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TEACHING
My teaching at Kent State University includes
Law & Society, Minorities in Crime & Justice, and Criminology. I bring to these courses my interests and experiences
teaching in several other substantive areas, including racial and ethnic groups, social deviance, deviant subcultures, and
sociological theory. Prior to teaching at Kent State University, I taught in Illinois at Benedictine University and Roosevelt
University, and in Massachusetts at Boston University and Curry College.
Teaching in an interdisciplinary Justice
Studies department provides the perfect opportunity for me to pursue my several substantive interests without being inhibited
by disciplinary restrictions. My undergraduate education was in political science, focusing on political and social theory,
although I settled on political science only after flirting with philosophy and psychology. My graduate education was in sociology,
but included much exposure to the philosophy of social science. After starting my graduate training in the traditions of sociological
theory and comparative-historical sociology, my graduate education ended with an emphasis on the sociology of deviance, crime
and law, including the study of discrimination and minority identities. My teaching benefits at times from each of these areas
of study, and allows me to appreciate a wide variety of student interests and perspectives.
My teaching style
is very much influenced by the liberal arts tradition of higher-education scholarship, emphasizing engagement with key concepts
and debates in the relevant academic fields, both historical and contemporary, as well as bringing these academic insights
into a dialogue with students’ beliefs and concerns about social issues and current events. My courses emphasize critical
thinking and challenge students to reconsider conventional wisdom and identify new interests.
Brief course descriptions
for my current and recent teaching are included below:
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RESEARCH
For several years now, my research
has involved a constellation of issues including discrimination, law, social identity, and language-use. Discrimination as
a legal problem amounts to causing someone harm due to membership in a social group that belongs to a legally protected category,
such as a racial category. Because individuals belong to many groups and have many personal characteristics as well, it can
be very difficult to reach a compelling, authoritative decision that someone was harmed because of membership in a social
group from a protected category. For this reason, language-use becomes a central topic as well as a central resource for studies
of discrimination. It is through language-use that individuals, groups, corporations and governments make accusations of discrimination,
and defend themselves from such accusations, and it is through language-use that such disputes are judged. As an analytic
matter for empirical investigation, the key question is often whether the alleged discriminator was acting on the basis of
the claimed victim’s minority status, and the best way to address this question is to study relevant speech or textual
records. This is not to say that either the accuser or the accused should have their version taken at face value, but their
versions are the central data available to social scientists studying discrimination, just as these versions are the material
that affirmative action offices and courts must evaluate in order to decide whether discrimination has occurred. This is also
not to say that action is any less important than language-use, but properly understood, language-use is a centrally important
but neglected variety of action, and language-use is inseparable from the meaning and moral significance of actions. Many
social scientists believe that statistical inquiries provide a more rigorous method for studying discrimination than “qualitative”
methods do, but inferential statistics are demonstrably dependent upon a great variety of non-mathematical methods of reasoning
and argumentation which only qualitative studies of natural language use can reveal and explicate.
My empirical
research over recent years has included an analysis of the U.S. Supreme Court judgment which upheld the Japanese Exclusion
Order during the Second World War. This analysis suggests that Japanese Americans could be correctly described as either a
racial minority, or a national ancestry minority, and the upholding of the Exclusion order was premised on the majority placing
emphasis on questions of nationality and national ancestry over racial minority status, the latter of which receives a greater
amount of protection in American civil rights law. Similar issues are raised by contemporary U.S. policies basing security
screening on nationality rather than race, although nationality often serves as a very reliable indicator of race and religion
in the ‘War on Terror.’ Another case covered in my research is the case of McCleskey v. Kemp, a famous and precedential
U.S. Supreme Court case involving demonstrated racial inequalities in capital sentencing. My analysis of oral arguments before
the U.S. Supreme Court describes complex and methodic processes of inferential reasoning and argumentation, but suggests that
such reasoning and argumentation can be understood as displays of common linguistic and cultural competences, even when the
arguments concern the relevance and the meaning of complex statistical data. Another case I have analyzed is the famous case
of Mary Daly, the noted feminist professor who excluded men from women’s studies classes at Boston College. My analysis
of an excerpt from a media interview with Daly and a male public relations representative of Boston College reveals that discrimination
disputes involve many social identities other than the one under dispute, and that disputes can turn on these other identities,
as this dispute ends with Daly’s emphasis on her status as faculty with substantive expertise not shared by her accuser.
