Sonia Planson
About
Currently, I am a Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Notre Dame. Previously, I have been a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow at Brown University. I received a dual PhD in sociology from Sciences Po Paris and Northwestern University where I was a Council for Race and Ethnic Studies fellow. I was trained, have taught, and conducted multi-methods research both in the United States and in France.
Research
I am interested in legal and cultural citizenship, cultural practices, and how they are experienced and passed on intergenerationally in immigrant families and along dimensions of class and race.
In my current main project, I study assimilationism and the maintenance of cultural practices in transnational comparison. I investigate immigrants’ experiences with cultural transmission (how foreign-born parents pass on cultural markers and practices, how children receive them), and how they are shaped by race in the United States and France. This project uses both survey data and in-depth interviews with immigrant parents, their teenage children, and their teachers in the Chicago and Paris metropolitan areas.
I am also contributing to the study of cultural capital as racialized in France, with a quantitative analysis of Education Ministry data. This work is published in Sociology of Education and Poetics.
In former research, I studied French citizenship law and older immigrants’ naturalization practices. I am working to publish this research as part of an international and interdisciplinary special issue on imperial citizenship after empire.
Teaching
At Brown, I taught my own interdisciplinary course on The (Racial) Politics of National Culture for sociology and international & public affairs concentrators.
I loved teaching that course which was inspired by, and occasionally drew on my own research. Students also shared that they “genuinely enjoyed every one of these classes” and were “getting a lot out of this course [which] really connects greater themes that have appeared in past classes related to politics, culture, and race with compelling texts.”
I also look forward to teaching new courses: for instance, I’m developing courses on Race & Ethnicity: Transgenerational & Transnational Approaches, and The Digital Diaspora.
At Northwestern and Sciences Po, I also gained experience as a teaching assistant, with sections in Introduction to Sociology, Law and Society, and Sociology and Gender.
