PhD Student
she/her
Allison Wigen is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at Boston University. Her research and writing focus on culture, class and inequality, work and occupations, environment, family, education, and social theory. Her dissertation research explores the relationship between work and cultural production, with an emphasis on the role of creative actors in producing social change. Utilizing ethnographic and historical methods, she examines how commercial fishermen’s work and artmaking have evolved amid the backdrop of environmental shifts spanning from the nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution to contemporary climate change.
Recent collaborative projects include exploring the duality of occupations and artistic hobbies (with Neha Gondal) and investigating how cross-class siblings experience and navigate economic difference (with Nazli Kibria). These projects complement her broader research interests in the intersections of culture, work, and inequality.
In addition to her research, Wigen has taught in a range of undergraduate sociology courses at Boston University, including Principles in Sociology, Sociology of Popular Culture, and Sociology of Gender. She has also collaborated on course design and instruction for graduate-level courses in education, such as Slow Looking: Learning through Observation in Museums and Beyond, Text Study: Purposes, Principles, and Processes, Arts-Based Research, International Perspectives on the Arts and Education, and The Arts in Education: Philosophical Dimensions and Practical Considerations.
Wigen’s academic work has appeared in Poetics, American Journal of Cultural Sociology, and Sociological Forum, and her cultural criticism has been published in Bright Lights Film Journal, among other venues. She holds an Ed.M. in Arts in Education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a B.A. in Literary Arts from Brown University.