Michael Zanger-Tishler

Research interests: Social inequality, the state, sociology of knowledge, criminal justice.

Bio: Michael is a sociologist of the state and criminal legal system, and is starting as an assistant professor at the University of Iowa in the fall of 2027.

Research summary: My research interests center on the criminal legal system, social inequality, and the state, drawing on quantitative and qualitative methods, the sociology of law, the sociology of race and ethnicity, and the sociology of knowledge. My dissertation, “State Data and the Production of Quantitative Knowledge” is a comparative study of how macro factors related to state structure, organizations, and data restructure the types of questions that social scientists ask and the type of knowledge they create. Based primarily on over 280 interviews conducted in French, Hebrew, Arabic, and English with quantitative researchers, government officials, journalists and activists producing knowledge primarily about the French, American, and Israeli states, I explain how police departments, courts, and prisons strategically release their data, how external actors navigate and develop questions based on available data, and how knowledge of the state and social inequality are conditioned by national data cultures. I contextualize these interviews by tracking dataset usage in newspapers, activist publications, and journal articles as well as reading public records requests. In this work, I argue that understanding the state as the central actor in shaping data infrastructures is critical to understanding the possibilities for quantitative knowledge creation. In other words, I analyze how contemporary statistical knowledge is affected in previously unappreciated ways by the politics of data production, publication, and accessibility, and the advantages and limitations of using these data to critique state institutions and reduce social inequality.

This information is accurate as of the affiliate year indicated. (last updated 09.01.2026)