I was fortunate to present original research at both SSSI and ASA this year. At SSSI, collaborators and I presented our first programmatic paper on Pragmatic Interactionism. At ASA, I presented my work on the veil of standards as it works out in football helmet safety standards.

In a bit of an unusual move, I met with some (more) junior scholars to share research strategies and my thoughts on organizing workflow for multiple research projects. This was rewarding for me and I hope everyone I spoke with got something out of the exchange. I know I did.

I was also able to go to Ruha Benjamin’s book launch at NYU, which was excellent. I picked up her new book Race after Technology as well at Tony Hatch’s new book Silent Cells about the drugging of captive America. Both are excellent reads and suitable for your classes, too.

I will be attending, speaking at, and serving as discussant on an undergraduate roundtable at the PSA Annual Meetings in Oakland.

I also have the special privilege of organizing, with Monica Casper, a session honoring the work of Adele Clarke, an outstanding scholar, mentor, writer, and amazing person.

I will be giving a talk on my football helmet safety standards research, and I am mentoring an undergraduate student’s work which will be presented at another undergraduate roundtable.

I also serve on the Committee on the Academic Freedom and Contingent Faculty committee, and look forward to reconnecting with that group.

Please drop me a line if you want to connect at the meeting!

I will be participating in a number of panels surrounding the launch of our special issue of Sociological Perspectives on ethnography at/through the PSA annual meetings. Will also be with my amazing co-author and mentor Monica J. Casper. 

I am thrilled to be talking sports, concussion, CTE, and cultures of masculinity at this workshop, held at Georgia Tech. 

There are a number of excellent sociologists at Tech, and I hope to see many of them there. 

I have the pleasure of organizing the science, technology, and medicine panels, as well as presenting work on the politics of science within the American Sociological Association vis a vis its sections.

Unfortunately, I'll have to miss presenting a paper with my brilliant colleague Black Hawk Hancock. 

I'll be giving a paper here titled, "The Neglected Legacy and Promising Future of a Pragmatic, Realist, Approach to Interactionism." I may tread pretty lightly on the realism aspect, since realism may be identified with the need to agree on exactly what one thing an object or entity is, and pragmatism would seem to indicate that what an entity is could be up for debate or rather could be named differently given different context(s). 

Annual PSA meeting! Two excellent sessions in the sociology of science, knowledge, and technology that I organized. 

I'm also pleased to be working with the authors of the special issue of Sociological Perspectives that my colleague Black Hawk Hancock (DePaul University) and I are co-editing. We'll be holding a workshop session with these authors, with the goal of supporting and deepening their work prior to publication in early 2018, just in time for PSA 2018. 

I hope that my own paper on the ambiguities of professional status for clinical ethicists will be accepted. 

I've joined a little group that is led by Beau Weston (Centre College) and Brandon Vaidyanathan (Notre Dame) on human flourishing and critical realism. 

I'm still new to CR, and reading and watching as much as I can, thanks to the CR Network. 

We will be reading several articles, book chapters, etc etc on what CR can tell us about the warrants and grounds for social science around human flourishing. In connection with this, I've just been reading Wilkinson and Kleinman's new book A Passion for Society, and they make some excellent points about the origin of social science in a concern for social progress and the reduction of social suffering.

I'm excited to talk with folk about all of this within the lovely confines of Yale. 

It's going to be a busy PSA this year.

I'm presenting on attributions of responsibility for unwanted outcomes in DBS treatment for movement disorders.

I've organized an Author-Meets-Critics event for Aaron Panofsky's very smart book Misbehaving Science: Controversy and the Development of Behavior Genetics. This will be a great panel, with Charis Thompson, Daniel Navon, and myself as critics, and Aaron with his response.

I've also organized a session called "Science, Technology, and Bodies" which features three great papers about bodies, sports, science, and citizenship.

I will likely be at some Ethnographer's Circle events.

Finally, I'm hosting an undergraduate research roundtable, which should be exciting.

The Preliminary Program is online now at pacificsoc.org.

Excellent philosophy and medicine conference at UC Irvine. They have a really interesting Medical Humanities Initiative. Here is the website for the conference. 

I'll be talking about the work of consensus building that occurs in case conferences among interdisciplinary medical teams. Looking forward to the conversation with some really imminent scholars. 

The conference is organized by B. Holman at Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea. He's working at the Underwood International College, which is cool. I hope Kevin Spacey is a founder.

I'm presenting  “Biotechnology in the Era of Transhumanism: Beyond Normalizing the Human with Deep Brain Stimulation Devices” with Black Hawk Hancock (DePaul University, blackhawkhancock.com), at the "Humanism and its Prefixes" conference, developed by graduate students at UC Berkeley's Department of Rhetoric. 

Thanks to the Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics at Arizona State University, I will be giving a talk on what goes wrong with brain implants, focusing on deep brain stimulation.