In a period of increasing instability in so many young Americans’ lives, my research broadly asks how the emotional worlds and future imaginings of youth are shaped by peer, institutional, and broader cultural contexts. By using ethnography and qualitative methods that are attuned to the affective racialized, gendered, and classed dimensions of these contexts, I have uncovered under-explored sources of educational and social inequalities as well as the foundations for youth agency, resistance, and activism.

In a new project, I am exploring how school-aged boys are making sense of the current public concerns and political debates about the state of boys and men today, and how they are, together with peers and friends, constructing their own visions of masculinity.

My prior work can be organized within the three major areas listed below.

Grief and the Aftermath of Gun VIOLENCE

Brothers in Grief: The Hidden Toll of Gun Violence on Black Boys and Their Schools (University of Chicago Press, 2024) spotlights the neglected aftermath of neighborhood gun violence and its consequences for racial and educational equity. Drawing on two years of school observations, five years of social media observations, over 100 in-depth interviews with students and adults, and students’ school records at an all-boys, all-Black charter school in Philadelphia, I offer a three-stage analysis of the institutional management of grief in a school. I demonstrate that the school’s inability to fully recognize its students’ complex and long-lasting grief is reflective of larger misrecognitions of Black boys’ humanity and therefore the school system’s unpreparedness to wholly serve them. Brothers in Grief — which has won numerous book awards from professional sociological and educational organizations — is the first school-based examination of grief’s long-term impacts for the secondary victims of urban gun violence, who are rarely accounted for in the quantification of gun violence devastation. Find more, including a related PD for educators, at the book’s website: www.BrothersInGrief.com.

Other related publications include:

• Gross, Nora. 2025. "The Hidden Toll of Grief after Youth Gun Violence." Contexts 24(1): 34-39.

• Gross, Nora. 2022. “#LongLiveDaGuys: Online Grief, Solidarity, and Emotional Freedom for Black Teenage Boys after the Gun Deaths of Friends.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 52(2): 261-289.

• Clonan-Roy, Katherine, Nora Gross, and Charlotte Jacobs. 2021. “Safe Rebellious Places: The Value of Informal Spaces in Schools to Counter the Emotional Silencing of Youth of Color.” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 34(4): 330-352.

• Gross, Nora and Cassandra Lo. 2018. “Relational Teaching and Learning After Loss: Evidence from Black Adolescent Male Students and Their Teachers.” School Psychology Quarterly 33(3): 381-389.

• Gross, Nora. 2017. “#IfTheyGunnedMeDown: The Double Consciousness of Black Youth in Response to Oppressive Media.” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society 19(4): 416-437.

• Kelleher, Ina and Nora Gross. “Haunted Kinship: Black Mothers and the Emergence of Othersons After Gun Violence.” Invited book chapter in Failed: How Young People and their Families Navigate A Precarious World. [Under Review.]

• Gross, Nora, Bets Wondimu, Uzma Chowdhury, and Joseph Sanchez. “Social Death Consciousness and Grief: Black Men Navigating Loss After Police Violence.” Invited book chapter in American Policing Through Their Eyes, under contract with Oxford University Press. [In Press.]

Methodological Interventions for Inclusivity and Care

My co-edited methods text, Care-Based Methodologies: Reimagining Qualitative Research with Youth in U.S. Schools, offers concrete advice for conducting research, particularly with vulnerable populations, that centers transparency, reflexivity, reciprocity, curiosity, consent, and care.

The book’s website includes a teaching guide and video of our Feb. 2022 book launch event.

You can also find my chapter from the book here: “A ‘Friend’ or an ‘Experiment’?: The Paradox of Ethnographic Relationships with Youth.”

Race, politics, and emotion in schools

• Gross, Nora, Ellen Bryer, Charlotte Jacobs, and Jarvis Goosby. 2024. “’Heated, Polarized, and Annoying’: The Characteristics and Consequences of Affective Polarization in Elite Schools.” Democracy and Education 32(2), 1-11.

• Gross, Nora, Charlotte E. Jacobs, Rekha Marar & Adam Lewis. 2022. “‘This school is too diverse’: fragile feelings among white boys at elite independent schools.” Whiteness and Education 8(2), 193–211.

• Gross, Nora. “Nurturing Specialness, Defining Difference, and Cultivating Colorblindness in an Elite All-Boys Elementary Classroom.” Invited book chapter in Fergus, Edward and Joseph D. Nelson (eds.), Boys’ School and Community Life in the United States (Routledge). Forthcoming. [Pre-publication chapter available upon request]

research COLLABORATIONS