Rachael Stephens' main interests are U.S. political economic inequity, social change (in relation to politicization, ideology, discourse, etc.), and social ethics. She is committed to trying to better understand--and more effectively transgress--the ways we learn to continually re-make our inequitable realities. Stephens examines how many of us--particularly those who identify as "liberal"--learn to construct the "causes" of various social dynamics in ways that disavow our complicity in and responsibility for its "solutions.”  She also considers how normative social scientific knowledge production is itself grounded in analytical paradigms that make it frighteningly easy to reproduce inequity.  Her dissertation explores these dynamics as they are manifested in the concrete interactions that sustain the so-called "real estate market," property relations (including valuation and taxation), public finance (especially school finance), and perhaps most especially, the public discourses that narrate such phenomena. This focus also allows her to consider contemporary technologies of social differentiation (particularly race-making and related taxonomies of citizenship) as they relate to the late liberal mode of production and to the social ethics with which it is enmeshed.