Ph.D., Sociology, University of California, Los Angeles
A.M., Sociology, Harvard University, 2005
B.A., with distinction, Sociology and Spanish, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2001
I am broadly interested in interracial and inter-ethnic relationships between actors and their implications for inequality and racial hierarchies in the Americas.
I recently completed my dissertation on a qualitative study of Black-White marriages in Los Angeles and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. I examined the ability of Black-White marriages to eradicate racial boundaries. I used in-depth interviews to uncover the meanings that people in these relationships give to their unions and their implications for racial boundaries and hierarchies. I find that rather than simply breaking down racial boundaries (as we often assume), interracial marriages can actually reify existing racial boundaries as well as create new ones in the form of "the biracial."
I am currently working on a number of projects. I am working on a paper with Sylvia Zamora, a UCLA PhD candidate in Sociology, examining the role of African Americans in the immigrant rights movement. We draw on data from two separate multiracial organizations to examine how immigrant rights activists frame the role of African Americans in the fight for a pathway to citizenship.
I spent over a year working as a research assistant for the Leveraging Mobility Project with Thomas Shapiro, Director of Brandeis University's Institute on Assets and Social Policy. I conducted interviews with Black, White, and Latino heads of households in Los Angeles in order to understand how members of different ethnic groups use their assets to support themselves and their families during the current financial crisis.
As Postdoctoral Fellow, I am working on publishing articles in peer-reviewed journals based on chapters of my dissertation as well as convert my dissertation into a book manuscript to be published with an academic press. In addition, I will use my experience using quantitative methods to analyze U.S. and Brazilian census data. I will also analyze survey data from the Project on Ethnicity and Race in Latin America (PERLA). This survey includes data on race and ethnicity from Mexico, Colombia, Peru, and Brazil. I will incorporate findings from my dissertation research with analysis of this dataset to compare and contrast attitudes surrounding interracial marriage between White, Black, and indigenous communities in Latin America.
Publications
Osuji, Chinyere K. In preparation for special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies. "Contesting Whitening in an Era of Black-Consciousness: Racial Ideology and Black-White Marriages in Brazil."
Osuji, Chinyere K. 2007. “The Integration of Africans in Spain.” UFAHAMU Journal of African Studies, v. 32:31-54.
