Dr Carter Koppelman

Dr Carter Koppelman is an Assistant Professor in International Social and Public Policy. A sociologist with interdisciplinary proclivities, he is broadly interested in how individuals and movements pursue dignity in unequal societies, and how these efforts are structured by broader political and economic forces. His research focuses primarily on the working-class peripheries of Latin American cities, using ethnographic methods to investigate the impacts of housing policies and related state interventions on people’s everyday lives, senses of citizenship, and engagements with state agencies.

Carter holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley. Before joining LSE, he worked on the faculty at Florida Atlantic University, where he taught Sociology and Global Studies and was an affiliate of the Americas Initiative, the Center for Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies, and the Center for Peace, Justice & Human Rights. His research has appeared in the journals Qualitative Sociology, Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society, International Journal of Comparative Sociology, Latin American Perspectives, and City & Community.

Currently, Carter is engaged in three projects. First, he is co-editing a special issue of the International Journal of Comparative Sociology on "Global Ethnographic Comparison," due for publication in 2026. Second, he is writing a book manuscript, titled Negotiating Homeowner Citizenship, which examines how market-oriented housing policies shaped women’s struggles for social rights and urban inclusion in Santiago, Chile, and São Paulo, Brazil. Drawing on years of comparative ethnographic fieldwork, the book analyzes how the globally-circulating policy model of "demand-subsidized housing" gave rise to divergent living conditions, state-citizen relations, and gendered logics of housing rights in different urban political contexts. Third, he is conducting a new ethnographic study on the uses of credit and management of debt among social housing residents in São Paulo. The project focuses on how state policies promote and manage household indebtedness, how debts (re)produce precarious housing and working conditions for the urban poor, and why debt remains depoliticized even in widely indebted communities.