Sabrina Pendergrass

My research and teaching focus on one of the United States’ most challenging and consequential issues—inequality. In my Engagements course, I introduce students to something else that defines my work and that I was fascinated to learn when I was an undergraduate: systematic ways to identify social patterns that could go unnoticed and to find much-needed answers to questions about people, groups, institutions, and issues in society. More specifically, my students and I use discussion and interactive activities to explore various approaches to empirical engagement used across the social sciences. We consider the ethics and limitations of empirical engagement as well. Recently, my empirical work has explored whether and how inequality has mattered for why more African Americans have been moving to the U.S. South since 1970 than leaving the region. Through the Engagements program, I will work with first-year students who want to know more about how they might gather and analyze empirical evidence to pursue answers to intriguing questions of their own.