Youngmin Yi
Knafel Assistant Professor of Social Sciences and Assistant Professor of Sociology
Sociologist and demographer interested in institutions of social control, family, race, space, and inequality in the United States.
My research is situated at the intersection of the sociology of crime and deviance; population; law and society; family; and race and ethnicity, with a broader interest in social and geographic inequality. I focus primarily on using quantitative data and methods to study the criminal legal and child welfare in the United States. I am particularly interested in these systems' impacts on family and racial inequality, the ways these systems shape and reflect our ideas of race and family relationships, and critical interrogation of the ways we ask these questions and use data to try and answer them. The questions I am interested in range from fundamental (e.g., "On average, how many members of Americans' families have ever been incarcerated?") to more complex (e.g., "How do changes in racial segregation exposure over the course of the day shape people's feelings of neighborhood social cohesion and safety?").
At Wellesley, I teach courses on law and society, critical criminology, demography, and social exclusion. I also have pedagogical expertise in research design and quantitative methods. My courses are designed to offer students an opportunity to build out conceptual and analytic toolkits to understand and interrogate systems that shape social organization and inequality. In addition to teaching within the walls of the classroom, I am passionate about undergraduate mentorship and teaching through advising, undergraduate research, and supporting students in their professional and academic journeys more broadly.
Prior to joining the Wellesley faculty, I was a member of the faculty at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and completed my PhD in Sociology at Cornell University. I am a proud alum of Wellesley College.
The beautiful colorful mural behind me in the headshot 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
Introduction to Criminal Justice Systems
SOC103
What is a crime? Who or what is a criminal? How do individuals and societies respond to crime? These are the key overarching questions that will structure this sociological introduction to criminology and criminal justice. We will begin by developing a shared foundation of key terms, concepts, empirical facts, and theoretical perspectives that are used to describe and analyze crime and punishment. We will then use this foundation to examine a set of real-world historical and contemporary “moments” as a vehicle for analyzing key challenges and possible futures currently facing communities and the criminal legal system, using the United States context as a case.
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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.