Prof. Dr. Christel Kesler

CV

Christel Kesler is Associate Professor of Sociology at Colby College in Waterville, Maine, USA. She earned her BA (1998) from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, her MA (2001) and PhD (2007) from the University of California-Berkeley, and also holds an honorary MA (2007) from the University of Oxford. Kesler conducted postdoctoral research at Nuffield College, Oxford and previously taught at Barnard College, Columbia University. At Colby College, she has served as Chair of the Department of Sociology and as Faculty Associate Director of the Goldfarb Center for Public Affairs. Kesler’s main areas of research are international migration, social policy and the welfare state, and social stratification, with a focus on how social policies shape immigrants’ experiences of incorporation into host societies in North America and Western Europe and how immigration-generated diversity affects social policymaking. Her work has appeared in a range of journals in the field, including the International Migration Review, Social Science Research, and Social Forces, as well as in edited volumes and policy reports. Kesler has been a consulting editor for the American Journal of Sociology, a commissioning editor for the American Sociological Association’s public sociology blog Work in Progress: Sociology on the Economy, Work, and Inequality, and is currently an associate editor for the Race and Ethnicity section of the open access journal Frontiers in Sociology.

Selected Publications

• Kesler, Christel. 2022. “Inequality, Immigration, and Welfare Regimes: Untangling the Connections.” Pp. 297-320 in Handbook on Migration and Welfare, edited by Markus M.L. Crepaz. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing.

• Kesler, Christel and Amber Churchwell. 2020. “The Obama Effect on Perceived Mobility.” Societies 10(2): 46.

• Kesler, Christel. 2020. “Maternal Employment When Children Are in Preschool: Variations by Race, Ethnicity, and Nativity.” Social Science Research 85: 102349.

• Kesler, Christel. 2018. “Gender Norms, Work-Family Policies, and Labor Force Participation Among Immigrant and Native-born Women in Western Europe.” Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World 4: 1-16.

• Kesler, Christel and Mirna Safi. 2018. “Immigrants in the Labour Markets of France and the United Kingdom: Integration Models, Institutional Variations, and Ethnic Inequalities.” Migration Studies 6(2): 225-250.

FRIAS Research Project

Work-family reconciliation in challenging times: How ethnicity, gender, and social policy shape caregiving responsibilities and employment trajectories across contemporary advanced democracies

This project focuses on recent developments in gender and ethnic inequalities in the labor markets of advanced democracies, and how these inequalities are shaped by social policy. The challenges of work-family reconciliation only grew more acute for many families during the pandemic-related disruptions of recent years and are thought to be a significant driver behind supply-side changes in the labor market. However, as was the case before the pandemic, different countries had vastly different policy contexts and indeed, as existing research has shown, responded to challenges of work-family reconciliation during the pandemic quite differently. This project will focus on the intersectional effects of gender and ethnicity in shaping employment patterns over the course of this major economic disruption, and how these patterns unfold within distinct social policy contexts. The project adds to our collective knowledge about how work-family policies function (or not) during unusually tumultuous economic times. Furthermore, the project helps to answer the question of how social policies, including work-family policies, shape the inclusion and exclusion of different ethnic groups from important institutions such as the labor market, as advanced democracies become more ethnically diverse.