Overview
Lili Dodderidge is a doctoral candidate in the Sociology department at Cornell University, with research interests in community/urban sociology, the sociology of education, and criminal justice. Prior to Cornell, Lili worked for several years at a research and policy center at Drexel University's School of Public Health on issues related broadly to U.S. social policy and welfare programming. Most recently, Lili served as a high school educator and administrator in Philadelphia for five years. She earned her MSEd in Education Policy from the University of Pennsylvania and her BA from Georgetown University.
Lili’s dissertation consists of two key projects. While both explore questions of the role of schools in long-term or macro-level outcomes, the first project bridges her prior research in criminal legal contact with the sociology of education field. This study works with the most recent data from the Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study to identify the various disciplinary pathways students may take over their K-12 educational careers and how these trajectories are associated with arrest or imprisonment in early adulthood.
The second study is a sequential mixed methods study born of Lili’s own experience as an educator that investigates the weakening ties between neighborhoods and their local schools through the increasingly common school choice policy of intradistrict open enrollment. By assessing which neighborhood- and school-level characteristics predict enrollment in an assigned public school and generating, analyzing, and mapping enrollment ties across the School District of Philadelphia, she advances our understanding of the social and structural forces influencing the geographic dispersion of students in a school choice landscape. However, these quantitative analyses do not explain how this dispersion influences the day-to-day operations of schools. For that, Lili uses the findings from this first stage of this study to conduct qualitative case-study analyses in four theoretically-informed schools, interviewing teachers, staff, and school leaders about how a geographically dispersed student body impacts their work and the operational and cultural priorities of a school. She further explores whether there are differences in a school's approach based on the strength of their enrollment ties.
When Lili is not working on her dissertation research, she is exploring the coastal terrain of New England (where she is finishing her degree in absentia due to spousal work constraints), or reading lots of Sandra Boynton, practicing her seagull calls, and dancing with her toddler.
Dissertation Committee
Kendra Bischoff (chair), Sadé Lindsay, Peter Rich (University of Wisconsin), and Erin York Cornwell