Youngmin Yi

Assistant Professor of Sociology

Contact
Email:
yyi@wellesley.edu
Department
Sociology

Links

Sociologist and demographer interested in family, race, institutions of social control, and inequality in the United States.

My research is situated at the intersection of the sociology of family; race and ethnicity; law and society; crime and deviance; and inequality. I focus primarily on using quantitative data and methods to study the criminal legal and child welfare systems in the United States (US). I am particularly interested in these systems' impacts on family and racial inequality, the ways these systems shape and reflect our ideas of family relationships and race, and critical interrogation of the ways we ask these questions and use quantitative tools to try and answer them. The questions I am interested in range from fundamental (i.e., "What proportion of Americans have ever had a family member incarcerated?) to more complex (i.e., "What shapes variation in the timing and intricacy of criminal legal cases?"), and my collaborators and I use multiple methods to try and answer them (e.g., descriptive statistics, sequence analysis, observations).

At Wellesley, I teach courses on law and society, critical criminology, demography, and social exclusion. I have also taught courses in research design and quantitative methods. My courses are designed to offer students with an opportunity to build out conceptual and analytic toolkits to understand and interrogate systems that govern and shape social organization and inequality. In addition to teaching within the walls of the classroom, I am actively engaged in mentorship and teaching through undergraduate research opportunities.

Prior to joining the Wellesley faculty, I was an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. I completed my PhD in Sociology at Cornell University, where I completed my doctoral work in the Departments of Sociology and Policy Analysis and Management (now the Brooks School of Public Policy). I am a proud alum of Wellesley College, where I majored in Economics and French.

The beautiful colorful mural behind me in the photo above is titled “Evo” and was painted in 2017 by my colleague David Teng-Olsen, Professor of Art at Wellesley College.

Education

  • B.A., Wellesley College
  • M.A., Cornell University
  • Ph.D., Cornell University

Current and upcoming courses

Crime and Punishment

SOC238

What is a crime? Who or what is a criminal? How do individuals and societies respond to crime? These are the broad questions that will structure our work together in this sociological introduction to criminology and criminal justice. We will begin by developing a shared foundation of key terms, concepts, and theoretical perspectives that are used to help us describe and understand crime. Using this shared foundation, we will then turn our attention to a set of real-world historical and contemporary “moments” to help us understand key challenges and possible futures currently facing communities and the criminal justice system.
More Info

  • Population and Society

    SOC110

    This course provides a broad introduction to population studies, or social demography, which offers a framework and tools by which to understand how fundamental human processes of birth, death, and migration are inextricably linked to social change and inequality. Is racial inequality deadly? Is there such a thing as “too many people” on Earth? Over the course of the semester, we will develop a conceptual and analytic toolkit that allows us to consider these, among other big questions about societies, populations, and inequality and change therein. In addition to developing a demographic vocabulary, students will learn how to use interpret and calculate basic demographic measures and statistics, including population growth rates, life expectancies, and racial/ethnic population compositions.

  • Social Exclusion

    SOC203

    Who is an outsider? Who is an insider? What role do systems and structures play in shaping exclusion and inclusion in social life and organization? In this course, we will examine forms, conditions, causes, experiences, and the very definitions of social exclusion and marginalization through a deep engagement with sociological scholarship. We will focus on key topical contexts of interest including immigration, family and kinship, and poverty, based on a shared foundation of core sociological theory and concepts. We will consider not only how social exclusion helps us analyze sociological phenomena in new (or expanded) ways, but also how social exclusion is enacted and/or recognized in the policy systems that structure our everyday lives. Notes: This course can fulfill the requirement of a second course in social theory for the sociology major but is open to all interested students.