Assistant Professor at Duke University
About
Jessi Streib is an assistant professor of sociology at Duke University. She has a PhD in sociology from the University of Michigan. Her work is in the areas of social class inequality, family, and education. Her research focuses on how the class that people are born into shapes the ways that they understand and navigate the social world, and how these understandings of the social world reproduce or alleviate social class inequality.
Current Work:
Jessi Streib studies how the class that people are born into shapes the ways that they understand and navigate the social world. Her forthcoming book, The Power of the Past, demonstrates that, in regards to ideas about how to go about their daily lives, highly-educated individuals have more in common with strangers who share their class background than with their spouses with whom they share their lives. Building upon this work, Streib is turning to the study of how individuals from different class backgrounds navigate the transition from college to work. By following students from the beginning of their senior year to when they obtain their first job, Streib will uncover how students use their unequal resources in a way that erases or maintains past disparities.
In a related study, Streib is researching how college students from different class backgrounds present their human and cultural capital in job applications and how employers evaluate them. Returning to her previous work on children and class, Streib is also conducting a content analysis of how class is portrayed in G-rated movies. Finally, together with Juhi Verma and Linda Burton, Streib is writing a chapter about the invisible middle-class reference group in the culture of poverty debates.
Research Area(s):
