Welcome! My name is Maximilian Cuddy and I’m the Earl S. Johnson Instructor in Sociology in the MA Program in the Social Sciences (MAPSS) at the University of Chicago. My work sits at the intersection between the sociology of race, the sociology of education, and urban sociology. Specifically, I study schools and urban neighborhoods as critical institutions through which racial and class-based hierarchies are either being reproduced or disrupted. My scholarly agenda has two core strands. First, I examine contemporary racial politics in K-12 urban education. As a qualitative sociologist, I am deeply interested in understanding how individual and community actors make sense of, defend, and resist the structural racism that upholds white (and affluent) advantage in and across schools. I also draw out how the current racial moment differs from, or remains similar to, past racial dynamics. My second core strand explores the racialized and classed aspects of how families make school and residential decisions. This work sheds light on how urban families navigate the simultaneous and self-reinforcing inequalities of school choice marketplaces and racially segregated neighborhoods. On the whole, my agenda centers the overlapping effects of race, class, and space at the macrolevel while also emphasizing the interactional and relational nature of actors’ lived experiences