Projects

Since 2017, including as part of my graduate training, I have been working with Christians in South Africa on the development of the church and responses to post-apartheid division. This work has explored evangelicals’ dynamic engagement with global shifts in ideas about theology, gender, inequality, religious legitimacy, and scientific authority. The writings and publications stemming from this project have been based in over sixteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Johannesburg and other parts of the country.

In 2014, I conducted ethnographic research with young-earth creationists in northern Kentucky. This project, which set the context for my later work in South Africa, explored the semiotic and identity-based components of contemporary American creation science and its relation with dominant discourses. I have been especially concerned with social pressures to refract religious messages through scientistic frameworks and what American creationism can tell us about the changing face of global Christianity.

Across several of my projects, I have written about and sponsored conversations related to the social life of law. Whether in courtroom settings or in public contestations over government policy, competing notions of justice, rights, and transformation speak to concerns as deeply human as the existential reflections of religious actors. At the core, I seek to draw attention to the unwritten story of law: Social structure and precedents are not destiny, and legal institutions are amenable to being reshaped for undetermined ends.