Washington and Lee University
My research focuses on the role of morality in the process of self-formation. For my dissertation, I studied the postwar experiences of Iraq War veterans, and found that the experience of readjustment is organized by powerful perceptions informed by a shared normative order -- leading to common phases of subjective experience. The status transition to ‘Iraq War veteran’ is shown to bring with it durable moral constructs concerning the proper treatment of veterans by members of society, as veterans become situated within a moral order premised on the maxim of ‘support for service’: A reciprocally based social obligation, generated through deployed service, which symbolically implicates others in the veteran’s quest for postwar well-being. Consequently, this status transition has the overall effect of morally orienting the self, as Iraq War veterans come to interpret and evaluate their personal postwar predicaments in decidedly moral terms, or in terms that render their postwar realities normatively intelligible, explicable, and significant due to the perceived absence or presence of social support.
My interest in veteran readjustment developed in part from exposure to the subfields of ethnography, psychoanalytic sociology, and ethnomethodology. Against the backdrop of the unfolding Iraq War, I found that a general appreciation of social process, self-formation, and the constitutive expectancies of group membership aptly suited the sociological study of Iraq War veterans. No doubt this intrigue was further augmented by two personal factors of note: My father’s own status as a Vietnam veteran and my presence in Manhattan during the 9/11 terrorist attacks. But beyond these influences, my interest in war veterans emanated from a decidedly humanistic desire: The very basic and rudimentary curiosity to apprehend the life experiences of others in terms that they themselves understand and articulate. Indeed, their answers to my questions ushered me into a distinct social world, sustained by its own system of shared meanings, cultural categories, and normative understandings. Transcending the fashionable urge to hastily define the postwar experiences of Iraq War veterans as mere reflexes of trauma, I maintained sensitivity to the shared symbolic structures that actively mold their everyday, interactive, postwar meaning-making processes.
Presently, I am working on an article which presents some key findings of my doctoral dissertation; namely, that perceived transgressions and affirmations of the moral order contribute to variations in the experience of postwar social integration. My future research will continue to explore the relationship between postwar social interactions, the moral order, and social solidarity, in order to assess the affect that perceptions of moral maintenance or neglect have on Iraq War veteran well-being.
I am absolutely thrilled to be teaching at W&L. Among my favorite courses to teach are Sociological Theory, special topics in the Sociology of Culture (i.e., Collective Memory, Cultural Dimensions of Work, etc.), and Introduction to Sociology. I would be more than happy to teach a course on the Sociology of Culture, as well as a Social Psychology course. This spring I plan to teach a course called “The Social and the Sacred: Topics in the Sociology of Morality.”
