Theoretical Work

As a social theorist, I am motivated by concerns about social power, knowledge and identity. There are at least four themes that re-emerge across several of my projects. First, I am interested in the ways in which people experience disjunctures (ruptures) in their subjectivities, which I believe motivates critical reflection and radical action. This can be conceptualized as border crossing (moving across contradictory social positions) and/or experiencing incongruous experiences over the course of one’s life, which manifests in complex embodiments. Second, I have a series of papers that engage with the concept of “exclusionary inclusion” – the ways in which people are asked to perform their identity in particular ways to achieve rights or citizenship, but state legibility that is achieved in this way is always contingent on meeting certain behavioral requirements. For example, people in South Africa who are HIV positive must perform biomedical responsibility to gain access to healthcare, which is often difficult when living in squatter camps. I am also interested in how epidemics invite epistemic contestation over dominant ways of knowing. This is the subject of both of my books. In both cases, people with HIV or parents of children with autism situate their own understanding of illness in their experiences of marginalization, but exploring these non-normative experiences also exposes the inequalities that shape dominant knowledge production of disease categories. I have also written a series of articles about complex causality and how to build arguments that attends to multiple vectors of causality in an historically contingent way. 

In 2022, I was awarded the Lewis A. Coser Award for Theoretical Agenda Setting from the Theory Section of the American Sociological Association.