Mosi Ifatunji

Biography:

Mosi Adesina Ifatunji is an Assistant Professor in the Department of African American Studies and the Department of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He is also a Faculty Associate at the Program for Research on Black Americans, which is located in the Research Center for Group Dynamics, at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor; and a Research Scientist at the Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Before joining the faculty at Madison, he held teaching and faculty appointments at Ann Arbor (at the Summer Program in Quantitative Methods of Social Research at the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research) and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (in the Department of Sociology, at the Institute for African American Research and at the Carolina Population Center). His work has been supported by the American Sociological Association and the National Institutes of Health. His contributions have been published in Sociological Forum, Sociological Perspectives, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity and the Du Bois Review. He is also the Inaugural recipient of the James S. Jackson Emerging Scholars Award from the Program for Research on Black Americans.

Research Interest Statement:

Ifatunji’s primary research interests are in racial and ethnic theory and the methodologies used to study inequality and stratification. He is particularly interested in theorizing how non-phenomic characteristics contribute to racial classification and stratification. While most theories of race are based on assigning racialized meanings to people and populations according to perceived differences in skin color, hair texture and/or bone structure, he argues that racial classification often turns on non-phenomic characteristics, including language, religion, and geography. For instance, the U.S. Census Bureau recently recommended that we change our racial classification of immigrants from countries like Syria and Egypt from White to “Middle Eastern and North African.” For decades, proponents of this change have offered various rationales, but none of them reference phenomics. Therefore, he believes that; since non-phenomic characteristics contribute to the process of assigning racialized meanings to people and populations, we must revise the ontologies and theories that social scientists most often use when studying race and ethnicity. He is advancing this view by studying the ways in which African Americans and Black immigrants are racialized differently in the United States. His research draws on mostly quantitative methods, including: large-scale surveys, linked administrative data, social experiments, advanced statistics, and historiography.

Education:

Ph.D., University of Illinois at Chicago, Department of Sociology, 2011

M.A., University of Illinois at Chicago, Department of Sociology, 2006

B.A.,  University of Illinois at Chicago, Department of Psychology, 2003

B.A., University of Illinois at Chicago, Department of African American Studies, 2003

Departmental Areas of Interest:

Race and Ethnic Studies, Social Stratification, Methods and Statistics, Demography and Ecology

Classes:

Afro American Studies 151/Soc 151: Introduction to Race and Racism in the United States

Soc 922: Comparative Racialization

Soc 987:  UW Race and Ethnicity Workshop

Afro American Studies 271: Race, Racism and the U.S. Labor Market

Afro American Studies 271: Race, Racism and Population Health Disparities in the U.S.

Afro American Studies 271: Race, Racism and American Politics

Afro American Studies 673: Advanced Studies in Race and Racism

Afro American Studies 673: Race, Racism and Quantitative Research Epistemologies

Home Page

Department of Afro-American Studies

Other Campus Affiliations:

Center for Demography and Ecology

Center for Demography of Health and Aging

Selected Publications:

Labor Market:
Ifatunji, Mosi Adesina. 2021. “White Managers, Ethnoracism and Black Ethnic Labor Market Disparities.” Accepted for publication at Sociological Perspectives. [Available upon request].

Ifatunji, Mosi Adesina. 2017. “Labor Market Disparities between African Americans and Afro Caribbeans: Re-Examining the Role of Immigrant Selectivity.” Sociological Forum 32(3):522-43.

Ifatunji, Mosi Adesina. 2016. “A Test of the Afro Caribbean Model Minority Hypothesis: Exploring the Role of Cultural Attributes in Labor Market Disparities between African Americans and Afro Caribbeans.” Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race 31(1):109-38.

Health:
Ifatunji, Mosi Adesina, Deshira Wallace, Wendy Lee and Yanica Faustin. 2022. “Black Nativity and Health Disparities: A Research Paradigm for Understanding the Social Determinants of Health.” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 19(15).

Larimore, Savannah, Mosi Adesina Ifatunji, Hedwig Lee, Jane Rafferty, James Jackson and Margaret T. Hicken. 2021. “Geographic Variation in Reproductive Health among the Black Population in the Us: An Analysis of Nativity, Region of Origin, and Division of Residence.” Population Research and Policy Review 40(1):33-59.

Jacquelyn Taylor, Yan Sun, Veronica Barcelona de Mendoza, Mosi Adesina Ifatunji, Jane Rafferty, Ervin Fox, Solomon Musani, Mario Sims and James Jackson. 2017. “The Combined Effects of Genetic Risk and Perceived Discrimination on Blood Pressure among African Americans.” Medicine 96(43): e8369.

Politics:
Perrin, Andrew J. and Mosi Adesina Ifatunji. 2020. “Race, Immigration, and Support for Donald Trump: Evidence from the 2018 North Carolina Election.” Sociological Forum 35(S1):941-53.

Methods:
Mosi Adesina Ifatunji and Catherine Harnois. 2016. “An Explanation for the Gender Gap in Perceptions of Discrimination among African Americans: Considering the Role of Gender Bias in Measurement.” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, 2(3):263-88. [Lead Article].

Catherine E Harnois and Mosi Adesina Ifatunji. 2011. “Gendered Measures, Gendered Models: Toward an Intersectional Analysis of Interpersonal Racial Discrimination.” Ethnic and Racial Studies, 34:1006-28. [Distinguished Article Award, American Sociological Association; Section on Race, Gender and Class].