Ali R. Chaudhary is a sociologist, musician, and associate professor of sociology at Rutgers University in New Brunswick-New Jersey.

My scholarship interrogates the significance of social categories in everyday life. Socially constructed categories such as nationality, race, gender, caste-among others, can condition opportunities and constraints across many domains of social life. My research and scholarship seek to understand the consequences of such categories as they impact organizations, transnational diaspora groups, and most recently, the production and performance of popular music.

Musical Instruments

I am currently exploring the significance of 20th-century racial segregation on the production and consumption of musical instruments in the United States. The first article from this research explores the boundary-making power of advertising in the development of the electric guitar (published in Sociological Forum). A related article examines the production and consumption of DJ equipment during the late 20th century.

Working Musicians: Precarity and Recovery

A second project uses ethnography and quantitative data to examine the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on working-musicians in the United States. The project uses survey data to measure the short-term economic implications of the pandemic on working musicians. In addition, ethnography and interviews are being conducted for a case study on the local effects and consequences of the pandemic on working-musicians in the NYC/NJ metropolitan region. I am currently collecting interview data and will publish findings in a book manuscript.