Welcoming the New Stone Program Postdoctoral Fellows

Davis Daumler is a sociologist who studies wealth, poverty, and families—in order to understand the process by which societies become economically and racially stratified. His research advances our understanding of how population-level inequalities are shaped by different aspects of temporal dynamics, including life-course timing and shifting historical contexts. Prior to joining the Stone Program, Daumler received his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Michigan. His research has received funding and grant support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, and the American Sociological Association. As a Stone Postdoctoral Fellow, Daumler's research will examine how changes to the political economy of wealth have affected the economic foundation of families. Drawing on a unique combination of institutional and demographic theories, Daumler's research will investigate a key pathway by which government policies directly affect the wealth of American families—and maintain systems of racialized wealth inequality.

Ritika Goel is a recent doctoral graduate in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley. Her research explores status aspirations among minority and poor individuals, and how right-wing populists capture narratives and shape perceptions of performance in office by leveraging these status aspirations, information asymmetries and challenging liberal democratic institutions in multi-ethnic and unequal democracies. Drawing on rich multi-method fieldwork across India, the United States, and Brazil, Ritika’s  book project combines interviews, electoral data, campaign speech analysis, and survey experiments to investigate why new poor and minority voters support economically right-of-center, culturally conservative populist leaders in power in deeply unequal societies and what these leaders claim to have done in office. She not only investigates the appeal of such right-wing populism in power for aspirational minorities, but also how the strategies and democratic trajectories of such populism diverge depending on vulnerable media business models and other institutional and structural constraints. Ritika’s broader research interests include business and regulation, upward mobility, information environments, inequality, and infrastructure policy constraints in India and United States. She holds a Master’s in Public Affairs from Princeton University and a Bachelor’s in Engineering from Delhi University, and has worked in international development with the World Bank Group and the UK Department for International Development. As a Stone Postdoctoral Fellow, Ritika looks forward to working on her research and book manuscript and benefiting from the vibrant, interdisciplinary community.