Wild Flesh: Explorations in Critical Drug Studies

How to Cite This Material By Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D. Ideas grow through conversation. If an essay on this site contributes to your writing, teaching, research, or public discussion, please acknowledge that contribution and help your readers find the original. You can cite an online essay even when it has not appeared in a journal or book. The essential information A useful citation identifies the author, the essay’s title, the name of the blog or website, the publication date, and the direct link to the essay. Please use Wayne Martin Mellinger as my author name. Academic degrees such as “Ph.D.” generally do not belong in a citation. For an informal bibliography, newsletter, or reading list, use this straightforward template: Mellinger, Wayne Martin. “Title of Essay.” Name of Blog or Website , publication date. Direct URL. Replace each placeholder with the information from the essay you are citing. Link to the individual article rather than the blog’s homepage, where newer posts ...

About Me I’m Wayne Martin Mellinger, a sociologist, writer, educator, activist, and lifelong student of the strange and beautiful ways human beings make worlds together. I was trained as a sociologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where I earned my Ph.D. My intellectual home has long been in symbolic interactionism, ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, phenomenology, and critical social theory. I have taught sociology and related subjects at several universities and colleges, and I continue to write about interaction, institutions, homelessness, inequality, recognition, and social justice. But scholarship is only part of my life. Years of community organizing, homeless outreach, recovery work, and advocacy have convinced me that ideas matter most when they return us more attentively to the world and to one another. My three blogs explore different territories of that larger project. Doing Modernity examines sociology, social theory, interaction, institutions, and...

  The Cynical Cycle of Mindless Inaction Recognition, Critical Consciousness, Disruption, and the Praxis of Doing the Next Right Thing Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D. A Prayer Before Beginning Spirit of Life, Mystery in which we live and move, Sacred depths of this astonishing world: Wake us. Interrupt the sleepwalking routines by which we move through our days seeing without seeing, hearing without listening, knowing without understanding. Startle us with a black beetle on a red rose bush. Stop us before the dead horseshoe crab washed upon the shore. Let the ordinary trip the switch. Turn our attention toward what we have learned not to notice: the neighbor sleeping beneath a freeway, the joke that diminishes another human being, the worker whose labor disappears behind what we consume, the species vanishing without ceremony, the child frightened by authorities, the lonely, the despised, the discarded, the person standing directly before us whom our categories have prevented us from...