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My Professional Story |
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I’m fascinated by what people do. I went into political science because I thought it would be a good way for me to pursue this fascination with the way that people organize their lives, and the types of communities they create as they seek to fulfill their dreams. My own family had been profoundly affected by the way that Americans have defined “insiders” and “outsiders,” and that experience left a deep imprint on me. These interests rarely fell within the mainstream of political science, however. For example, my first scholarly interests developed at the University of Oregon, in a class on the music of Woody Guthrie, Robert Johnson, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and Patti Smith. There, I began to get an inkling of how the arcs of individual lives intersect to create something bigger. I became a social scientists because I wanted to try to understand these bigger things. At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I was fortunate to have remarkably supportive mentors who encouraged my unusual interests—and, in some cases, even shared them. I was allowed to explore the ways that popular culture shaped our lives, and my dissertation was a not very successful effort to understand the role that 1960s rock played in political change. As I was working on that, political scientists began to have renewed interest in the role of culture. While this helped make my interests somewhat less bizarre to other political scientists, I was struck by how some of these approaches ignored race. I couldn’t see how any understanding of American culture could ignore the role of race, so I began to shift my research focus as I arrived at Augsburg. About that time, battles over multicultural education were erupting in places such as New York, and I began to study those controversies, because they seemed to show how race was very important to issues of culture and politics. But as I learned more about these debates, I started to notice that many opponents of multiculturalism seemed actually to be more concerned about immigrants—something that had not yet been examined very much in discussions of the debates over multiculturalism. So, I began to look more at issues of immigration, leading to another bit of good luck, as my interest developed shortly before immigration exploded as a major political issue in the U.S. For the past several years, I’ve been looking at debates over immigration and the impact of immigrants on American politics. As I’ve written about these things, my career has begun to return to its starting point, because some of the greatest concerns over immigration have been over its impact on the American community. And so, my research has begun to expand to explore the impact of diversity on civic engagement and community-building. Throughout it all, the common thread has been an interest in how we negotiate our differences and realize our similarities in our collective search for a promised land. My professional story |