Wild Flesh: Explorations in Critical Drug Studies

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...