Lauren Clingan is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Davis. A cultural economic sociologist of gender, work, and family, her work examines how everyday relationships and emotions connect to economic inequality.  

In the United Arab Emirates, she studies the impact of “state-building feminism” on gendered subjectivities, class inequality, family economies, and citizen-state relations. Work from this research has been published in Social Forces and Social Problems. In the United States, other work focuses on the production of reproductive power and gig labor in the fitness industry. Collaborative work in Kenya, with an eye toward social policy interventions, investigates how financial relationships shape contraceptive decision-making. Cross-national, collaborative work in the United States and France focuses on information, the digital economy, and research methods.

Clingan completed her PhD in Sociology at Princeton University in 2025, where her work was supported by the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies and the Prize Fellowship in the Social Sciences. She was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Research on Social Inequalities at Sciences Po, Paris. Her work has earned recognition from the American Sociological Association’s Sociology of Emotions, Economic Sociology, and Sex and Gender sections. In 2025, Clingan was a Rosabeth Moss Kanter Award Finalist for “the best-of-the-best research about work and family from around the globe.” She earned a degree in Social Research and Public Policy and a minor in Economics from New York University Abu Dhabi in 2017.