Jessica McCrory Calarco is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an expert on inequalities in education and family life, with a focus on qualitative methods.
Calarco’s first book, Negotiating Opportunities (Oxford, 2018; winner of the Pierre Bourdieu Award), draws on ethnographic observations and in-depth interviews with teachers, parents, and students to reveal the origins and consequences of social class differences in help-seeking.
Calarco’s second book, A Field Guide to Grad School (Princeton University Press, 2020), builds on her research on inequalities in students’ experiences at the postsecondary level and offers advice for navigating (and dismantling) academia’s hidden curriculum. Calarco also offers related workshops aimed at promoting equity and empathy in college and graduate education.
Along with Mario Luis Small, Calarco recently published her third book, Qualitative Literacy (University of California Press 2022), which outlines five indicators of quality that readers can use to evaluate ethnographic and interview-based research on its own terms.