Ellen Berrey

Dr. Ellen Berrey is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto and an affiliated scholar of the American Bar Foundation. Her research investigates how organizations and movements advance, and thwart, progressive social change in the United States and Canada. She is particularly curious about how cultural ideals – diversity, fairness, sustainability – get invoked, contested, and institutionalized in law and organizations. Motivated by the goals of understanding and supporting anti-racism movements, her current study with Alex Hanna investigates campus protest and responses by university administrations and police. Her study of an anti-sustainability movement in the United States examines how conspiracy theory is politically mobilized by white, conservative, suburban homeowners and adopted in local government.  

Dr. Berrey’s first book, The Enigma of Diversity: The Language of Race and the Limits of Racial Justice (U of Chicago Press 2015) received the prestigious Herbert Jacob Book Prize of the Law & Society Association, among other awards, and was profiled in The New Yorker. Her related Salon article, “Diversity Is for White People,” has been circulated on social media more that 33,000 times. Her second award-winning book, with Robert Nelson and Laura Beth Nielsen, Rights on Trial: How Workplace Discrimination Law Perpetuates Inequality (U of Chicago Press 2017), features online audio recordings of interviewees, which brings to life their experiences of discrimination.