The vast majority of my graduate career was spent investigating “missingness,” a term I use to describe the process by which missing persons are both produced and reacted to. I began my project with two central questions: who becomes missing and who, colloquially speaking, is it that we miss? Which absences inspire a vigorous response and which little or none at all, and why? In the United States, missingness is, by itself, a persistent social problem, wherein over half a million people are reported missing each year, and these absences exact a steep cost, on families, on the state, and frequently, on missing persons themselves. But it was also my hypothesis that, by examining this system of assessment and triage, we could gain insight into a number of processes that determine the ways in which a society apportions care.

 

My dissertation, Marketing The Missing: Missing Persons and the Competition for Concern, defended at New York University in August 2023, sits at the intersection of research on the state, inequality, classification, health, and emotions. Drawing on 241 semi-structured interviews with families of the missing, police, advocates, reporters, and formerly missing persons; a multi-year ethnography; archival research; and quantitative analysis, I argue that missingness functions, in the United States, as a radicalized breakage of ties, one disproportionately affecting families of color, particularly Black families, and other communities suffering from various social problems, of which these ambiguous absences are symptomatic. The response to these absences, I found, hinged on the ability of a missing individual’s social network to produce in relevant institutions a particular set of affective states — sympathy, concern, intrigue — that compelled attention and, crucially, the provision of aid. Some families are, through disparities in various forms of capital, far better able to mount these "sympathy campaigns" than others. The capacity to reliably summon aid-provoking emotions, including through this strategy of instrumentalized affect — a process applicable to the social repair work of missingness but also to numerous other situations where subjects are compelled to seek vital care outside of established pathways — is, I argue, an important and overlooked vector of inequality, one that becomes more relevant when resources are scarce and within a socio-political context where an ethic of individualized deservingness and contingent compassion has replaced that of rights.

 

In a second project, I draw from research on social movements to investigate the U.S. federal government’s prosecution of activists associated with radical environmentalism. Beginning in the 1970s, the radical environmental movement, spearheaded by the activist group Earth First!, functioned as an important counterweight to more compromise-oriented, mainstream environmental groups, constantly pushing the larger organizations to take a harder-line stance. The radicals believed that small, incremental reforms simply were not sufficient to mitigate a variety of looming ecological catastrophes, including climate change. I focus on the prosecution of the Earth Liberation Front, a faction that deployed arson and sabotage as tools for political change. Despite killing no one, the ELF and other environmental protestors were, for a number of years in the 2000s, ranked as the FBI’s foremost domestic terrorism threat.  This work will provide an important case study informing scholarship on state repression and movement building, while offering a lens through which to view the climate movement’s current debate over tactics.