DEPARTMENT OF SOCIOLOGY

Area(s) of Interest

Science, Knowledge, & Technology; Crime, Law, & Deviance; Alcohol, Drugs, & Tobacco

Biography:

My goal as a student is to understand how medical and social researchers, policymakers and public servants, private treatment providers, and drug users negotiate the cultural, legal, and medical boundaries of acceptable substance use. I am particularly interested in legally-coerced addiction treatment, its historical origins in the Temperance Era, its significance for drug users today, and its role within wider debates over public policy, social citizenship, and the meaning of freedom.

I am also currently researching the private bail bond industry as part of a project led by University of Minnesota professors Joshua Page and Joe Soss. Previously, I worked with Joshua Page and the University of Toronto's Philip Goodman on a paper about using fiction to understand the embodied process of prisonization.