The purpose of my professional
work is to produce and transmit knowledge in three domains: our empirical-substantive
understanding of
At
an empirical-substantive level, my goal is to produce and transmit knowledge about
the way global political and economic restructuring is experienced at the
ground level by everyday Latin Americans, and the way they use culture to
confront problematic experiences of these forces and gain agency over them. The
political motivation for this project is not a rejection of this global
restructuring—a process I think is multi-dimensioned and open-ended—but rather
my belief that one important source of bad policy is its being formed on the
basis of abstract knowledge of peoples and contexts. Policies left or right not
informed by ground-level knowledge lead to all sorts of unintended consequences
that thwart their intended goals. While this is the case everywhere, the lack
of ground-level knowledge about human behavior is especially true of the
developing world, and even more so about
First,
I am interested in the way cultural and religious phenomena are conceptualized.
Whether to conceptualize them as epiphenomena, autonomous phenomena, or
something in between has been a long-standing issue in Western thought. The
different ways the issue has been dealt with—for example by utilitarian,
Marxist, and myriad neokantian theorizations--has had
important effects on the directions taken in social theory. In the current
scholarly context, I think the attempt to analyze culture as having a
semi-autonomous existence and impact has made combining it to rational,
strategic action difficult. While this has not hindered scholars such as Pierre
Bourdieu from freely combining them, existing
theorizations that work out how this actually happens are
underdeveloped. In my book Reason to
Believe I use resources from pragmatist linguistics, feminist theory and
postcolonial writing on religion to develop a non-reductive theory of agency in
religion. In my current project on Christianity and political conflict in
Second,
I am interested in network conceptualizations of social structure. In my
research on conversion I saw the explanatory importance of constellations of concrete
individuals who interact in predicting who became Pentecostal. I especially
sought to understand how networks have their effect beyond the classic social
psychological conformity hypothesis. I found that networks frequently had
important effects beyond any desire to conform. I also sought to reaffirm the
role of human agency in networks by showing that human beings often understand
the impact of networks and actively construct their network location. In my
current project on Christianity and political conflict I am following scholars
such as Ann Mische, Mustafa Emirbayer
and Eiko Ikegami to try to reconceptualize
the public sphere through network theory. In this perspective “publics” are the
relational contexts created when multiple networks overlap, leading people to
temporarily suspend their network identities. This network reconceptualization
of the public sphere promises to help us move beyond some of the current
dilemmas in liberal political theory whereby “civic” and “public” are so
separate from “partisan” and “political” that it becomes hard to understand actual
empirical cases of political process. In my project on religion and political
conflict I am using network concepts to understand political polarization among
religious participators, and the concept of publics to understand the influence
of religious organizations in
I
am interested in advancing our knowledge of qualitative methodology in several
ways. First, I am interested in research design. Following my teacher, Wendy
Griswold, I believe that reflecting on research design throughout the life of
project makes it more likely that the end product will be able to overcome the
ethereal quality of traditional cultural research. Second, I am interested in
the way participant observation and qualitative interview data are collected
and conceptualized. While I understand post-modern critiques of ethnography, I
think these can be taken into account in order to do better ethnography rather
than abandon the enterprise altogether. By presenting descriptions of
interactions in which the ethnographer is a participant and in which actual
discourse is presented, the writer presents cultural confrontations rather than
unmediated perceptions of culture. Third, I am interested in conceptualizing
and justifying inductive scientific research as is used in grounded theory and
other protocols for qualitative data analysis. The deductive model of
hypothesis testing is still the dominant standard for what counts as “scientific.”
However, there is ample philosophical support—in the work of Carl Hempel, pragmatic realists like Margaret Somers and
critical realists like Roy Bhaskar, for
example—justifying inductive research in which concepts are considered to be
bridges between empirical observations in a process that is open-ended.
Furthermore, analysis shows that much research that gets reported in a
deductive mode—as the confirmation of hypotheses—actually is developed through
induction. I am interested in working through the different assumptions
involved in, and the consequences resulting from inductive versus deductive
models of research. Fourth, I am interested in the potentials of software for
qualitative data analysis. Qualitative data analysis is labor intensive insofar
as it requires going over the data time and again. Software for qualitative
data analysis greatly increases the efficiency of this process not only through
automatic coding and search tools, but also by simply making the data rapidly
accessible and by conserving and organizing the product of any given moment of
analysis. This greater efficiency means
that time can be spent to do even deeper analysis; more adequately tie analysis
into existing literatures, or simply analyze more data where a project
would benefit from it. Qualitative data not only is labor intensive, it
requires a lot of space for authors to present, and a lot of time and energy
for readers to consume. This limits the ability of authors to nuance and
convincingly substantiate their arguments. While quantitative research can
summarize a large amount of data in a table, qualitative research depends on
resource-demanding presentation of quotes, ethnographic descriptions, photos,
etc. Sooner rather than later, we will be at the point at which qualitative
research will come on CD-ROM with (increasingly user-friendly) read-only
versions of the software used to analyze the data. In this way the author will
be able to make arguments with selected quotes and hyperlink further data to
the appropriate point in the text. This has the potential to further increase
the reliability of qualitative research. Finally, I am interested in the
contribution of quantitative techniques to qualitative research. In my research
on conversion I used Charles Ragin’s “qualitative
comparative analysis” based on Boolean algebra to analyze my life history data.
Such techniques work through the process of analytic inference that is the
strength of qualitative methodology, yet provide the data reduction and
penetration characteristic of quantitative methods. They also facilitate summary
presentation of research results.