Cameron G. Beckett

Medical Sociologist · Dementia Care Research

I'm a medical sociologist and TL1 Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Health and the Social Sciences and the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago. I study how people develop expertise and sustain demanding commitments, and how social relationships and institutions support or constrain their ability to do so.

My current research develops these questions through dementia caregiving. Drawing on fieldwork in Italy and the United States, I examine how family caregivers learn unfamiliar tasks, negotiate responsibilities, and preserve identities and relationships beyond care. My framework for caregiver flourishing, published in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, examines the capacities caregivers build alongside the strain they experience. I am now extending this work through longitudinal analyses of national surveys, asking how care arrangements shape those capacities and caregivers' health.

Methodologically, I work abductively: moving between empirical puzzles and social theory, developing concepts through close attention to people's experiences, and examining how those concepts hold up in population data. I completed my PhD in Sociology at the University of Bologna in 2025. Outside research, I occasionally write theater sketches and play banjo and harmonica (poorly).