Katherine Jensen
Assistant Professor, Sociology and International Studies
About
Katherine Jensen is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and International Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She earned her PhD in Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin in 2018, with a Doctoral Portfolio in African and African Diaspora Studies. Before joining the University of Wisconsin, she was a Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Center for Inter-American Policy & Research at Tulane University. She is a former Fulbright Fellow and P.E.O. Scholar. As an ethnographer, her research interests include race/racism, refugees and immigration, political sociology, and forced migration in the Americas, with a focus on Brazil and the Southern Cone. Her work has been published in Ethnic and Racial Studies, Qualitative Sociology, American Behavioral Scientist, Social Currents, City & Community, and Contexts, as well as in edited volumes with university presses. Her first book “The Color of Asylum: The Racial Politics of Safe Haven in Brazil” was published in 2023 at the University of Chicago Press.
Areas of Interest
Race and Ethnic Studies; Political Sociology; Qualitative Methods; Culture
- Ph.D., The University of Texas at Austin (2018)
- Katherine Jensen. 2023. “From the Asylum Official’s Point of View: Frames of Perception and Evaluation in Refugee Status Determination.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 49(13):3455-3472.
- Águeda Ortega, Katherine Jensen, and Javier Auyero. 2023. “You Will Never Walk Alone: Ethnographic Training as Collective Endeavor.” Teaching Sociology:1-14.
- Katherine Jensen and Lisa M. Sousa Dias. 2022. “Varied Racialization and Legal Inclusion: Haitian, Syrian, and Venezuelan Forced Migrants in Brazil.” American Behavioral Scientist 66(13):1797-1815.
- Katherine Jensen. 2021. “Contexts of Reception Seen and Constituted from Below: The Production of Refugee Status Apathy.” Qualitative Sociology 44(3):455-471.
- Katherine Jensen. 2021. “The Meanings of Refugee Status.” Contexts 20(1):10-15. “New Ethnographies of the Global South” Special Issue, eds. Victoria Reyes and Marco Garrido.
- Javier Auyero. 2019. “Teaching and Learning the Craft: The Construction of Ethnographic Objects.” Research in Urban Sociology (Special Issue, Urban Ethnography: Legacies and Challenges) 16:69-87.
- Katherine Jensen. 2018. “The Epistemic Logic of Asylum Screening: (Dis)embodiment and the Production of Asylum Knowledge in Brazil.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 41(5):2615-2633.
- Katherine Jensen. 2018. “El asilo pensado como un campo: percepciones, posturas y relaciones en el proceso de refugio en Brasil.” Pp. 27-50 in Pierre Bourdieu en la sociología latinoamericana: El uso de campo y habitus en la investigación, eds. R. Castro and H. J. Suárez. Mexico City, MX: UNAM Press.
- Shapira, Harel, Katherine Jensen, and Ken-Hou Lin. 2018. “Trends and Patterns of Concealed Handgun License Applications: A Multi-State Analysis.” Social Currents 5(1):3-14.
- Collins, Caitlyn, Katherine Jensen, and Javier Auyero. 2017. “A Proposal for Public Sociology as Localized Intervention and Collective Enterprise: The Makings and Impact of Invisible in Austin.” Qualitative Sociology 40(2):191-214.
- Katherine Jensen. 2015. “Kumar: Driving in the Nighttime.” Pp. 138-161 in Invisible in Austin: Life and Labor in an American City, edited by J. Auyero. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
- Auyero, Javier, and Katherine Jensen. 2015. “For Political Ethnographies of Urban Marginality.” City & Community 14(4):359-363.