My research engages a broad range of topics: race, inequality, social movements, extremism, policing, national security, foreign policy, domestic U.S. political contests and beyond. However, uniting these works are a common set of themes and questions. Broadly, my work can be broken into three tracks (click on each for elaboration):
My forthcoming book, We Have Never Been Woke: Social Justice Discourse, Inequality and the Rise of a New Elite lies at the intersection of all three tracks: it explores elite narratives about social justice and inequality; it highlights the disjuncture between these narratives and the ‘facts on the ground’; it seeks to explain the gaps between rhetoric and reality without appeals to cynicism or bad faith. Instead, the book leverages contemporary research in social and moral psychology, the cognitive and behavioral sciences, the sociology of morality and the sociology of cognition to understand the functions of social justice discourse in the symbolic economy.