Assistant Professor
he/him – (Mijs is pronounced “Mice”)
Dr Mijs´s research contends with why the growing economic gap has left many of us unconcerned.
His work draws on a combination of longitudinal data analysis, survey experiments, qualitative field work, and computational methods to document the transformation of the social landscape and its consequences for how people understand, explain and feel about inequality and meritocracy.
His research has been published in Social Problems, Socio-Economic Review, Sociology of Education, Social Psychology Quarterly, and the Annual Review of Sociology, among other journals. It has been supported by grants from the European Union, Dutch Research Council, Harvard University, London School of Economics, and BU’s Center for Innovation in Social Science. It has been featured in such news outlets as The Atlantic, the Washington Post, Financial Times, The Guardian, The Independent, and El País.
Recent publications include:
– Mijs, Jonathan J.B. 2023. “Learning About Inequality in Unequal America: How Heterogeneity in College Shapes Students’ Beliefs About Meritocracy and Racial Discrimination.” Research in Stratification and Social Mobility (in press)
– Mutgan, Selcan and Jonathan J.B. Mijs. 2023. “Income Inequality and Residential Segregation in “Egalitarian” Sweden: Lessons from a Least Likely Case.” Sociological Science 10: 374-402
– Mijs, Jonathan J.B. and Christopher Hoy. 2022. “How information about economic inequality impacts belief in meritocracy: Evidence from a survey-experiment in Australia, Indonesia and Mexico.” Social Problems 69(1): 91-122
– Carbone, Luca and Jonathan J.B. Mijs. 2022. “Sounds like meritocracy to my ears: exploring the link between inequality in popular music and personal culture.” Information, Communication and Society 25(5): 707-25
– Mijs, Jonathan J.B., Willem de Koster and Jeroen van der Waal. 2021. “Belief change in times of crisis: Providing facts about COVID-19-induced inequalities closes the partisan divide but fuels Republican intra-partisan polarization about inequality.” Social Science Research 104: 1-13
– Mijs, Jonathan J.B. and Elizabeth Roe. 2021. “Is America Coming Apart? Socioeconomic Segregation in Neighborhoods, Schools, Workplaces, and Social Networks, 1970 – 2020.” Sociology Compass 15(6): 1-16
Currently, Dr Mijs teaches SO 391 Social Inequality in America, SO 497 / SO 897 Understanding Meritocracy, and SO 702 Sociological Methods. He is available to supervise dissertations and student research projects.
Dr Mijs received his BSc (Sociology) and MSc (Social Sciences) from the University of Amsterdam and his MA and PhD in Sociology from Harvard University.
See his Professional Website for more information and PDFs of his published research.