Elena Ayala-Hurtado is a sociologist studying employment precarity and economic instability through a cultural lens. She is particularly interested in the intersection of high educational status and various kinds of insecurity and uncertainty.

Her dissertation is a cross-national study of insecure young college graduates in the United States and Spain. She is examining how “insecurity” is configured differently in each country, and how these configurations of insecurity shape young graduates’ experiences. More specifically, she is interested in insecure graduates’ self-understandings (especially in relation to conceptions of merit), projected futures, and strategies of action.

Elena also studies how people try to resolve the conflict between their belief in the ideal of meritocracy and their consistent use of networks to find employment, as well as how people navigate situations of uncertainty in interaction. 

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