Abbey Potter
Job Market Focus
Academic (tenure track) or postdoctoral positions in criminology, criminal justice, or other relevant fields
Expected Graduation
Spring 2027
Abbey's Dissertation
My dissertation is not yet titled, but the topic is school discipline, disproportionality and the school-to-prison pipeline
Abbey's Research
My research centers on formal and informal school discipline and how these contribute to disproportionality in students' educational and justice system outcomes. I am trained in quantitative and qualitative methods, and my dissertation uses a mixture of interviews and ethnography to better understand how teachers view student behavior and make disciplinary decisions.
Outside of the dissertation, I am working on a paper investigating the school characteristics associated with schools' use of in-school suspension, out-of-school suspension, expulsion, and student arrest. This project uses administrative data from the Maryland Longitudinal Data System. I am also preparing my masters thesis for publication. The thesis focuses on how student race and school racial composition interact to shape students' punishment risk using data from the Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study.