Another case which I have analyzed deals with the Congressional testimony of a hate crimes expert, exemplifying an important
strategy for extending civil rights protections to groups previously not covered by law – specifically a strategy of
analogical reasoning, comparing unprotected groups to already protected groups. Ongoing research follows up on my study of
the the treatment of Japanese Americans in WWII by looking at categories used for describing the threat of domestic terrorism
in the war on terror, with special reference to the categories 'sleeper cells,' 'fifth columns,' and 'lone wolves.' Such categories
rhetorically facilitate stereotyping in the context of media and public opinion, and ethnic profiling in the context of criminal
justice and national security.
THEORY
Several of my interests go beyond research, into areas of sociological theory, the philosophy of the social sciences,
debates about qualitative social research methods, and the role of concepts and language in social research. I am particularly
interested in combining empirical studies of talk-in-interaction with Wittgensteinian conceptual analysis, thereby grounding
philosophical linguistics and infusing empirical research with conceptual rigor. In many of these concerns, I am pursuing
and expressing insights grounded in my studies with Jeff Coulter at Boston University.
My theoretical, programmatic
and philosophical interests are suggested in part by some of my recent writings.
For example, in a paper published
in the Journal for the Philosophy of the Social Sciences, "Rethinking Practices and Structures," I summarize and
critique the attempts of Pierre Bourdieu and Anthony Giddens to overcome dualistic thinking with respect to social structures
and social practices, and I ‘rethink’ the micro-macro debate by means of exploring a number of insights and findings
from ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, and membership categorization analysis. I draw particularly on Jeff Coulter’s
papers on social structure and macro-social phenomena. Two common faults found in conventional theory are tendencies to reify
social structure and tendencies to dismiss the knowledge and skills of the ‘subjects’ of the social sciences.
Ethnomethodology and conversation analysis are able to respecify many of the relevant theoretical issues into topics that
can be settled by empirical research, and without committing reification or drawing invidious contrasts between academic studies
and commonsense knowledge of social structure.
In another recent paper, "Evaluative Categories of Action
and Identity in Non-Evaluative Human Studies Research: Examples from Ethnomethodology," I take up the issue of whether
the social sciences can describe their phenomena in a disinterested analytic manner, without politicizing scholarship. I discuss
ethnomethodogical scholarship on problematic identities and problematic actions to argue that even with “deviant”
phenomena and controversial categories or labels, disinterested description is not only possible, but very rewarding analytically
and methodologically. I use Max Atkinson’s study of suicide and Jeff Coulter’s studies of mental illness as examples
of rigorous and rewarding, and also disinterested studies of controversial topics in the social sciences. Instead of categorizing
people as mentally ill, as suicides, as retarded, as delinquents or criminals, as terrorists, as socio-paths, etc., it is
possible to study how such identities are made and unmade in the course of social interaction and talk. In this manner, the
controversial and problematic nature of many identities and actions is no longer an obstacle to research, but actually assists
in revealing the social practices and practical reasoning involved in moral evaluations and how they are made to ‘stick,’
or not, with reference to observable social interaction and speech, and with respect to individual people and cases.
In two papers published in the journal Human Studies, I take up Melvin Pollner’s ethnomethodological critique of labeling
theory, and explore its continuing relevance for the social sciences. Pollner faults labeling theory for not consistently
and conclusively breaking with the commonsense notion that deviance is an inherent property of certain individuals and actions.
