Stephanie L. Canizales, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Merced, earned her PhD in Sociology from the University of Southern California in 2018. Stephanie’s primary research agenda centers the migration and incorporation of unaccompanied, undocumented Latin American-origin youth coming of age in the U.S. Based on six years of research, Stephanie’s forthcoming book, Sin Padres, Ni Papeles, examines why unaccompanied youth migrate from Central America and Mexico to Los Angeles, California and how, once there, they navigate school, work, family, and community life without parents or papers. Funded by such agencies as the Ford Foundation, National Science Foundation, and Russell Sage Foundation, recent publications from this research can be found in Social Forces and Sociology of Education. A distinct thread of this research considers the role of ethnoracial identity and language(s) in unaccompanied Indigenous youth’s incorporation. At UC Merced, Stephanie teaches courses in Latinx Sociology and Immigration at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Stephanie was formerly a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow in Sociology at UC Merced (2019-2020) and an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Texas A&M University (2018-2019).
