Mari Sanchez is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at Harvard University. Sanchez is broadly interested in how societies manage and make sense of growing ethnoracial diversity. Her research lies at the intersection of ethnoracial classification, knowledge production, and intra-minority politics. Her dissertation offers a comparative study of “non-white meta-categories,” or superordinate categories that encapsulate various populations considered non-white, in the United States and the United Kingdom. In the U.S., non-white meta-categories include “people of color” (POC) and “minority”; in the UK, these include “Politically Black” and “Black, Asian, Minority Ethnic” (BAME). Sanchez interrogates how non-white meta categories, which were used in administrative spheres and radical movements in the U.S. and UK over the last 50 years to manage ethnoracial diversity and seek ethnoracial rights, have been unsettled, challenged, and revised since the 2020 murder of George Floyd.
Before graduate school, Sanchez worked nine years in the advertising industry, where she specialized in analyzing, understanding, and creating cultural narratives of diversity and inclusion.
Sanchez is a Graduate Student Affiliate at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies and the recipient of a Krupp Foundation Dissertation Research Fellowship.
