 I'm Dr. Shontal Haley. I'm an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin. My work generally is on the role of race and racism and how people sort into spaces and then thinking about how the sorting of people into spaces, particularly across schools and neighborhoods really influences racial inequality. Why does your research matter and why do you study it? Yeah, so my research in particular at this moment is focused on school choice in New York City and particularly the role of race and how people choose high schools in New York City. And this is important for a couple of reasons. One, New York City is the largest school district in the United States. Over a million kids attend school in this school district. And a couple of years ago in 2014, there was a study that came out that was completely surprising to me as someone who was new to New York City, which said that New York City's schools were the, or New York City's state schools were the most segregated in the country. What's the one thing you want people to take away from your research? Yeah, I think two things. I think that even though we might think of school choice as a race-neutral policy, right? That the ways in which families interact with school choice policies are very racialized. What inspired you to study the field that you're in right now? Yeah, so what inspired me to study in particular race and racism within the education system and within decision-making was really my own schooling experiences. I experienced many different kinds of racialized school spaces from majority black elementary school to racially mixed middle schools to a private all girls majority white school and across all those spaces, I saw different resources that were available. I saw different racialized treatments of students across these different spaces. And I knew that race was really central in both how I experienced those spaces and in my decisions and my mom's decisions to move me across spaces. And so I really wanted to understand what does that look like from a larger context and what does that look like in terms of students racialized outcomes and their experiences within school spaces?