See my C.V. here
Hi there! I’m Kristopher Velasco, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Princeton University.
My research lies at the intersections of global & transnational sociology, organizations, political sociology, culture, and sexuality.
My overarching research agenda is motivated by the following questions: How do societies become more inclusive over time? And what is the role of organizations and institutions to facilitate social and cultural change? Drawing primarily from institutional theories, I pay particular attention to the interactive role between culture and organizations within processes of social change at local, national, and global scales.
To answer the above questions, I employ a range of methods and research designs, though I typically use quantitative and computational approaches, while exploiting novel and high-quality sources of data. In other words, I get really excited about research design, learning new methods, developing original sources of data, and getting lost in hours of coding.
My broad interests at at the intersection of organizations and cultural change manifests into two related lines of research. My first line of research investigates the role of civil society organizations in global social change. Specifically, I investigate how these actors institutionalize norms, or cultural expectations of appropriateness, supportive of LGBT+ communities within international organizations like the United Nations. In turn, I then analyze the consequences these norms have on domestic policies and cultural understandings. This perspective informs my sole-authored publications in Social Forces and International Studies Quarterly and my current book project.
In a separate but related research stream, I investigate how the cultural and social dimensions of U.S. nonprofits influence their engagement with external audiences and how the sector, in turn, produces social and cultural change. This line of research has been published in American Sociological Review, American Review of Public Administration, Social Indicators Research, and Nonprofit Management & Leadership..