Nicole Perez
Postdoctoral Research Associate
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About
Nicole A. Perez (Ph.D., Sociology, University of Notre Dame) is a postdoctoral researcher in the Office of Student Affairs Assessment and Planning at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). Her research focuses on student success initiatives to understand and improve the retention and graduation rates across UIC.
Research Currently in Progress
Nicole's research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of race and ethnicity, immigration, education and social inequality. She seeks to examine the importance of place, context of reception, access to social institutions, and localized constraints and opportunities young Latina/os encounter in forging their (im)mobility pathways. Her dissertation ‘At the Crossroads of America’: New Latino Immigrants in Northern Indiana found that over half of respondents are at a critical transition where they are “learning to be illegal” beyond the K-12 educational system within a new Latinx immigrant community. What all respondents share in common is that they are the first cohort of Latina/os who were shaped by the K-12 educational system and are currently “coming of age” and making sense of their “Latinidad” in a new Latino immigrant community. She focused on three major questions: 1) How do Latina/o young adults navigate the transition out of high school in a new immigrant destination? 2) How does variation in access to school resources, relationships with institutional agents and placements within educational curricular regimes across the local educational context explain variation in pathways formed after high school completion? and 3) How do K-12 educational experiences and the transition thereafter shape ethnoracial and undocumented identity formation processes? She plans to publish this work as a book manuscript.