Ellen Berrey

Dr. Ellen Berrey’s research engages multiple sociological subfields: law, race and racism, culture, organizations, and social movements. Her work is centrally focused on the politics and paradoxes of solving social and environmental problems. She has a particular interest in how cultural ideals—such as diversity, fairness, anti-racism, and sustainability—get mobilized, institutionalized, and contested. Her projects to date have examined the organizational and legal push for diversity, affirmative action policy and politics, employment discrimination law, corporate social responsibility, higher education protest, and sustainability politics. In addition to her appointment at University of Toronto, she is an affiliated scholar of the American Bar Foundation.

Dr. Berrey’s first book, The Enigma of Diversity: The Language of Race and the Limits of Racial Justice (University of Chicago Press 2015) is a multi-case ethnographic and historical analysis. In it, she argues that the popular public commitment to “diversity” in the U.S. represents the taming of radical demands for racial justice. The book was awarded the 2016 Herbert Jacob Book Prize of the Law & Society Association, the 2016 Distinguished Book Award of the Sociology of Law section of the American Sociological Association, and the 2016 Mary Douglas Book Prize Honorable Mention of the Sociology of Culture section of the American Sociological Association. It was profiled in The New Yorker, as well.

Her second book, with Robert Nelson and Laura Beth Nielsen, Rights on Trial: How Employment Discrimination Law Perpetuates Inequality (University of Chicago Press 2017) documents the dynamics of employment discrimination legal cases in the U.S. and the various parties’ experiences of litigation. Based on a novel mixed methods design, this book reveals the mechanisms by which law reinscribes social hierarchies of race, gender, (dis)ability, and age. It was awarded the 2018 Distinguished Book Award Honorable Mention of the Sociology of Law section of the American Sociological Association.

Dr. Berrey’s new projects explore 1) higher education protest and university and police responses to those protests in the U.S. and Canada (with Dr. Alex Hanna) and 2) a right-wing movement against sustainability planning that was motivated by a conspiracy theory.