Taylor Winfield

Taylor Paige Winfield is an assistant professor in the School of Sociology at the University of Arizona. Her research and teaching interests include law and society, criminology, organizational and cultural sociology, and social inequality.

Dr. Winfield’s research examines how organizations use strict and comprehensive internal rules to shape behavior. With a focus on gender, race, and class, she traces how individuals from diverse backgrounds navigate these efforts and push organizations to change. Her upcoming book, Becoming a Soldier: How Institutions Shape Bodies and Bodies Shape Institutions, addresses this topic through three years of immersive ethnography and over 100 interviews with new soldiers in the U.S. Army.  She recently completed an 18-month ethnography in a South African women’s correctional facility in order to compare across organizations with different purposes and rationales for control, as well as in countries with distinct racial and gendered regimes. As a feminist scholar and community-engaged researcher, Dr. Winfield has over a decade of experience conducting immersive, longitudinal studies in global settings with restricted access. Her work has been published in Sociological Theory, Theory & Society, Ethnography, and Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, and has received funding from the National Science Foundation, U.S. Fulbright Program, Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from Princeton University in 2022.