The Economic Opportunity and Community Lab at VCU (Principal Investigator: Victor Chen) is currently working on two projects:

• The Structural and Cultural Context of Deaths of Despair: A Qualitative Study of Urban and Rural Joblessness and Precarity. This study, funded by the Russell Sage Foundation, demonstrates how social isolation—compounded by the pressure to succeed in a highly polarized economy—creates a vacuum that opioid use fills. This work helps bridge gaps between economic sociology and medical sociology, exploring how so-called deaths of despair are not merely medical outcomes but are exacerbated by a society that commodifies the self while offering little in the way of social solidarity and support.
• The Mark of Segregation: Redlining’s Impact on the Relationship Between Racial Diversity and Social Capital. This research, funded by a state-sponsored 4-VA grant, examines the degree to which racial and ethnic diversity at the county/neighborhood level influences various dimensions of social capital as well as prosocial behaviors like volunteering and event organizing. It also explores how historically rooted racial inequalities (captured in redlining and urban renewal data) moderate the relationship between contemporary levels of ethnic heterogeneity and social capital.