About Me
Well, hello there! My name is Nahrissa and I am a Sociology Ph.D. student at The Ohio State University. Broadly speaking my interests are in race, identity, place, and politics. I am a qualitative researcher at heart, finding that the questions I ask are best answered via interviews, focus groups, and ethnography. To me, there is something very special about honoring the knowledge embedded in lived experiences.
My approaches to sociology, teaching, advising, and mentoring are one in the same: make information accessible, pay attention to the nuance, and meet people where they are. As a budding public sociologist, I am committed to ensuring that the work I do goes beyond the creation of knowledge for knowledge's sake. What's the point of studying society, if we, as sociologists, do not engage with it?
Outside of my graduate program I enjoy daily walks, birdwatching, crossword and jigsaw puzzles, making new dog friends, mastering new versions of Solitaire, astrology, my houseplants, chatting, and Internet rabbit holes.
Projects
My current work focuses on the experiences of adults with one Black and one white parent, with special attention paid to the role of the family in the process of identity formation and experience. In this work I am also concerned with questions about group identity, what is “Blackness”, and the various ways that identity is affirmed and denied. My master’s thesis titled, “’We Have to Talk About this Mixed Thing’: Family Dynamics and Racial Identity Formation for Biracial Adults,” investigated the ways in which family influenced racial identity experiences for adults through means of direct and indirect influence.
Previous projects include my undergraduate thesis which studied organizational response to conflict, using a grocery cooperative as a case study. Employees and others were interviewed to assess the ways in which the organization chose to either avoid conflict altogether or address it head on, as well as how various actors within the organization viewed different points of conflict. The thesis received the Best Undergraduate Thesis Award from the Sociology Department at the University of Minnesota in 2020.
Copies of my theses are available upon request.
