Dr. Vance Puchalski

Biography

Vance Alan Puchalski (Ph.D. Princeton University) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Michigan State University. His research and teaching explore financial exclusion through a lens of consumption-based stratification, which reinforces broader social inequalities and limits opportunities for marginalized communities. Vance is finishing a forthcoming book under contract with University of Chicago Press. His work combines urban ethnography with an analysis of everyday finances to investigate how neighborhood stores serve as important financial hubs, mediating the interactions between marginalized consumers and mainstream financial institutions as well as government bodies. This research challenges dominant conceptions of market behavior as asocial, acultural, and apolitical, envisioning what an equitable, inclusive, and democratic financial system might look like. Vance earned a Bachelor of Liberal Arts in Extension Studies from Harvard University, a Master of Arts in Sociology from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. from Princeton University. He has also worked as a researcher at the Debt Collection Lab and served as the managing editor for City & Community, a quarterly, peer-reviewed journal of the American Sociological Association’s Section on Community and Urban Sociology.

Research Interests

Experience