Maddie Kerr is a first-year PhD student and Chancellor’s Fellow in the Sociology Department. Before joining Berkeley, Maddie completed their B.A. in sociology at Northwestern University. They held a position as an undergraduate researcher at Northwestern’s Impact Institute, where they contributed to several projects focused on LGBT health equity and wellbeing.

Maddie’s research interests converge around the politics of scientific and medical knowledge, particularly in relation to social categories of difference. In their research, they pursue broad questions such as: How do professional and lay actors interactively produce and mobilize knowledge about gender, health, and disability? How do social actors in these fields draw and enforce boundaries of credible evidence and expertise? And what are the material consequences of these processes?

Reflecting these themes, Maddie’s current work examines how opposing movements to uphold versus undermine professional and state restrictions on gender identity-based conversion therapy engage with scientific evidence, expertise, and authority. Another recent project, co-authored with Dr. Rebecca Ewert at Northwestern, analyzed how scientific and medical professionals, news media, politicians, and competing social movements construct statistical findings of an "overlap" between autistic and transgender populations in divergent ways that alternately legitimate or discredit all transgender peoples’ claims to recognition and health care.

Other past projects are described in the CV on this page. Maddie is always eager to collaborate and chat with others who share overlapping interests.