Katherine Jensen

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Curriculum Vitae

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Biography

Research Interest Statement:

I am an Associate Professor of Sociology and International Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. As an ethnographer and qualitative sociologist, I research how race/ethnicity and immigration dynamics intertwine in Latin America, with a focus on Brazil and the Southern Cone. My work engages areas of race and ethnicity, international migration, political sociology, culture and cognition, and global and transnational sociology. It has been published in Sociology of Race & Ethnicity, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Qualitative Sociology, and City & Community, among others. My first book “The Color of Asylum: The Racial Politics of Safe Haven in Brazil” was published in 2023 by the University of Chicago Press.

Education:

Ph.D., The University of Texas at Austin (2018)

Departmental Areas of Interest:

Race and Ethnic Studies; Political Sociology; Qualitative Methods; Culture

Classes:

Soc 496 Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality (Fall 2020)
Soc 496 Asylum and Refugees (Spring 2020)

Other Campus Affiliations:

Latin American, Caribbean and Iberian Studies Program

Selected Publications:

Jensen, Katherine. 2026. “Confederate Reckoning and Resignifying Racism in Brazil: Local Memory Politics and Anti-Racist Movement Strategies.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 49(15):3134–3151.

Javier Auyero, Faith Deckard, Alexander Diamond, Maricarmen Hernandez, Katherine Jensen, Eldad Levy, Allison Lang, Águeda Ortega, Katherine Sobering, and Mary Ellen Stitt. 2026. “Why Ethnography?” Qualitative Sociology 49(3):425–445.

Jensen, Katherine and Jake Watson. 2025. “Transnationalizing Reception: Racial Scripts, Institutional Logics, and Congolese Refugee Processing in the United States and Brazil.” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 11(4):556-570.

Jensen, Katherine, Monika Krause, and Benjamin Witkovsky. 2025. “Human Rights as a Lay Category of Thought: Content and Structure in the United States.” Socius 11:1-17.

Jensen, Katherine. 2023. The Color of Asylum: The Racial Politics of Safe Haven in Brazil. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Jensen, Katherine. 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.

Katherine Jensen. 2021. “Contexts of Reception Seen and Constituted from Below: The Production of Refugee Status Apathy.” Qualitative Sociology 44(3):455-471.