Anya Degenshein

 

About                                                  

 

Anya Degenshein is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Sociology at Northwestern University, as well as a Presidential Fellow and a Graduate Fellow at Northwestern's Center for Legal Studies. Her research examines institutional and relational mechanisms that create or exacerbate social inequality, with particular interest in the criminal justice system and urban economies.

 

She is currently working on her dissertation project, which investigates how legal actors interpret preventative policing tactics--especially digital tehcnologies--in post-9/11 domestic terrorism cases. Previous empirical projects also include a 13-month ethnography of a Chicago-area pawnshop, investigating the social and economic logics of pawn-based loans, as well as an interview-driven study of a state-level prosecutorial lobbying organization and their efforts to maintain legal discretion in the legislative arena.

 

Degenshein holds Masters of Arts degrees from Northwestern and the University of Chicago. She completed her Bachelors of Arts degree at Cornell University. She has previously volunteered as a teaching assistant for the Cornell Prison Education Program and worked as an English as a Second Language teacher in Santiago, Chile. She has also worked as a Court Advocate in the New York Supreme Court for the Fortune Society's alternative to incarceration programs.