Research
Dr. DaShanne Stokes’ research examines how institutional power and inequality shape recognition, classification, criminalization, legitimacy, social belonging, and protection across political and social contexts. His work asks how institutions construct social and political categories, confer or withhold legitimacy, regulate populations, and shape who becomes visible, protected, criminalized, or ignored. A central thread across his research is the study of recognition, classification, and misrecognition as institutional processes through which power and inequality are produced, reproduced, concealed, contested, and transformed.
His research combines mixed methods, comparative-historical analysis, macro-causal analysis, and theory building. Drawing on sociology and criminology, his scholarship examines how large-scale structures of power become embedded in institutional practices and how those practices shape social and political outcomes.
Core Questions
Who receives recognition?
Who becomes visible?
Who becomes protected or regulated?
Approaches
Mixed methods
Comparative-historical analysis
Macro-causal analysis
Theory building
Research Areas
Power
Recognition
Politics
Criminalization
Inequalities
Collaboration
Scholarly collaboration
Student research
Research mentorship
Research Program
Recognition, Classification, and Institutional Power
A foundational part of Dr. Stokes’ research examines political recognition and the institutional processes through which legitimacy, political opportunity, and collective belonging are constructed.
In his 2012 article in the American Indian Culture and Research Journal, he theorized recognition as a mechanism through which institutions distribute legitimacy, resources, political opportunities, and organizational possibilities, shaping the conditions under which collective mobilization occurs. His 2019 article in the International Review of Sociology extended this work to international political recognition. Using comparative-historical analysis of Tibet, Taiwan, and Palestine, he originated the Opportunity Structure of Recognition (OSR) framework, identifying how political opportunities, alignment of interests, timing, and external patronage interact to shape recognition and non-recognition outcomes.
This research established recognition as a consequential and contested institutional mechanism through which political status, legitimacy, opportunity, and inequality are produced. His subsequent research extends these questions beyond formal political recognition to examine how institutional classifications shape criminalization, social regulation, victimization, and protection.
The Opportunity Structure of Recognition (OSR) Framework
The OSR framework identifies four interacting conditions—political opportunities, alignment of interests, timing, and external patronage—that can operate singly or in combination to shape political recognition and non-recognition outcomes. Rather than a simple linear sequence, the framework treats these conditions as potentially reinforcing, competing, and changing over time.
Criminalization, Social Control, and Inequality
Dr. Stokes’ current research extends his work on recognition and institutional power into the study of criminalization and social control. He examines how populations and behaviors become constructed as criminal, how those processes change over time, and how mechanisms of criminalization are adapted across populations.
His research on intersectional criminalization examines how classification becomes linked to criminalization and how criminalization helps constitute boundaries among legitimate citizens, governable populations, and subjects of social control. This work treats criminalization not simply as an outcome of inequality, but as an institutional process through which populations are classified, regulated, and differentially positioned within systems of law and social control.
His 2026 peer-reviewed entry on “Biopower” in The SAGE Encyclopedia of Crime and Gender examines how carceral institutions use gendered classification and regulation to constitute populations and differential treatment, showing how these processes reproduce domination while remaining open to resistance.
His research in this area also includes questions of state crime, political crime, institutional discrimination, and the relationship between criminalization and political legitimacy.
Gendered Violence, Victimization, and Institutional Protection
Another developing area of Dr. Stokes’ research examines how systems of power shape patterns of violence, victimization, and institutional protection. His comparative research on colonialism, racism, and the production of gendered violence examines how colonialism, racialization, patriarchy, and other systems of power become translated into contemporary patterns of gendered violence and differential institutional response.
His 2026 peer-reviewed entry, “Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, United States and Canada,” in The SAGE Encyclopedia of Crime and Gender examines how racialized and gendered institutional narratives shape the visibility, investigation, and protection of Indigenous women and girls, linking violence to broader structures of state power and colonialism.
This research contributes to a broader inquiry into how institutional classifications shape whose victimization becomes visible, whose claims receive recognition, and how protection is distributed across populations.
Gender, Sexuality, and Institutional Inequality
Related research examines gender, sexuality, and institutional inequality, with particular attention to how institutions shape access to resources, visibility, legitimacy, and protection.
His peer-reviewed chapter in Social Problems in the Age of COVID-19 examines how the pandemic intensified LGBT inequality by constricting material resources and public visibility, weakening political capacity to contest institutional discrimination. This work extends his broader research program by examining how institutional conditions shape both inequality and the capacity of groups to respond to it.
Book Project: State Complicity, Biopower, and Misrecognition in the Production of Inequalities
These projects contribute to a broader book-length research program, State Complicity, Biopower, and Misrecognition in the Production of Inequalities. The book brings together Dr. Stokes’ research on political recognition, classification, biopower, criminalization, victimization, and differential protection to examine how states and other institutions constitute and govern populations.
The project examines how recognition and misrecognition operate across interpersonal, institutional, and political levels; how classifications become institutionalized; and how those classifications shape regulation, criminalization, protection, and legitimacy. Biopower and criminalization are central mechanisms through which states govern populations, produce distinctions among social groups, and distribute vulnerability and protection. Criminalization is therefore not simply an outcome of inequality but a process through which institutions constitute populations as legitimate, dangerous, deviant, vulnerable, or otherwise governable subjects.
The book examines these processes across race, gender, sexuality, indigeneity, migration, and political recognition without treating any single identity or population as its necessary unit of analysis. Historical and comparative analysis, combined with institutional ethnography and other methods, connects large-scale structures to everyday institutional experience and illuminates how power operates across levels.
Scholarship of Teaching and Learning
Dr. Stokes’ research and teaching are closely integrated. His scholarship on teaching and learning examines educational practice, student empowerment, critical inquiry, and evidence-based approaches that help students connect individual experience with broader social and institutional processes.
His pedagogical research includes peer-reviewed publications through the American Sociological Association’s TRAILS resource library, including work featured in TRAILS collections and Teaching Sociology. His current scholarship includes “An Empowerment Approach to Teaching,” which is in second-round peer review at Teaching Sociology following an invitation to revise and resubmit. His teaching record also documents a substantial record of 49 courses taught across sociology, criminology, research methods, statistics, political sociology, gender, social problems, and related areas.
Selected Publications
- Stokes, DaShanne. 2026. “Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, United States and Canada.” Pp. 62–63 in The SAGE Encyclopedia of Crime and Gender, Vol. 3, edited by J. Stamatel. Sage Publications.
- Stokes, DaShanne. 2026. “Biopower.” Pp. 865–869 in The SAGE Encyclopedia of Crime and Gender, Vol. 3, edited by J. Stamatel. Sage Publications.
- Stokes, DaShanne. 2020. “The Contraction of LGBT Rights in the Face of COVID-19.” In Social Problems in the Age of COVID-19: Volume 1 – U.S. Perspectives. Policy Press.
- Stokes, DaShanne. 2019. “Political Opportunities and the Quest for Political Recognition.” 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 scholarly collaboration, student research, and research mentorship. Students working with him have gained hands-on experience with research activities including literature reviews, data collection, coding, and data analysis, as well as opportunities to contribute to collaborative scholarly work and develop research skills relevant to graduate study and professional careers.