UNC Sociology Welcomes Four New Faculty: Scott Duxbury, Tania Jenkins, Alexandrea Ravenelle, and Jessica Houston Su -

Tania M. Jenkins joins UNC as Assistant Professor of Sociology and faculty fellow at the Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from Brown University in 2016 and worked as a Canadian Institutes of Health Research postdoc at the University of Chicago from 2016-2017. Before coming to Carolina, she was an assistant professor of sociology at Temple University in Philadelphia from 2017-2019.

Jenkins’ research interests span medical sociology, medical education, professions, social status, stratification, gender, ethics, qualitative methodologies, and social theory. More specifically, her scholarship examines how and why status hierarchies are (re)produced in the medical profession and how they impact both doctors and patients.

In her forthcoming book, Doctors Orders: The Making of Status Hierarchies in an Elite Profession (Columbia University Press; expected summer 2020), Jenkins examines the construction and consequences of status distinctions between physicians-in-training. Her next book will focus on the burnout epidemic in medicine, and she will explore what it is about the medical profession that is making so many doctors sick.

Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the International Association of Medical Science Educators, as well as the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and has appeared in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Social Science & Medicine, and the Journal of General Internal Medicine, among others. She has also received several awards, including the 2017 Roberta G. Simmons Outstanding Dissertation in Medical Sociology Award from the American Sociological Association.

Alexandrea Ravenelle studies the lived experience of gig economy workers, entrepreneurship, and the outsourcing of risk from platforms to workers. Recently awarded an Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation Knowledge Challenge grant, Ravenelle is currently working on her next project, After the Hustle, that examines the impact of high-status gig work and sudden platform closings on gig economy entrepreneurs.

Her first book, Hustle and Gig: Struggling and Surviving in the Sharing Economy, was published by the University of California Press in March 2019. In Hustle and Gig, she argues that the sharing economy upends generations of workplace protections such as worker safety; workplace protections around discrimination and sexual harassment; the right to unionize; and the right to redress for injuries. Ravenelle’s recent media coverage includes NPR Morning Edition; NPR On-Point, Forbes; The Young Turks; Yahoo! Finance video; Quartz; MTV News; The New Republic; San Francisco Chronicle; The Daily Beast; The John Fuselsang Show; The Outline; Axios; Bankrate.com; ElConfidencial.com; ThePennyHoarder.com; USA Today; and Harvard Political Review.

Ravenelle earned her PhD in Sociology from the CUNY Graduate Center in New York and her MA in Sociology and BA in Interdisciplinary Studies from the University of Missouri. Her recent peer-reviewed papers have been published Regions, Economy and Society; Journal of Managerial Psychology; and Consumption Markets and Culture. Ravenelle has also had excerpts from her research featured on Wired.com and Medium.com and published an op/ed in The New York Times on sexual harassment and assault in the gig economy.

Jessica Houston Su joins UNC as an Assistant Professor of Sociology and faculty fellow at the Carolina Population Center. As a family demographer, she uses a sociological lens and quantitative analytic techniques to examine social patterns of family formation in the United States and how they are related to the health and well-being of parents and children. Her research contributes to the sociological literature in families, health, inequality, work, and demography.

One stream of her research examines the causes and consequences of unintended and nonmarital fertility. For example, she examines how both contextual and individual economic resources shape patterns of unintended childbearing. She also examines the short- and long-term implications of unintended childbearing for the mental health of parents and children. Another stream of research examines how nonstandard work schedules are related to the well-being of working mothers and their young children.

Her research appears in peer-reviewed journals such as Demography, the Journal of Marriage and Family, and the Journal of Health and Social Behavior. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from Cornell University and her B.A. in Sociology from Dartmouth College. Before coming to Carolina, she was an assistant professor of sociology at the University at Buffalo.