Austin Vo’s graduate research has taken him around the world

“I always aspired for my research to take me to places and people beyond what I was familiar with,” said Austin Vo, a fifth-year sociology doctoral student from Austin, Texas.

After earning his bachelor’s degree in statistics from Williams College, Austin chose to pursue his Ph.D. at Carolina because of the sociology department’s offerings in political sociology and social movements and what he described as the “friendly, collaborative” students, faculty and staff.

This past year, his dissertation research led him to France to study “indigenous responses to French colonialism” in Indochina and French West Africa, he explained.

Through his work, he said, he is “trying to understand how indigenous institutions mobilized power and shaped trajectories towards national independence.”