About Blyss Cleveland

I am a second-year PhD student in the Stanford University sociology department, and my research agenda is driven by the desire to understand how people experience stratification and inequality. If individuals are raced, gendered, assigned a class position, and inhabit a social location based on these identity markers, how do they experience the world from that space? I am primarily a qualitative scholar and my current research project uses ethnographic observations of retail stores and interviews with employees and customers to understand how people shop for and make decisions about cosmetic products. I also study marriage as it relates to inequality through the lenses of race, class, gender, and skin-tone stratification, analyzing how these variables affect Black women’s participation and non-participation in dating and marriage markets. In my free time, I contribute to the Arts & Life section of the Stanford Daily.