Sobering_headshot2024

I am an Associate Professor of Sociology and faculty affiliate in Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of North Texas. My research examines how inequality is produced and disrupted in everyday life. I primarily use ethnographic methods to understand contemporary work and politics in the U.S. and Latin America.

My new book, The People’s Hotel: Working for Justice in Argentina (Duke University Press, 2022), is a long-term ethnographic study of worker-recuperated businesses in Argentina, which are workplaces that were closed by their private owners, occupied by their workers, and reopened as worker cooperatives. The book details how work has been reconfigured without a boss and the possibilities for producing equality in the workplace.

I am a Fulbright Scholar and my research has also been supported by the National Science Foundation. I earned my PhD in sociology from the University of Texas at Austin in 2018, where I was a Graduate Fellow in the Urban Ethnography Lab. I also received a B.B.A. and B.A. in the Plan II Honors Program at the University of Texas at Austin.