BAILEY OTTER

Bailey Otter is a first-year PhD student in Sociology at the University of Michigan, a predoctoral trainee at the Population Studies Center, and a Rackham Merit Fellow. Bailey’s research examines how nonbinary people (individuals whose gender identities exist beyond the man/woman binary) construct, express, and negotiate their identities throughout the life course. These inquiries live at the intersection of gender, health, family, embodiment, and aging. For their master’s research, Bailey is developing a project centered around interviews and focus groups with later-in-life nonbinary people to examine the unique challenges and joys that arise when aging as a nonbinary person.

Before beginning their doctoral studies, Bailey received their BA in Sociology from Texas A&M University Corpus Christi, where they were also a McNair Scholar. For their undergraduate honors thesis, they conducted 28 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with nonbinary individuals from across the United States. One line of findings from these interviews formed the basis of a paper exploring nonbinary individuals' experiences of and barriers to joy related to their gender identities, which earned second place in the 2024 Midwest Sociological Society Undergraduate Student Paper Competition and was published in The Sociological Quarterly. They are currently working with Dr. Daniel Bartholomay to reanalyze these interviews with a focus on interviewees' encounters of gender identity erasure within everyday social interactions and the lasting impacts of such erasure.

Bailey is a proud first-generation college student and advocate for deconstructing the "hidden cirriculum" of academia. To that end, they welcome the chance to chat with prospective graduate students over email or Zoom anytime.