Lilith Green
Ph.D. Candidate
Research Associate
Teaching Associate
Lilith is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology interested in research that sits at the nexus of culture, medical sociology, and embodiment through mixed methodologies. Their dissertation, Stewards of the Dead, treats funeral professionals as workers navigating oft-contradicting positions: caregivers, ritual authorities, tradespeople, and state-regulated professionals, all at once. The project frames funeral work as a hybrid occupational field, arguing that death care is itself a form of post-mortem care that extends the boundaries of the care economy beyond the living. Conducting interviews with death care workers, and field work at a mortuary science college, it asks how professional authority gets built and sustained as the traditional funeral home model erodes under shifting workforce demographics, rising cremation, corporate consolidation, and automation.
Alongside their dissertation, Lilith is a research assistant with the Global Knowledge Lab at the University of Arizona, where they're part of a team that has conducted over 200 interviews with scientists around the world, spanning AI, space science, genetics, and the social sciences, to examine how scientific authority and knowledge hierarchies operate transnationally. The team's latest paper, currently under review, is a methods piece assessing the efficacy and ethical dimensions of AI-assisted qualitative coding. Their broader research reflects a sustained interest in how institutions gatekeep expertise, identity, and legitimacy, from their earlier work on marginalized identity performance and institutional erasure to their current focus on how death care professionals and global scientists alike stake claims to authority within shifting institutional terrain.