About
I’m a sociologist who’s moved back and forth between the academic and nonprofit world several times over the course of my thirty year career, and I’ve acquired a diverse array of specializations along the way, including: media studies, race and gender studies, political sociology, and immigration and refugee law. You can check out my publications on Google Scholar and Academia.edu to see some examples of this work.
The contents of this website, on the other hand, exceed the strictures of all my previously published work, even though they are also directly informed by all of this work. Soul-searching writing is the best description that I can come up with for all of this writing. I want to chart a path for social science inquiry that is integrative and healing, addressing matters of both the heart and the mind.
As a sociologist, I understand that our personal selves are microcosms of the societies we inhabit. But there’s also a lot happening in the spaces of our personal lives that never rises to the level of public knowledge. Quite often, the beliefs, experiences and feelings that matter most to us are precisely the things that we want to edit out of the public transcript of our lives because we believe that they are too complicated to unpack, among other reasons…
To put things even more simply, we are not at peace with ourselves, and if we are not at peace and clear-headed within ourselves, we’re not going to be able to make coherent sense of all the stimuli that bombard us on a daily basis. So, if there’s one message that ties together everything I have to share on this website it’s this: tend to yourself.
The advice I’ve just shared was a widely understood commonsense among the intellectual classes of the ancient world. But it’s been diminished by the modern paradigm of science, which is largely focused on knowledge derived from observations of the natural world. This emphasis on observing what’s “out there” and all around us, has also accompanied by a diminished concern for the interior life of the observer. We need to turn this around.
We should strive to master our inner lives before we set out to make sense of the wider world; these two things should be integrated. But we don’t live in a world that supports this way of making knowledge. As many social theorists have explained (albeit, using different words) the modern world is deliberately schizophrenic. It is powered by abstract systems of knowledge that are disconnected from the particulars of our lives. And it has been very successful in helping us achieve a level of material wealth that is unparalleled in human history. But it’s also created a situation in which millions upon millions of people can be ‘very well off’ by most objective standards, and also feel incredibly disconnected from each other and anxious about what the future holds. The experiments in soul-searching that populate this website are my humble attempt at providing a more humane alternative to this schizoid reality.
Finally, here’s a quick explanation of each section of the website. The “First Science” is devoted entirely to the cultivation of an orderly inner life, with reflections on meditative, ascetic and devotional practice. “Strange and Wondrous Tidings” is a blog that explores directions in social science epistemology and ontology (and also some very practical questions about research methodology) that are informed by the integrative approach I’ve described above. The blog pages for “Interrogating Violence” and “Cultural Security” are topics for social research and theory that are directly informed by this integrative approach to matters of the heart and mind. The “Interrogating Violence” page discusses many of the experiences and realizations that led me to create this website. The “Cultural Security” page, on the other hand, describes a way forward; an answer to all of the questions and antagonisms that I surface on the “Interrogating Violence” page.
The “Research and Analysis” page is very much a work in progress. At present, it contains links to publications that are broadly representative of my scholarly trajectory over the past few decades. But this cross-section of my work is a mixed-bag, when considered in light of the goals of this website. I expect to refine this roster of publications in the months ahead—as new work is published—so that it better reflects the centered, integrative approach to social science inquiry that I want to elevate.