Visiting Assistant Professor
he/him/his
Vance Alan Puchalski (Ph.D. Princeton University) is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology. His research, teaching, and practice focus on the separate and unequal world of financial services that persists in post-civil rights America. This work highlights the lived experiences of low-income populations that exist outside of the banking and credit mainstream, the so-called “unbanked,” “underbanked,” and “credit invisible,” revealing lesser understood reasons for banking status as well as informal means through which these populations meet their financial services needs.
Vance is finishing his forthcoming book (under contract with the University of Chicago Press). It combines urban ethnography with analysis of everyday finances to investigate how neighborhood stores play a crucial role in bridging the gap between urban poor communities, mainstream financial institutions, and governmental bodies. This work challenges dominant conceptions of market behavior as asocial, acultural, and apolitical and imagines what a more equitable, inclusive, and democratic financial system might look like.
Vance earned a Bachelor of Liberal Arts (Extension Studies) from Harvard University and a Master of Arts (Sociology) from Columbia University in the City of New York. From 2015-2017, he served as managing editor for City & Community, the quarterly, peer-reviewed journal of the American Sociological Association’s Section on Community and Urban Sociology. In addition to urban sociology and economic sociology, he is particularly interested in ethnographic methods.