January 2024: Dr. Spencer Piston (CAS Political Science)
Spencer Piston is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Boston University. He received his PhD in 2014 from the University of Michigan. His research examines the politics of oppression in the United States, focusing on race, class, public opinion, political behavior, elections, the welfare state, and the criminal justice system. Piston is the author of Class Attitudes in America, which was published in 2018 by Cambridge University Press. His scholarship has also been published or accepted for publication in many leading social science journals, including The American Political Science Review, Du Bois Review, Electoral Studies, The Journal of Politics, and more. His scholarship has been funded by the Social Science Research Council, Time-Sharing Experiments in the Social Sciences, the Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences, the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan, the Maxwell School’s Campbell Institute at Syracuse University, and the Initiative on Cities as well as the Institute for Health System Innovation & Policy at Boston University. Learn more about Professor Piston in his full interview below.
What made you decide to be a social scientist/ why does social science matter to you?
The social sciences, along with the humanities, are often a wonderful space in which people can engage the question: How are we to live together?
Can you tell us about a recent research project that you’re excited about?
I am researching intersections between systems of school policing and family policing, in partnership with Center for Innovation in Social Science postdoc Andrew King and Center on Forced Displacement postdoc Selma Hedlund, as well as local advocacy organizations Movement for Family Power and Family Matters 1st. We are finding substantial evidence that mothers engage in creative and sustained resistance to these twin systems of oppression.
What is the best piece of professional advice you ever received?
“If you don’t have courage before tenure, you won’t have courage after tenure.” This advice, from Katya Gibel Azoulay at my alma mater (Grinnell College), guided my years as an assistant professor.
What is your favorite course you’ve taught at BU?
Tell us a surprising fact about yourself.
I have been, briefly, incarcerated.