Mosi Adesina Ifatunji, Ph.D.
4141 Helen C. White Hall
Email: ifatunji@wisc.edu
Education:
Ph.D. 2011 Department of Sociology, University of Illinois at Chicago
M.A. 2006 Department of Sociology, University of Illinois at Chicago
B.A. 2003 Department of Psychology, University of Illinois at Chicago
B.A. 2003 Department of African American Studies, University of Illinois at Chicago
Biography:
Mosi Adesina Ifatunji is a Philosopher, Social Scientist and Associate Professor with joint appointments in the Departments of African American Studies and Sociology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he also holds courtesy and research appointments in the Department of African Cultural Studies, African Studies Program, Institute for Diversity Science, Center for Demography of Health and Aging, Center for Demography and Ecology and the La Follette School of Public Affairs. Outside of Wisconsin, Ifatunji serves as a Faculty Associate at the Program for Research on Black Americans, which is located in the Research Center for Group Dynamics, at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor; and a Research Scientist at the Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Before joining the faculty at Madison, he held teaching and faculty appointments at Ann Arbor (at the Summer Program in Quantitative Methods of Social Research at the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research) and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (in the Department of Sociology, at the Institute for African American Research and at the Carolina Population Center). His contributions have been published in Sociological Forum, Sociological Perspectives, Sociological Focus, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity and the Du Bois Review.
His primary research interests are in racial and ethnic theory and the methodologies used to study inequality and stratification. He is particularly interested in theorizing how non-phenomic characteristics contribute to racial classification and stratification. While most theories of race are based on assigning racialized meanings to people and populations according to perceived differences in skin color, hair texture and/or bone structure, he argues that racial classification often turns on non-phenomic characteristics, including language, religion, and geography. For instance, the U.S. Census Bureau recently recommended that we change our racial classification of immigrants from countries like Syria and Egypt from White to “Middle Eastern and North African.” For decades, proponents of this change have offered various rationales, but none of them reference phenomics. Therefore, he believes that; since non-phenomic characteristics contribute to the process of assigning racialized meanings to people and populations, we must revise the ontologies and theories that social scientists most often use when studying race and ethnicity. He is advancing this view by studying the ways in which African Americans and Black immigrants are racialized differently in the United States. His research draws on mostly quantitative methods, including: large-scale surveys, linked administrative data, social experiments, advanced statistics, and historiography. His work has been supported by the American Sociological Association and the National Institutes of Health.