Hana Shepherd

Hello! I'm in my second year of the sociology Ph.D. program at Princeton. I'm primarily interested in gaining better understandings of the mechanisms behind group-based inequality, especially racial inequality, which means trying to understand simultaneous processes occuring at the level of individual agents, organizations and institutions over time. I'm especially interested in how traditional concepts such as hegemony or ideology might be rethought in terms of how information, forms of classification and other cognitive processes, and norms emerge and flow across networks.

Questions I am very interested in learning agent-based modeling and methods of analyzing/modeling diffusion over networks.

Adrian de Froment and I have a project underway on how individuals figure out what the relevant group norms are based on network structure and cognitive network structure (from Krackhardt) and we would appreciate feedback about the project. We would like to think through ways to collect dynamic data on the emergence of ideas about social norms and how this affects individual's behaviors, and ways to model this problem. I'm also thinking about ways to analyze the diffusion of categorization systems across organizations.

During June, I would love to begin thinking through how to build accounts of organizations and institutions into networks and how these affect network dynamics.

My favorite "big problem" regards the persistence of particular meanings associated with social groups long after the original purposes of the group-based differentiation are gone and I would love to see where we are in one hundred years with respect to understanding group-based forms of inequality.