Research Expertise and Interest

historical ethnography, urban austerity, medicine, law, criminal justice, organizations, economic sociology

Research Description

Armando Lara-Millán earned his PhD in Sociology from Northwestern University in 2013.  Before joining the Department of Sociology, he was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Postdoctoral Scholar in Health Policy Research at UC Berkeley. Professor Lara-Millán is an ethnographer and historical sociologist.  His research is currently focused on studying “reasoning” in a wide range of contexts, including law, medicine, criminal justice, economic pricing, austerity budgeting, and urban poverty governance.

He is currently working on two projects. He is completing a book manuscript that examines how austerity-stricken public institutions like public hospitals and county jails are able to, despite disastrous under-funding, provide services to large numbers of people and create an illusion of policy success.  He is also conducting an ethnography of medical pricing that traces how value is assigned to new medical codes and ultimately enters into and shapes household budgets.  His work has appeared in the American Sociological Review, Criminology, and in the forthcoming volume, The Many Hands of the State.  He is also the recipient of awards from the National Science Foundation, the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, the Ford Foundation, the Society for the Study of Social Problems, and the American Sociological Association.  In his spare time, he is an avid fan of the National Basketball Association and Lowrider oldies.