Hi! I’m Charles Crabtree. I'm an assistant professor in the Department of Government at Dartmouth College, director of the Fundamental Needs Lab, co-founder and past co-director of the Baltic LEAP foreign study program, and current co-director of the Department of Government’s Honors Program.
I study discrimination
I’m a scholar of discrimination, researching it in new populations, sometimes for understudied identity groups, across new contexts, and with the goal of testing new theoretical mechanisms and ways of reducing it. I also develop better methodological approaches for measuring discrimination. My interest in discrimination stems in part from my own lived experiences, having been raised in a poor, blended, biethnic family, where multigenerational trauma was ongoing. I saw members of my family experience adverse treatment because of their class and ethnic identities. Earlier work on censorship and human rights also contributes to my interest. Researching censorship taught me more about which attitudes and actions (such as discrimination) people conceal and why; researching human rights taught me more about unequal rights provision across identity groups.
In the past, I’ve published work documenting and explaining discrimination against a wide range of identity groups, including those defined by disability, ethnicity, gender, nativity, race, and religion. Moving forward, I’m primarily focused on studying class-based discrimination. Growing up in poverty - without a home, in a trailer park, in public housing - taught me much about the role of class and money in society. While cash rules everything around us (with apologies to the Wu-Tang Clan), and class-discrimination is common, this topic remains largely ignored in political science.
Most of my work uses field or survey experiments and has focused primarily on the United States. To put my work there in a broader perspective and better understand the global variation we see in how people treat each other, I also do research in many other places, particularly Eastern Europe and Japan; I’ve spent years living in those contexts and have done extensive fieldwork there.
My research has been published or is forthcoming in over 40 journals or volumes across several fields, including the American Journal of Political Science, the American Political Science Review, the British Journal of Political Science (2), the Journal of Politics (2), Nature Human Behavior, Political Analysis, Public Administration Review, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2, 3).
This work has been covered in many media sources, such as National Public Radio's All Things Considered, CBS News, The Asahi Shimbun, The Atlantic, The Economist, The Huffington Post, and Yahoo! News (2). It has also been cited by advocacy organizations, such as the ACLU, and in policy documents, including U.S. House of Representatives testimony and State Department reports. I’m grateful to acknowledge funding from the American Political Science Association, the Swedish Research Council, the Tokyo Foundation for Policy Research, and the Research Council of Norway.
Reflecting the interdisciplinary nature of my work on discrimination, I’m affiliate faculty in several departments and programs at Dartmouth, including the Department of Eastern European, Eurasian, and Russian Studies, the Department of Sociology, the Program in Quantitative Social Science, and the Program in Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies.
I used to do a lot of other things
Before becoming a professor, I worked as a congressional staffer, policy researcher, photojournalist, English teacher in Belarus, tree farm hand, designer, and senior data scientist in Japan, among many other things.
When I’m not working, I enjoy spending time with my family, traveling, taking photographs, cooking, and visiting colleges and universities around the world.