Research
Dr. DaShanne Stokes' research examines legitimacy, recognition, inequality, criminalization, and social belonging across contexts. His work explores how social and political institutions shape visibility, exclusion, protection, and political possibility, as well as how unequal relations of power become normalized, reproduced, contested, and transformed through processes of recognition and misrecognition.
Drawing from political sociology, criminology, sociology of law, postcolonial sociology, and critical approaches, his scholarship investigates the processes through which power and legitimacy are socially organized. His research also informs his teaching and mentoring, enabling students to engage contemporary debates, research methods, and applied inquiry both inside and outside the classroom.
Research Areas
Legitimacy, Recognition, and Power
A major project in Dr. Stokes' research is the analysis of political recognition, legitimacy, and the social organization of inclusion and exclusion. His work investigates how institutions and political actors define the boundaries of statehood, citizenship, sovereignty, and collective belonging, and how these processes shape inequality across the global arena.
His research has explored questions surrounding Indigenous political recognition, contested statehood, symbolic boundaries, and the colonial and postcolonial foundations of political legitimacy. This work examines how systems of recognition shape relations among states, nations, and marginalized communities while structuring access to political visibility, rights, and institutional inclusion. Dr. Stokes' more recent work in this area examines the roles of crime in shaping state political recognition.
Selected publications in this area include work published in the International Review of Sociology and the American Indian Culture and Research Journal.
Criminalization, Inequality, and Social Regulation
Dr. Stokes' research in this area increasingly examines the intersections of crime, inequality, institutional power, and social control. His work explores how criminalization operates across systems of race, gender, sexuality, and political power, and how institutions construct and reproduce inequalities through legal, political, and cultural processes.
Current and developing projects examine biopower, state complicity, state crime, violence, social exclusion, and the criminalization of marginalized communities. This work includes research related to Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW), political crime, political discourse, and the historical evolution of discriminatory claims and rights-based rhetoric.
His work in these areas contributes to broader sociological and criminological conversations surrounding inequality, governance, criminalization, and institutional power.
Selected publications in this area include Dr. Stokes' entries on biopower and MMIW in the forthcoming (2026) Sage Encyclopedia of Crime and Gender.
Sociology of Gender, Sexuality, and Institutional Inequality
Related areas of Dr. Stokes' research examine gender, sexuality, inequality, and institutional regulation. His scholarship explores how institutions shape social inclusion, legitimacy, and unequal access to resources and protections across systems of gender and sexuality.
This work includes research on LGBT inequality, biopower, public discourse, and the relationship between institutional power and marginalized identities. His scholarship in these areas has appeared in Social Problems in the Age of COVID-19 (Policy Press 2020) and forthcoming (2026) work in The Sage Encyclopedia of Crime and Gender.
Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL)
Dr. Stokes' research and teaching are closely connected and mutually informing. His scholarship on teaching and learning examines educational sovereignty, empowerment, critical inquiry, and evidence-based pedagogical practices that help students connect personal experience with broader institutional and historical forces.
His pedagogical work includes peer-reviewed teaching publications through the American Sociological Association's TRAILS resource library as well as ongoing work on an "Empowerment Approach" that is currently under review at Teaching Sociology.
Dr. Stokes also integrates mentorship and collaborative research into his teaching and research agenda. Students working with him have gained hands-on experience with collaborative scholarly work, including literature reviews, coding, data collection, data analysis, and other research activities.
Selected Publications
- Stokes, DaShanne. 2026 (forthcoming fall 2026). “Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women, United States and Canada.” The Sage Encyclopedia of Crime and Gender. Janet Stamatel, ed. Sage.
- Stokes, DaShanne. 2026 (forthcoming fall 2026). “Biopower.” The Sage Encyclopedia of Crime and Gender. Janet Stamatel, ed. Sage.
- Stokes, DaShanne. 2020. "The Contraction of LGBT Rights in the Face of COVID-19."Social Problems in the Age of COVID-19: Volume 1 – U.S. Perspectives. Edited by G. Muschert, K. Budd, M. Christian, D. Lane, and J. Smith. Policy Press.
- Stokes, DaShanne. 2019. Political Opportunities and the Quest for Political Recognition." Mem>International Review of Sociology 29(1): 1–23.
- Stokes, DaShanne. 2012. "Native American Mobilization and the Power of Recognition: Theorizing the Effects of Political Acknowledgement." American Indian Culture and Research Journal 36(4): 57–76.
Collaboration and Student Research
Dr. Stokes welcomes opportunities for peer collaboration, student collaboration, and student advising and research mentorship. Students working with him have gained hands-on experience in an array of research activities--including data collection, data coding, literature reviews, and more--as well as collaborations leading to students gaining professional citations to strengthen their resumes and curriculum vitaes for the job market, graduate studies, and beyond.