My training as a sociologist helps me peek through the surface of social relations to view the power dynamics that influence human interactions and the formation of social systems. My research is informed by the fundamentals of Critical Theory and the application of its concepts and themes to the study of power relations in various fields such as: Human Rights and Social Justice; Crime, Deviance and Society; The Patriarchal Order; Violence, Conflict and War; Law and Society; Food Security and Food Justice; Critical Pedagogy and Activist Teaching; The Sociology of Human Nature; The Sociology of Consciousness; Domination and Biopower; Critical Agonism.
The Prison Industrial Complex and Social Division in Market Societies: The Hyper-Security State, Crime and Expendable Populations
February 21, 2017
Issues surrounding mass incarceration and the rise of racialized prison populations in the USA and Canada have been increasing with the expansion of neoliberalism and the growing economic class divide. Although the disturbing phenomenon of mass incarceration has been an academic concern for some time, there is today a greater public interest in it as evidenced in part by the popularity of documentaries such as The 13th and the many recent books that address the topic.… Read More
The Agony of Injustice: The Adversarial Trial, Wrongful Convictions and the Agon of Law
February 21, 2017
http://ijcst.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/ijcst/article/view/40262Symbolic Violence and the Violation of Human Rights: Continuing the Sociological Critique of Domination
February 21, 2017
http://ijcst.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/ijcst/article/view/32143
Security, Life and Death
February 21, 2017
Theorizations of power through a Foucauldian conceptual paradigm continue to predominate critical analyses of the present geopolitical order. Michel Foucault’s concepts of “governmentality” and “biopower” have been central to critical understandings of the new world order of the post 9/11 era. With the fall of the Berlin wall, the 1990s were quickly characterized as a post-communist era with the promise of a burgeoning global civil society. Conversely, geopolitics at the start of twenty-first century took a new turn with the September 11 terrorist attacks on American soil and the Western world’s subsequent captivation with the war on terror.… Read More
Agon Culture
February 21, 2017
Agon Culture offers an analysis of the human condition through an examination of the way in which the cultural ideology of competition operates as a mode of rationality that underpins the order of domination. By combining insights from Theodor Adorno’s critical theory with a reconstruction of the philosophy of the agon, the book formulates a novel critical theory of cultural domination that offers insights into our “winner-loser” culture and a renewed intensity of its social Darwinist tendencies.… Read More