Sonia Planson

Postdoctoral Researcher

Profile

Sonia Planson received a dual PhD in sociology from Northwestern University and Sciences Po (France) in 2023. She has been a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow at Brown University, holding affiliations with the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs as well as the Department of Sociology. Sonia is a comparative and multimethod sociologist of race, immigration, and culture, with research and teaching experience in both the United States and France.

The main questions driving her research interests are how norms around national identities and belonging are defined culturally and legally, how they are experienced by immigrants intergenerationally, and how race structures those norms and experiences transnationally. Sonia has developed multimethod skills through U.S.- and France-based projects employing interview, ethnographic, archival, and statistical methods. She pursues two main streams of research—one focused on cultural citizenship, race, and assimilationism and another focused on legal citizenship and postcolonial migration. She has also published research on race, gender, and educational inequality in Sociology of Education and Poetics.

During her fellowship at the University of Notre Dame, Sonia intends to work on her book project tentatively titled Assimilation’s False Promises: How Immigrant Families Experience the Everyday Politics of Race and Belonging in the U.S. and France. A shift away from the conventional focus on immigrants’ assimilation under supposedly different regimes of integration, the book will draw attention to ideologies of assimilationism from the standpoint of immigrant families.

Faculty Mentors: Steven Alvarado, Anna Haskins, Erin McDonnell, Terry McDonnell, Rory McVeigh, and Lynette Spillman