Research Areas

Schools

One line of Calarco’s research uses reveals the power of privilege in schools and the myths that justify that power. Drawing on ethnographic observations and interviews with students, parents, and teachers in K-12 schools, Calarco’s first book and related articles highlight the causes and consequences of inequalities in families’ trust in schools. She shows that affluent white parents coach their children to ask for help from teachers, that that coaching empowers affluent white students to make requests that often go beyond what is fair or required, and that teachers feel compelled to grant those requests and even let affluent white students break the rules because of how the US public education system—with its property tax-based funding and emphasis on rankings—affords affluent white parents disproportionate influence over schools. Calarco also shows how schools use the myth of meritocracy to justify "status-reinforcing practices" like homework, "gifted" education, and standardized testing. And at the postsecondary level, Calarco’s work highlights a digital divide among college students, showing that inequalities in students’ access to reliable digital devices likely influence their grades and mental health and that students from systematically marginalized groups are more hesitant to ask for help in overcoming technology-related struggles.

Families

Another branch of Calarco’s research reveals the power of privilege in families and the myths that justify that power. Calarco’s forthcoming book, Holding it Together, combines personal stories, evidence from her research—including a five-year study of more than 300 Midwestern families and two national surveys—and insights from other scholars in fields like Sociology, History, Political Science, and Economics, to reveal how the US has squandered opportunity after opportunity to build the robust social infrastructure we desperately need. Instead, the engineers and profiteers of our DIY Society have tried to delude us into believing that we can get by without one, all while dumping the work that a net would do (and the risk we face without it) onto women—only to gaslight them if they try to complain. Calarco’s work in this area reveals that gendered structural and cultural conditions make mothers’ disproportionate labor seem “practical” and “natural” and that couples draw on these perceptions to justify having women do a disproportionate share of the caregiving labor. At the same time, Calarco’s work also highlights inequalities among women, showing, for example, that affluent white women are able to leverage their privilege to avoid scrutiny for their parenting decisions, including decisions about alcohol consumption during pregnancy and decisions about the food they feed their kids.