Pamela Anne Quiroz is Associate Professor of Policy Studies & Sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of Chicago in 1993. Her research interests are sociology of education, inequality, children and youth, identity and social trust. She is the author of Adoption in a Color-Blind Society (2007, Rowman and Littlefield, Joe Feagin's series Toward a Multiracial Society).The book provides a critical interpretation of the discursive practices of private adoption, particularly as these practices relate to race. Her current scholarship is a research action ethnography involving the recent Supreme Court decision on race-conscious assignment in K-12 public school systems. Mapping the development of social networks and cross-generational relationships between 18 African American freshmen males and their peers, parents, teachers, and university researchers, the project explores how successful exchange relationships actually develop, how and which school structures facilitate development and sustenance of cultural straddlers in a selective enrollment high school trying to meet the challenges to diversity.

Professor Quirozﾒ publications have been featured in the Sociology of Education, Anthropology and Education Quarterly, Contemporary Ethnography, Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare, International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, Research in Sociology of Education and Socialization, Journal of Latino and Latin American Studies and Popular Culture. Professor Quiroz has received research grants from the National Science Foundation, American Sociological Association, U.S. Department of Education and Foundation for the Scientific Study of Sexuality. She has also served on the editorial board of Sociology of Education and as past Chair of the Educational Problems Division for the Society for the Study of Social Problems. Professor Quiroz has also been a fellow at Stanford University's Center for the Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and is currently a fellow at the Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy. She is currently working on a manuscript, Personal Advertising: Building Trust in a Distrusting Society (to be published by Cambridge Press), which focuses on the increasing use of personal advertising as a mode of trust-building within our larger social context of declining trust. The book treats personal advertising as one barometer of interpersonal trust illustrating how persons negotiate, innovate and meet the challenges of the postmodern world.