Dissertation Title: The social construction of neighborhood desirability
Hesu is a PhD candidate in Sociology. She studies place stratification by examining how high-status consumers and place entrepreneurs perceive, represent, and evaluate places. Her research particularly focuses on the role of racial composition, located institutions, and digital technology in shaping place-based perceptions and preferences.
Neighborhoods are deeply unequal as places are socially constructed in ways that reflect and reproduce that existing stratification by race and class. Unlike most prior research in urban sociology that primarily focuses on the bottom of place stratification, Hesu's dissertation shifts the analytical attention to advantaged neighborhoods and those experiencing upward mobility. Drawing on multiple data and methods, including surveys, experiments, location data, and computational text analysis, her dissertation uncovers racialized patterns of retail development and gentrification; neighborhood naming strategies employed by Airbnb hosts; and neighborhood racial composition preferences of highly educated young white Americans. Ultimately, Hesu is passionate about promoting equitable neighborhood development through research, community engagement, and education.