SELECTED RESEARCH PROJECTS
Climate Adaptation and Syncretic Solutions: Everyday life crises driven by climate change (urban flooding, drought-induced crop failure and food insecurity, wildfire,etc.) challenge individual, family and community resilience. This series of survey research projects, beginning in Senegal, asks whether and how much newly crafted forms of belonging and connection (e.g., fictive kinship arrangements like joking cousins and peace partners) reduce the disruptive impact of climate crises. It’s not just that we’re less resilient when we are more alone. It’s that in contexts of migration and heterogeneity, our individual and community abilities to transcend seemingly essentialist difference and form useful kin-like alliances with fluidity and rapidity may be a key variable in surviving and recovering from the crises triggered by accelerating climate change.
Emerging Global Lower Middle Classes and the “Good Life” in a Less-Liberal, Post-US World: Across what used to be called the “developing world,” tens of millions are moving into (full or partially) salaried work, urban apartment living, generally reliable electrification, access to mostly clean water and sanitation, ubiquitous smartphone use, car or motorbike ownership, and solidly lower-middle class lifestyles. In many locations in East Asia, South & Southeast Asia, Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa, we find, alongside these material conditions, access to some degree of leisure time; meaningful opportunities for investments in family, friends and what come call social capital; and relative political quiescence. While Western style liberal individualism and US versions of material success, empowerment and a “good life” remain in circulation, they may no longer define the universal, teleological ends of development. This project explores the degree to which new global, urban, lower-middle class communities are establishing distinct mixes of social, cultural, material, and political goals (new constructions of a “good life”) that stand apart from familiar Enlightenment-derived US and Western derived notions of developmental modernity.
Some alternatives are explicitly juxtaposed against colonizer, capitalist lifeways (buen vivir in Ecuador). Some easily coexist with the neo-liberal global order, but with different social and political priorities (evident in varying ways in Singapore and Indonesia). Others seem to have gradually developed in parallel to and beneath Western modernity (urban West African cosmopolitanism going back to the the metis of colonial Senegal and the Caibbean, forward into Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic). All reflect Amartya Sen’s reworking of the goals of development as culturally distinct functionings and the local capabilities to advance them. These multiple notions of what it means to be modern may recall debates about bourgeois political quietude from the early liberal period in the West (Biedermeier culture), but more importantly, they represent genuine alternatives to Western liberal constructs of self, community and success.
Economic Inequality & Democratic Instability Under Long-Term Neo-Liberalism: Senegal illustrates many successes of the worldwide neo-liberal reforms since the 1980s. Key sectors, like telecommunications, are far more efficient, low-cost, and able to provide universal access since privatization and the influx of foreign capital. Infrastructure is much improved. Prospects are good for economic growth via investment in new natural resource sectors. The visible signs of wealth accumulation, foreign investment and a robust remittance economy are everywhere in the capital of this low-income country. At the same time, conditions for the economically marginal have grown much more precarious in the decades of neo-liberal reform. Housing is now more crowded, access to steady income more unreliable, health services and education more prohibitively expensive for new migrants from the countryside and for the chronically poor. This project traces economic and social conditions for the most marginal in this West African society, and explores ways in which increasingly open wealth disparities may threaten the longstanding social contracts holding together Africa’s oldest and most stable democracy.
Everyday Nation Building: Creativity, Culture, and Political Community in Senegal and Indonesia: Grounded in decades of field research in Senegal and Yogyakarta (Central Java), Indonesia, this book project examines ethnic cooperation and religious tolerance in two very different societies at either end of the Muslim world. It traces the evolution and everyday life use of forms of fictive kinship in Senegal, and forms of fictive community in Java to help account for low levels of ethnic conflict and religious violence in both settings. Draws on the work of John Dewey, Michel de Certeau, and Bruno Latour to trace cultural and institutional change through ordinary life experiences that blur the boundaries of identity and create new inclusive experiences and concepts of “the nation.”
Syncretic Land Tenure Relations and Sub-National Conflict in Africa: Explores relationship between a) local-level, syncretic land tenure arrangements that ensure transparency of exchange and security of access without resorting to freehold-liberal tenure or reverting to communal tenure and b) pockets of reduced violence in societies torn by considerable sub-national conflict.
Institutional Syncretism in Comparative Perspective: Two-part research agenda which 1) establishes an alternative to historical and rational-choice institutionalism by emphasizing the decomposability of structures and the creativity of action, drawing especially on pragmatist social theory and constructivist understandings of culture, and 2) undertakes a cross-national exploration of illustrative cases of institutional syncretism and the circumstances under which such syncretic alternatives become institutionalized.