Sonia Planson

Currently, I am 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.

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 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 have studied French citizenship law and older immigrants’ naturalization practices. 

I have experience as a teaching assistant, with sections in Introduction to Sociology, Law and Society, and Sociology and Gender.

I have designed and taught an undergraduate seminar entitled The (Racial) Politics of National Culture for concentrators in International & Public Affairs and in Sociology at Brown.