Interaction

I am interested in interaction processes and symbolic interaction, particularly within oppositional social movements. I am especially interested in how group culture and interaction processes can constrain or facilitate strategic collective action.

My career as a political organizer and communications professional—training and advising electoral campaigns, candidates, officeholders, labor unions, non-profit organizations, community groups, and social movements—provides me with an insider’s understanding of macro- and micro-level symbolic interaction processes and meaning-making contests. My immersive exposure to vastly different subcultures has also attuned me to language, language games, interaction and meaning-making processes, and how power operates, is reinforced, or can be challenged through language and symbols. My research and non-academic professional work has centered on language and interaction; social psychology was one of my focus areas for my qualifying exams, with an emphasis on symbolic interaction. I now bring a deeper structural lens to this work, examining how specific historical conditions, distributions of wealth and power, and unfolding events influence interaction processes, language and meanings, the saliency of different messages, and the strength (or vulnerability) of dominant narratives.

My first book Hegemony How-To: A Roadmap for Radicals (AK Press, 2017) brings together these interaction, communication, and sociological lenses to examine dynamics in the contemporary US social movement left, giving special attention to Occupy Wall Street, a movement I was deeply involved in. Occupy made a dramatic framing intervention that cast a supermajority against a greedy few. Yet the movement’s internal culture ultimately prevented it from taking full advantage of the favorable conditions inaugurated by its successful narrative intervention. Weaving my own experiences and ethnographic observations with insights from social movement scholarship, I examine self-limiting tendencies toward insularity, self-referential rhetoric and jargon, and self-marginalization. I situate the movement within a historically specific class structure, arguing that these tendencies—along with the deep ambivalence toward power and “politics proper” that was on dramatic display at Occupy—must be considered sociologically. In other words, these tendencies resulted from a complex interplay between world-historical and national-institutional dynamics, actors’ socially situated biographies, and their structurally shaped choices. Throughout the book, I make the case for the role of self-conscious leadership in helping movements navigate these challenging dynamics. In her foreword, Rutgers University Professor Janice Fine described the book as “an insider’s attempt to mine the sociological canon to wrestle with why Occupy sputtered and explore what it takes to more effectively organize and build power with the 99%.” The New Republic heralded the book as a needed “Tough-Love Letter to the Left,” and Publishers Weekly called it “A powerful, rigorous, and clear-eyed guide to building social justice movements.”

My dissertation takes the case of Mennonite Action to explore how a strategically oriented and capable movement leadership intentionally guards against the self-limiting tendencies that I identified in Occupy. Through the novel movement, Mennonites have been the most organized Christian denomination in the Gaza solidarity movement in North America; measured by publicly posted protests and by generated news coverage, no other denomination comes close. This outlier level of mobilization is puzzling considering Mennonites’ long held reputation for eschewing political involvement and avoiding conflict with state authority. Based on participant observation, 73 interviews, a questionnaire administered to 537 participants, and analysis of hundreds of public-facing materials, I argue that Mennonite Action’s strategic use of familiar religious-cultural language and symbols has been essential to the movement’s unusually deep penetration into congregational life. I emphasize the movement’s “authentic but instrumental” use of Mennonite tradition, ritual, language, and symbols as key to 1) legitimizing the movement to its intended base, 2) making the unfamiliar and scary (i.e., protest and civil disobedience) feel familiar and less scary, 3) penetrating deeper into congregational life, activating thousands of new recruits, and 4) positively influencing public perceptions of the movement. I argue that this operation effectively inaugurated a new insurgent permission structure within the Mennonite church that helped many new movement participants overcome commonly held anxieties and misgivings about protest, facilitating extraordinary bloc recruitment.