CURRICULUM VITAE

Vance Puchalski

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BIOGRAPHY

Vance Alan Puchalski (Ph.D. Princeton University) is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Michigan State University. His research, teaching, and practice examine financial exclusion as a lens through which consumption-based stratification operates, thereby reinforcing broader social inequalities and limiting opportunities for marginalized communities. 

Vance is finishing his forthcoming book (under contract with the University of Chicago Press). It combines urban ethnography with analysis of everyday finances to investigate how neighborhood stores serve as important financial hubs, mediating between marginalized consumers,  mainstream financial institutions, and government bodies. This work challenges dominant conceptions of market behavior as asocial, acultural, and apolitical to envision what a more equitable, inclusive, and democratic financial system might look like. 

Vance earned a Bachelor of Liberal Arts (Extension Studies) from Harvard University and a Master of Arts (Sociology) from Columbia University in the City of New York, and a PhD. from Princeton University where he worked as a researcher with the Debt Collection Lab. From 2015-2017, he served as managing editor for City & Community, the quarterly, peer-reviewed journal of the American Sociological Association’s Section on Community and Urban Sociology. In addition to urban sociology and economic sociology, he is particularly interested in ethnographic methods.

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