Research

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My primary line of research uses qualitative methods to understand how schemas of deservingness influence the distribution of institutional resources, drawing on the case of missing persons. My findings on missingness contribute to a growing body of scholarship showing how affect- and narrative-based logics determine the apportionment of care within criminal justice, health, immigration, and other domains, as well as literatures on the relationship between social networks and health. 

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Resource Constraint, Institutional Triage, and Missing Persons​​

 

I began my doctoral project, which received funding from the Mellon Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies, with two central questions: who becomes missing and who is it, put bluntly, that we miss? Which absences, I asked, inspire a vigorous response from police, media, and the general public and which little or none at all, and why? In the United States, over 500,000 persons are reported missing each year, marking it as a persistent social problem but one that has received relatively little attention from sociologists. I argue that, by exploring the system of assessment and triage around these absences, we gain insight into a number of processes that determine the ways in which a society constructs worth and apportions care. In examining who it is that our institutions miss and how they come to miss them, we are able to see with greater clarity who matters and how certain structural inequalities are reproduced and reinscribed. I am currently continuing this line of research through an ethnographic embed in the missing persons unit of a large, urban police department, supported by a postdoctoral grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation.

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For my dissertation, “Marketing The Missing: Missing Persons and the Competition for Concern,” which I am currently adapting into a book, Mysterious Disappearances: Missing Persons in the United States, under contract with Princeton University Press,  I drew on 234 semi-structured interviews -- with families of the missing, police, journalists, advocates, and individuals who were formerly missing then returned -- four years of observational fieldwork, and archival sources. I found that, while responses to the missing were structured in part by the traits of the missing individual and circumstances of the absence, the institutional resources generated to mend an ambiguous absence frequently depended more on the ability of the missing person’s family to tell a compelling story about the disappearance. Examining the complicated dynamics between police and families of the missing. Due to disparities in social, cultural, and financial capital. Through disparities in social, cultural, and financial capital, some families, I found, were far better equipped to mount these projects than others, but the capacity to strategically leverage and instrumentalize emotions, is, I argue, an important and overlooked vector of inequality in a variety of domains, one that becomes especially relevant within a socio-political context where resources are in short supply and where an ethic of individualized deservingness and contingent compassion has replaced that of rights. 

 

Working at a productive intersection of criminology, inequality, health, and emotions, I introduce the concept of the “sympathy campaign,” a rhetorical program designed to shift institutional interpretations of worthiness. These campaigns, which can be found in many contexts where care is stratified and rationed, serve as a critical adaptation by needy individuals to conditions of persistent scarcity. (Think, for example, of the increasing role of GoFundMe campaigns in making up for gaps in the U.S. healthcare system.) Such individualist projects, however, can also come at the expense of collective solutions, paradoxically aiding certain actors while more deeply reinscribing existing inequalities. A chapter of my dissertation, on the historical struggle between police and families of the missing over classification of absences and the formation of "missing persons" as a new social category in the 19th century, has appeared in Theory and Society. A second paper at the journal has received a request to Revise and Resubmit request.

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Who Becomes Missing?​

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In a related project, with Kiara Wyndham-Douds, I draw on quantitative analysis of a unique state-level dataset of missing persons reports from the California Department of Justice (n=552,514) to offer the first representative, empirical estimates of how missingness is socially patterned in the United States. In examining which communities are most affected by the phenomenon, we identify factors that influence the splitting of network ties and show that marginalized communities, including Black Americans, are disproportionately vulnerable to these breakages. We are currently revising a draft paper by incorporating a new, rich dataset that shows how missingness is patterned within a single California community. 

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While most absences are resolved quickly, missingness, I argue, stands as both a neglected symptom of underlying societal maladies, including drug abuse, mental illness, and homelessness, and a social problem in its own right, exacting a steep cost on families, police, and, frequently, through threats to health and personal safety, on the missing themselves. These findings fit into a larger literature investigating how social networks and their breakages affect individual and group health. I have further examined ideas around  social networks and health in a paper, co-authored with Eric Klinenberg, on inequalities within a process we term "social repair" -- the ability of individuals to mend ruptured bonds, published in Social Research. 

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Radical Environmentalism, Law Enforcement, and Climate Change​

A new line of research examines the repression of the radical environmental movement in the 1990s and 2000s, including the designation of a subset of activists deploying illegal tactics as “ecoterrorists.” Beginning in the 1970s, the movement, spearheaded by the activist group Earth First!, functioned as an important radical flank to more compromise-oriented, mainstream environmental groups, constantly pushing the larger organizations to take a harder-line stance.

 

Drawing on scores of interviews with law enforcement officials and activists, as well as tens of thousands of pages of previously unreleased FBI documents, this investigation into the death of the radical environmental movement offers a lens through which to view the contemporary climate movement’s ongoing debate over strategy as well as its own repression by the state. As a first step, I have recently completed a book on the prosecution of the Earth Liberation Front, set to be published next year by Viking Press.

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Combining both of my research lines, in a project with Malcolm Araos, we identify the mechanisms and processual pathways by which climate change can indirectly break social ties, creating what we term the “climate missing." In articles in BMJ Global Health and The New York Times, we argue that these disappearances stand as a neglected human rights crisis requiring aggressive intervention and mitigation by carbon-emitting states . In the fall, I will begin a postdoctoral position at New York University's Institute for Public Knowledge on social infrastructure and climate.  ​​​​