Rachael D. Stephens
Hi, my name is Rachael.
I’m a joint Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology and Education and a Graduate Fellow in Urban Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. My work is grounded in a deep commitment to supporting communities’ ongoing efforts to build more equitable futures and to understanding how seemingly ordinary practices sustain larger structures of political and economic power.
My research explores how everyday decisions about things like housing, schooling, and public funding end up shaping who belongs where — and how inequalities we often think of as natural are actively made and remade through ordinary practices. My dissertation, an ethnography of public-school finance inequality, traces how the real estate market, property valuation and taxation, and public finance systems — along with the public discourses that narrate them — work together to reproduce stratified social orders in U.S. cities and suburbs. I’m especially interested in how these processes sustain racial capitalism: the historically specific ways race and economic power are co-constructed and mobilized to organize social life, delimit civic belonging, and rationalize state formation in the late liberal era.
This research is deeply tied to the Greater Hartford region, where I’ve collaborated with residents, educators, and organizers for over a decade on community-based research and participatory filmmaking projects. Before my doctoral work, I earned an M.A. in Education and Anthropology from Teachers College, Columbia University. At Penn, I’m part of CAMRA (a collective for multimodal research) and the Center for Experimental Ethnography.
Outside of academia, I’m an unabashed cat lady who spends most of her free time training in Muay Thai, making films, or binge-listening to podcasts about biophysics and healing. I’m continuously trying to learn how to balance life inside and outside academia — and I’m grateful that ethnography lets me spend my days learning from people about the worlds we share.
Please don’t hesitate to reach out!