Research Expertise and Interest

emotions, poverty, family and personal relationships, mental health

Research Description

Ekédi Mpondo-Dika is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology. She uses ethnography to research how social forces shape the most intimate aspects of our lives — our relationships, our emotions, and our sense of self. She is particularly interested in the intersection of inequality and emotion in U.S. society. She has two ongoing research projects. The first examines the affective underside of concentrated disadvantage and its management by various institutions, in particular how compounded hardship and institutional interventions shape disadvantaged people’s intimate bonds and sense of self. The second explores the social and institutional management of grief in the U.S.  

Before joining Berkeley Sociology, she held two postdoctoral positions, the first at Princeton University and the second in the School of Social Welfare at Berkeley. She graduated from the Ph.D. program in Sociology at Harvard University. Before that, she studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where she majored in Economics with a minor in the Social Sciences. She earned a BA in Economics and Econometrics from the University of Paris 1 Sorbonne and an MA in Economic Analysis and Policy from the Paris School of Economics.