Speaker Series: 2025-27 Doctoral Fellows

The Population Health Consequences of 911 Call Surveillance by Christopher Robertson

Christopher Robertson is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities and will join the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at North Carolina State University as an Assistant Professor in fall 2026. His research examines the social and health consequences of legal control. 

At the Borders of Belonging: Asian American Immigrant Families, Disability, and the Governance of Conditional Futures by Jane Y. Jeong

Asian American immigrant students with disabilities and their families remain an understudied population in the sociolegal landscape of U.S. special education.  Their experiences are shaped by complex institutional dynamics: legal mandates, administrative practices, and shifting policy priorities converge to determine how rights are interpreted, how services are delivered, and how futures are envisioned. Yet, little is known about how families navigate and make sense of this process — or how they respond when procedural requirements, institutional expectations, and family knowledge do not align. This dissertation examines how Asian American immigrant students with disabilities and their families encounter, negotiate, and contest the governance of transition planning as defined under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). Conceptualizing transition as a legal and bureaucratic process — one that organizes access to federally guaranteed supports and shapes postsecondary trajectories — this study draws on sociolegal theory, cultural citizenship, and border epistemologies to understand how families engage with and reinterpret the state’s categories and procedures. By revealing how legal mandates are operationalized in practice, this project advances a sociolegal account of transition planning as a site where governance, institutional logics, and family agency intersect.

Jane Y. Jeong (she/her) is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Special Education at the University of Texas at Austin and will join the Department of Child Studies at Santa Clara University as an Assistant Professor of Law and Advocacy in fall 2026. Her research investigates how special education law and policy reflect and reinforce broader hegemonic structures and ideologies. She examines how these forces shape the implementation of policy and the lived experiences of historically marginalized families navigating disability-related service systems. 

To register, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org.