Candace Miller, Ph.D.

Candace Miller is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society and a Visiting Assistant Professor in O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs.

She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Virginia in 2019. Her research interests have focused on race/ethnicity, urban sociology, and culture. Candace’s is currently working on a book based on a mixed-methods examination of the disparate impacts of gentrification on Black-owned and white-owned businesses in Detroit, MI.

In addition, she has recently examined how arts organizations are distributed among poor and minority urban neighborhoods, how students from different racial groups construct spatial meaning and interpret a sense of belonging on a public university campus, and how race and gender create inequality in among biology Ph.D. students in laboratory workspaces.

Tal Feder, Ph.D.

Tal Feder is an Israel Science Foundation (ISF) Post Doctoral Fellow at the CCA. His current research focuses on access to art and cultural policy. He received his Ph.D. degree from the University of Haifa in a joint program with Humboldt University, Berlin. 

His research interests are cultural policy, sociology of art and culture and quantitative research methods. Tal has taught courses on cultural policy and sociology of culture and art in several academic institutes in Israel and in NGOs dedicated to social activism through art.

In 2018 he published his paper “Normative justification for public arts funding” in the journal SocioEconomic Review. This paper received recently the 2019 Guttman award for best sociology paper from the Israeli Sociological Association.

Jessica Sherrod Hale, Ph.D. Candidate

Jessica Hale is a Ph.D. candidate in public affairs at the O’Neill School for Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University Bloomington. Her work focuses on adaptation, responsiveness, and innovation in public and nonprofit organizations, with a specific focus on mechanisms for effecting change in organizations. With Joanna Woronkowicz, Jessica recently examined how artists contribute to public sector innovation in an experiment examining group creativity in a collaborative problem-solving exercise.

Jessica situates much of her research in education policy and has examined the role of cultural infrastructure in higher education. Jessica’s work with colleagues has explored the impact of cultural infrastructure on outcomes ranging from arts participation to enrollment and tuition revenue.