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Nicole Marwell

Associate Professor
Department of Sociology, Columbia University

Nicole Marwell's research sits at the intersection of three subfields in sociology – urban sociology, organizational sociology, and political sociology – with a substantive focus on nonprofit organizations, local and state politics, and Latina/o communities. Her work is primarily oriented towards the classic questions of urban sociology, but she approaches them in empirical settings and via theoretical lenses rooted in organizational and political sociology. The development of this hybrid approach derives from her sense of the current lack of coherence, both empirically and theoretically, within urban sociology. Virtually any social phenomenon that can be found in cities is now considered part of urban sociology. Although the original American urban sociologists, Robert Park and some of his Chicago School colleagues, also ranged widely in their empirical investigations, their work was united in its pursuit of some key themes: how the city maintained social order in the context of rapid social change; how the city's heterogeneous populations sorted into enduring patterns of social stratification; and how land use affected the possibilities for social interaction and mobility. Marwell's work engages all of these enduring questions about the city by emphasizing their present-day embeddedness in meso-level structures of action: formal organizations and political architectures. She uses primarily qualitative research methods to examine how urban organizations, institutions, and politics shape and transform the conditions in which individuals and groups find themselves, circumscribing their agency in ways that both enable and constrain.

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