Book Celebration and Book Review with Jessica Hardie: Best Laid Plans

Best Laid Plans (UC Press, 2022) demonstrates how planning for the future and pursuing those plans are stratified by social class, race, and gender. Drawing on qualitative data from a five-year period, Best Laid Plans makes the case for why we need to move beyond the individual appeal to “dream bigger” and “plan better” and toward systematic changes that will put young people’s aspirations within reach.

Jessica Hardie, received her Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Family Demography and Individual Development at Penn State University. She joined the Sociology Department at Hunter in Fall 2014. She specializes in the areas of sociology of education, inequality, family, health, and the transition to adulthood, and her research explores factors that explain the intergenerational transmission of inequality at several stages in the life course. She has conducted qualitative and quantitative research on adolescent social capital, race and racism in high school, economic resources and romantic relationship quality among cohabiting and married couples, and the relationship between maternal health and child wellbeing. She is currently working on a longitudinal qualitative study of class and race differences in young women’s transitions to adulthood, with attention to how they balance work, school, and family life during this period.