Areas of Research and Teaching Community and Urban Sociology; Environmental Sociology; Culture; Race and Ethnicity; Theory; Ethnography and Methods; Social Psychology
Dissertation/Book Title: “The Global Pigeon: A Comparative Ethnography of Human-Animal Relations in Urban Communities.” Under contract with University of Chicago Press.
Summary:I am an urban and community sociologist. Originally interested in the use and contestation of public space in New York City, I discovered through participant observation that, for better or worse, pigeons (and other urban "wildlife") can play a major role in how people experience the city. I became interested in the tension between (1) the problematizing of pigeons-- evidenced through the popular label “rats with wings” and the criminalization of pigeon feeding based on public health concerns-- and (2) the fact that many park visitors nonetheless feed pigeons and that the breeding and flying of pigeons from one's roof is an old New York working class male tradition. These two cases revealed surprising ways that animals structure urban life and how people imagine their urban spaces and the problems they face. In seeking to account for how pigeons and other animals that live on the streets-- and humans-- become problematized, I constructed a theoretical model that builds on Mary Douglas and ties the problematization of these groups to cultural definitions of space in which they are imagined as "matter out of place." This larger theoretical framework appeared in Social Problems,and it led to my interest in qualitatively examining animal practices in a variety of contexts including Pretoria, London, Venice, Berlin, Chicago, and New York.
While the subject matter of my study is a variety of situated human-animal relationships, each chapter seeks to investigate such relationships as a "case of" a broader sociological issue. For example, in “Animal Practices, Ethnicity, and Community,” published in the American Sociological Review, I draw on the work of Edward Shils and Clifford Geertz, as well as Rogers Brubaker and Paul DiMaggio, to understand how a group of Turkish male migrants employ notions of ethnicity as a frame and cultural script to account for their experience of breeding pigeons in Berlin. I also show how animal practices can serve as a means for reproducing ethnic identity and community. Other chapters focus on public health, class, gender, and marginality.
The pigeon is my vehicle for examining the cultural logic that undergirds how humans conceive of “proper” relationships between nature and society, experience their urban spaces, and incorporate relationships with animals into their social relationships and self conceptions. I investigate how these processes operate on both a micro and macro level, in a comparative perspective. I use strategic research sites to uncover cross-cultural patterns as well as to highlight unique situational understandings. Though the primary method is participant observation, I employ comparative/historical methods to flesh out how larger social and cultural forces structure situated action.
Other research: 1. When urban areas undergo "white flight," some people stay behind. This was a salient issue for me in my research in the poor areas of New York and Chicago. Many of the pigeon fanciers that I researched were among the few ethnic whites-- first or second generation Italian, Irish, and Polish-- that remained in their homes as the neighborhood demographics came to be composed of largely black or non-white immigrant populations. Studies of social isolation usually focus on new immigrants of color or the "urban underclass." My next research project examines instead the social world of the ethnic whites that still dwell in declining neighborhoods in which they have become the minority. Using ethnography and survey data, it will focus on the attachment to place and local institutions, the role of social networks, and how ethnic whites interact with the immigrants and minorities who now make up the majority of their neighborhoods.
2. I am also interested in the Sociology of Religion. My Sociological Theory article, written with Douglas Porpora, reflects my concern for taking seriously the phenomenological and normative dimensions of religious experience. This stance is articulated in opposition to the rational choice theory of religion.
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