Dr. Sacha is a postdoctoral fellow in the Sociology department at UC Davis. He received his PhD in Sociology from the University of Southern California, where he was a Haynes Doctoral Dissertation Fellow. Dr. Sacha's research interests involve social inequality, sociology of education, school discipline, sports, and the high school-to-young adulthood transition for young men. His current research focuses on how high school extracurricular activities and school-based mentorship shape how young men think about school and their educational futures. Dr. Sacha's dissertation was titled, "Life on the Sidelines: The Academic, Social, and Disciplinary Impacts of Male High School Sports Participation in California." In this project, Dr. Sacha surveyed all of the male student-athletes at three Los Angeles high schools during the 2014-15 school year and conducted follow-up interviews with 20 student-athletes from each school. He found that sports often replicated, rather than challenged, unequal opportunity structures in these schools. Indeed, sports played a supplemental role for privileged students and a compensatory role in the high school lives of young men from low-income families. In his previous work Dr. Sacha has studied the mentorship practices of boxing trainers who work with young Black and Latino men in South Los Angeles. While a graduate student, Dr. Sacha was awarded his college's Outstanding Teaching Award.
Methodologically, I am a mixed-method researcher who specializes in using interview data to illuminate trends that I've documented in survey data. My topical areas of expertise include educational inequality, high school discipline, sports, and the experiences of young men, across race and family income. Specifically, my past work has shown how young men think and act creatively in contexts marked by both marginalization and privilege.
