
some of these projects are being fought by activists not on the right but on the environmental left.
This phenomenon is known as “NIMBYism,” and while it has been studied in environmental and
planning literature, it is relatively understudied as a social and historical movement. This gap in
the literature prevents a deeper understanding of when planned environmental infrastructure
projects succeed or fail–and whether NIMBYism is the relevant variable in that process–and thus
inhibits successful implementation of these projects in the future. My work responds to this
literature gap by creating a database of wind farm proposals in California and Texas, comparing
successful cases of wind farms that were ultimately built with unsuccessful cases of proposed
wind farms that were not ultimately built using archival methods. This database will be
supplemented by ethnographic research of case study success and failure cases in each state to
compare the communities where these projects are built to the communities where these projects
are resisted.