This inconsistency and hesitation result in an analytic failure to completely respecify deviance as a practical achievement,
which can be studied by attending to social methods of practical, moral reasoning and description. At stake is whether the
study of deviance will rely upon the same concepts and methods used in society to create deviance and deviants, or whether
the study of deviance will move beyond commonsense concepts and concerns, and develop specifically analytic insights, including
analytic insights into the role of commonsense concepts and commonsense explanations in the creation of deviance in the first
place.
Another paper, presented at a professional conference, picks up this distinction between commonsense and
analytic conceptions of deviance, and addresses how the analytic conceptualization of deviance as a social achievement can
be taught to students who see deviance as an inherent property of certain actions and identities. I argue that commonsense
reasoning itself contains resources for reconceptualizing deviance, including notions of subjectivity in judgment, and notions
of moral relativism. If the right resources within commonsense can be brought into play, the analytic reconceptualization
of deviance can be accomplished by building upon commonsense resources, rather than by fighting commonsense theories of deviance.
I suggest as well that ethnomethodological studies are invaluable in these matters, because they are able to study the methods
of practical reasoning and practical action involved in creating the sense that an action or identity is inherently deviant.
Ethnomethodological studies thereby recognize that deviance can be experienced as an inherent or essential property of actions
or individuals, without letting this element of commonsense reasoning constrain the analytic study of deviance, or prevent
the study of deviance from including the role of commonsense reasoning in the creation of deviance and deviants.
In one of my earliest papers, published in Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, I explored the topic of motives and
the role of motives in the social sciences. I argue that motives are explanatory devices which people use to speak of deviant
or potentially deviant actions and identities, and that social scientists therefore should not be in the business of using
motives to explain social action. To do so participates in the social process of stigmatizing certain particular individuals
and actions, and is therefore a type of moral evaluation distinct from empirical research. To the extent that social scientific
explanations are granted any authority, they are supposed to be authoritative because they reflect specialized methods of
research and specialized knowledge. To use the status of scientific authority to certify or credential moral evaluations which
don’t reflect distinctive scientific methods or knowledge may serve political interests in the short run, but in the
long run it works to discredit social science both politically and academically. Other explanatory concepts, including causes
and reasons, also reflect implicit moral judgments or have implicit moral consequences, and are therefore problematic for
social scientific explanation. So I argue for the study of how people use explanatory concepts such as motives, reasons and
causes in their practical interactions and speech, rather than for social scientists themselves to use motives in their analysis.
When social scientists use motives in their accounts of social action, they thereby unwittingly engage in practical reasoning
and practical action, and in this respect fail to explicate the logic of the cultural resources they are dependant upon. They
treat motives as a resource for study, when motives can be respecified as a topic of study, thereby achieving the analytic
ambition to offer a type of social understanding distinctive from mundane, practical reason.
My research on discrimination
disputes should be understood as applications and investigations of these theoretical interests, especially the interests
in the study of motives and the study of macro-structural phenomena such as institutional impacts upon minority groups, and
group relations such as race relations and gender relations. My research demonstrates how motives are used in moral discourse,
and how discrimination disputes involve attempts to treat individual cases or actions as examples of macro-social institutional
action or group relations.
PUBLICATIONS AVAILABLE ON-LINE
Two examples of my work are available on-line at the new journal Qualitative Sociology Review. One is a programmatic article
mentioned above on the study of evaluative categories of action and identity with reference to the categories of suicide,
schizophrenia, and discrimination. Another paper, mentioned above also, involves qualitative research on expert testimony
to expand national hate crime legislation to include women. A third article, on institutional racism, is available for a limited
time from Sociology Compass.
Please follow the links below to the tables of contents of the relevant issues of
Qualitative Sociology Review, from which the articles can be downloaded in PDF form. There is a direct link to the Sociology
Compass article on institutional racism.
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