Sarah Iverson's work is motivated by novel and enduring questions in sociology: How do people create collective meaning in institutional settings? How do these meanings inform action? What role does meaning making play in facilitating or inhibiting racial inequality?

Motivated by these questions, she has studied a range of sites and populations, including an ethnoracially diverse community health organization, the multiracial population in the U.S., and a bottle and can redemption center frequented by unhoused workers. By investigating taken-for-granted assumptions about the nature of race, work, and identity, her work aims to strengthen institutional efforts to combat inequality.

Her research is published in Genealogy, Demography, and the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, with funding from the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. In 2022, she received the Outstanding Teaching Award from NYU’s College of Arts and Sciences. Iverson previously worked as a Policy Fellow at Connecticut Voices for Children, a research and advocacy think tank.