Anthony Ureña, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Rutgers University - Newark

Biography

Dr. Anthony Ureña is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University - Newark. He previously served as a Presidential Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Sociology at Princeton University. Anthony earned his PhD in Sociology from Columbia University, where he was a Paul F. Lazarsfeld Fellow. He holds a B.A. in both Sociology and Human Biology from Brown University. Anthony is a Brooklyn native and was raised by his parents from the Dominican Republic.

Anthony’s substantive areas of research interest encompass the intersections of race & ethnicity, gender & sexuality, and risk. He is particularly interested in health inequality and perceptions of illness. Anthony specializes in qualitative research methods, with particular expertise on semi-structured interviews, participant-observation and ethnography, as well as survey administration and analysis. 

Anthony's research has been generously supported by fellowships, scholarships, and grants from prestigious institutions like The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Social Science Research Council, The Hispanic Scholarship Fund, and The Institute for Citizens & Scholars (formerly The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation).

As a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow, Anthony volunteered at several HIV/AIDS NGOs in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil to produce a comparative ethnography detailing the persistence of the epidemic in the city’s metropolitan and slum neighborhoods. Anthony has continuously complemented his scholarship with a deep commitment to teaching in the social sciences, as well as mentorship through his service to the Columbia Undergraduate Scholars Program, GSAS-Leadership Alliance Summer Research Program, SSRC-Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program, and the Institute for Recruitment of Teachers.

Research

Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles

Urena, Anthony. 2022. “Relational Risk: How Relationships Shape Personal Assessments of Risk and Mitigation.” American Sociological Review.

Dissertation

Anthony’s dissertation, The Risk Ecology Framework: A Socioecological Analysis of HIV Risk Perception among Black and Latino Men who have Sex with Men, explores how people deemed to be the most "at-risk" come to understand, for themselves, their own relationship to a given illness or disease. Through semi-structured interviews and participant-observation at a health advocacy group, his research specifically examines how HIV-negative Black and Latino men who have sex with men (MSM) are making sense of their place in the contemporary HIV/AIDS epidemic. In this work, he argues that Black and Latino MSM form their HIV risk perceptions by interfacing the lived experience of their social location with their knowledge of HIV. This sensemaking process gives way to diverse framings of risk that individuals employ to understand the threats HIV/AIDS may or may not pose to their bodily health and/or social lives. Individuals can also come to view HIV/AIDS as personally irrelevant or a non-issue, comprising a framing that escapes a definitive rhetoric of "risk" altogether.

The Risk Ecology Framework contends that these multiple framings constitute a variance of perceptions about HIV/AIDS that can influence an individual’s health-relevant behaviors, such as their use of prevention tools and their romantic/sexual partner selection strategies. Throughout this dissertation, Anthony develops and makes the case for a novel socioecological approach for the analysis of risk perception formation. The Risk Ecology Framework elucidates how a person’s perceptions of personal illness & disease risk comprise a consideration of a breadth of threats situated across the individual, relational, cultural, and institutional levels of a person’s social environment.

Events

Anthony has regularly been an invited speaker for a variety of conferences, roundtable discussions, panels, and other events. A selection of prior speaking engagements is provided here, where Anthony has shared insights from his research, critical perspectives on the work of prominent scholars from diverse fields, as well as guidance for aspiring researchers and educators.

 Testimonials from Student Reviews