About

Jeffrey Guhin is an Associate Professor in the UCLA Sociology Department. His research focuses on the interaction between power and meaning, particularly how moral and political obligations become internalized. Much of his work examines schools and religious sites, often utilizing qualitative methods. His first book, 'Agents of God: Boundaries and Authority in Muslim and Christian Schools,' was published in January 2021. His current research explores the relationship between achievement, alienation, and well-being, as well as the connection between self-conception and perceived social and political obligations, especially within religious and educational contexts. Guhin's work centers on public schools, with upcoming projects interrogating the meanings of secular and public within the context of public education. He has interests in qualitative methods, institutions, and the application of literary theory to sociological analysis. He teaches large undergraduate courses such as 'Sociology of Religion' and 'Contemporary Sociological Theory,' along with graduate and undergraduate seminars. Additionally, he directs the minor in Social Thought. Guhin holds a PhD from Yale University (2013) and a BA from Loyola New Orleans (2003). He has lived in Los Angeles for an extended period and enjoys hiking and camping with his two daughters.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Social Science
• Sociology
• Epistemology
• Law
• Social psychology
• Psychology
• Pedagogy
• Economics
• Philosophy
• Positive economics

Selected publications

• The Achievement Narrative and Alienation in School: A Typology of Academic Disconnection

  Sociology of Education · 2025-10-30

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  Previous work on student alienation in schools has emphasized alienation as either a source or consequence of students’ lack of achievement. We show, in contrast, how alienation is common to a wide range of students’ experiences in school, including among “high-achieving” students. Drawing on over two years of ethnographic fieldwork in two disparate suburban high schools, we show how students’ experience of alienation is linked to an exacting achievement narrative in U.S. schooling. We describe four forms of alienation: precarious character, unsound settings, impossible plots, and someone else’s story, with the first three each connected to a different narrative element (character, setting, plot) and the fourth a more existential sense of narrative disconnect. We highlight the importance of alienation as a reason to de-emphasize schooling in solutions to inequality, making space for more radical politics of redistribution.

  PublisherDOI

• Student Alienation in Schools Goes Beyond Low Achievement

  2025-11-17

  reportOpen accessSenior author

  When we think about students struggling in school, we often focus on grades, test scores, and graduation rates. But there's a deeper problem affecting students across all achievement levels: alienation. Students feel disconnected from school not because they're failing, but because they can't see themselves in the narrow story schools tell about success. This brief summarizes findings from a study drawing on over two years of ethnographic fieldwork in two different high schools in Los Angeles, California. The authors identify four types of alienation students experience: feeling like they don't belong, being in schools that can't support their goals, pursuing futures schools don't recognize, and succeeding in someone else's story. The authors recommend that educators, policymakers, and parents rethink what counts as achievement in the first place, rather than simply helping more students succeed within the existing narrow definition of success.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• :<i>Habit’s Pathways: Repetition, Power, Conduct</i>

  American Journal of Sociology · 2025-07-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Book Review: Wes Markofski, Review of <i>Good News for Common Goods: Multicultural Evangelicalism and Ethical Democracy in America</i>

  Review of Religious Research · 2024-05-28

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• A Narrative Theory of Alienation

  2024-11-17 · 2 citations

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Narrative and alienation are both important concepts in sociological theory, albeit often ill-defined. We suggest a “narrative theory of alienation” that builds on a renewed interest in alienation to sharpen both concepts, developing the concept of “structural narratives” as “anchors” (Swidler 2001b) for ongoing “active narratives” and actors’ “biographical narratives” about themselves. We distinguish between these three narrative categories, showing how structural narratives situate the temporality and parameters of alienation, thereby providing clarity to some of alienation’s ongoing conceptual problems. In so doing, the authors show how “structural narratives” can provide a theoretical resource to the broader study of narratives and culture. The authors further their argument by referencing various works of literature and social scientific research throughout the text, ending with a more thorough examination of alienation in schools.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Classifying Muslims: Contextualizing Religion and Race in the United Kingdom and Germany

  Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion · 2023-06-08 · 8 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract Since the late 20th century, public discourse in Muslim‐minority countries has centered around the question of how to classify Muslims. In this paper, we compare the state, academic, and self‐classification of Muslims in two countries: the United Kingdom and Germany. We propose that the historical experience of anti‐Semitism makes religion a more salient master category to understand Muslims in Germany, while the history of both anti‐Semitism and anti‐Black racism largely resulting from colonial domination means that religion together with race are master categories used to understand Muslims in the United Kingdom. Through this multilayered ethnographic and historical analysis, we challenge taken‐for‐granted assumptions in both the political and academic milieu about what it means to be Muslim, emphasizing the importance of the interplay between sociopolitical categories and self‐identifications.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• When to Preach About Poverty: How Location, Race, and Ideology Shape White Evangelical Sermons

  Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion · 2023-02-13 · 16 citations

  articleOpen access1st author

  Abstract Social scientists have long been interested in how intergroup contact or elite messaging can reduce or eliminate racial biases. To better understand the role of religious elites in these political questions, we show how a church location's income and racial characteristics interact with racial and economic ideologies to shape the political content of sermons. Testing our theories through both quantitative and qualitative analysis of an original data set of more than 102,000 sermons from more than 5200 pastors, we show that contact is only effective as a means of decreasing prejudice to the extent that actors—in our case, pastors—are ideologically capable of reconciling their potential role in economic inequality. White Evangelical pastors rarely preach about issues of poverty or racial justice overall, but the context of the preaching matters. We find that the greater the share of Black population there is in a church community, the less likely White Evangelical pastors are to mention issues of poverty or racial justice, and when they do mention it, they hold to ideological commitments that avoid blaming systems for racialized economic inequality.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• <i>How Schools Really Matter: Why Our Assumption about Schools and Inequality Is Mostly Wrong</i>. By Douglas B. Downey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. $95.00 (cloth); $16.00 (paper).

  American Journal of Sociology · 2022-06-16

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Traces of the Dead, Actions of the Not-Alive: A Prologue to a Theory of Agentification

  American Behavioral Scientist · 2022-12-22 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The author describes how sociological and philosophical discussions of agency tend to center questions of how or why people are agentic rather than who or what is agentic. In contrast, the author poses questions about the agency of things, the agency of non-humans, and the agency of dead humans, using three examples of historical traces—Washington’s refusal of a third term, Jenner’s development of the smallpox vaccines, and Smith’s publication of The Wealth of Nations—as historical examples to examine how non-humans and non-living-humans leave traces that can experienced as agentic. The author then analyzes six theories of agency that might provide explanations for these actions (actants, affordances, switchmen, residue, repression, and ghosts) before turning to his earlier work on the concept of “external authorities.”

  PublisherDOI

• Defining Du??�: A Study of Contested Meanings in Immigrant Muslim Schools in the New York City Area

  The Journal of Education in Muslim Societies · 2022-01-01 · 6 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Jessica McCrory Calarco

  University of Wisconsin–Madison

  2 shared

• Rachel Rinado

  University of Colorado System

  2 shared

• Cynthia Miller‐Idriss

  American University

  2 shared

• Thomas Crosbie

  Royal Danish Defence College

  2 shared

• Joseph Klett

  University of California, Santa Cruz

  2 shared

• Elisabeth Becker

  Heidelberg University

  2 shared

• Rachel Rinaldo

  University of Colorado Boulder

  2 shared

• Andrea M. Maccarini

  University of Padua

  1 shared