Research
“We are a people. A people do not throw their geniuses away. And if they are thrown away, it is our duty as artists and as witnesses for the future to collect them again for the sake of our children, and if necessary, bone by bone.”
— Alice Walker (In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, 1983, p. 92)
Research Interests
Race and Ethnicity (racism, ethno-nationalism, identities); Science and Technology (scientific racism, genetics and genomics, truth claims, objectivity, epistemology); Media (production, distribution, and consumption practices); Religion (theology, ethics, modernity, Bahá’í Studies); Theory (critical and cultural theory); and; Qualitative Methodology (content & discourse analysis, ethnography, participant observation)
What Guides the Research?
An overall question motivates my research: What is the relationship between the heterogeneous interpretations of race and the long-term staying power of racism and racial inequality?
I situate my worldview against concepts of social life that are entirely individualistic and which analyze society only in terms of psychological make-up, skills, and atomistic behaviors. These assumptions gesture toward a belief that social structures will magically change via one’s hard work, good intentions, or education. History affords too many examples of participation by the “righteous,” “educated,” and “hard-working” in structures of oppression to allow any objective observer of social life to accept that notion that equitable or just social arrangements are based entirely on the redemption of the individual without direct attention to external social forces.