jrandles@berkeley.edu

Jennifer Randles is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research interests lie at the intersection of family and marriage, public policy, social change, culture, gender, sexuality, and emotions. Her dissertation, tentatively titled "Learning and Legislating to Love: U.S. Relationship Education and the Modern Marriage Crisis," is an ethnographic study of government-sponsored marriage education in California. She explores how publicly-funded relationship skills training programs frame the causes, consequences, and solutions to marital and family instability, and how community-based marriage education programs are created, implemented and understood.