Ph.D.  City University of New York 2006
 

Specializations

anthropology of ethics; bioethics; philosophy and social theory; addiction; mental and existential health; the war on drugs; social change; artificial intelligence and ethics; data ethics and justice.

My interests include the anthropology of ethics; bioethics; philosophy and social theory; addiction; mental health as existential health; the war on drugs; social change; artificial intelligence and ethics; data ethics and justice.  I have done fieldwork on these topics in several places, including Russia, the United States, Canada, and Denmark.  These interests are taken up from the perspective of an anthropology strongly influenced by continental philosophy and critical theory, the theoretical articulation of which I name critical hermeneutics.    

My latest book, How is it between us?: Relational Ethics and Care of the World (2024) articulates what I call relational ethics through consideration of some of today’s most pressing ethical concerns, including post-truth, algorithmic policing and sentencing, data privacy and personhood, and ethics in the face of the climate disaster.  Prior to that, I wrote  A War on People: Drug User Politics and a New Ethics of Community (2019), an ethnographically-informed critical hermeneutic exploration of how the anti-drug war movement is politically building new worlds and creating a new ethics of community through the enactment of freedom, responsibility, and attuned care.  I also recently published Disappointment: Toward a Critical Hermeneutics of Worldbuilding (2018), which addresses the ethical, political and ontological grounds of the disappointment many feel today, offering an alternative vision of what a future could be and how to achieve it.  I have authored several other books: Morality: An Anthropological Perspective (2008), Making the New Post-Soviet Person: Narratives of Moral Experience in Contemporary Moscow (2010), and HIV is God’s Blessing: Rehabilitating Morality in Neoliberal Russia (2011), and edited a volume titled, Multiple Moralities and Religion in Contemporary Russia (2011).

I received my Ph.D. in anthropology from the City University of New York, Graduate Center (2006) and M.A. in liberal arts, with a focus on moral and political philosophy, from St. John’s College (1998). I have been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, a visiting scholar at Columbia University, and a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology.  My research has been funded through a Fulbright-Hays Fellowship, The Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), and the European Research Council (ERC), among others. 

I am the former director of the Health, Ethics and Society Program, and the former founding director of the Center for Data Ethics and Justice, both at the University of Virginia. 

Selected Publications

2024    How is it between us?: Relational Ethics and Care of the World. Chicago: HAU Books/University of Chicago Press. (Open Access: here)

2022    “Truth, Thinking, Ethics,” Puncta: Journal of Critical Phenomenology, vol. 5, no. 2, 87-104. (Open Access: here).

2021    “It’s a War on People . . .,” in The American Journal of Bioethics, vol. 21, no. 4.

2020    “Can Machines Be Ethical?: On the necessity of relational ethics and empathic attunement for data-centric technologies,” in Social Research: An International Quarterly, vol. 86, no. 4.

2019    A War on People: Drug User Politics and a New Ethics of Community. Oakland: University of California Press.

2018    Disappointment: Toward a Critical Hermeneutics of Worldbuilding. New York: Fordham University Press.

2015   “What is a situation?: an assemblic ethnography of the drug war,” in Cultural Anthropology, vol. 30, no. 3. (Open Access: here).

2014   “An Ethics of Dwelling and a Politics of World-Building: A Critical Response to Ordinary Ethics,” in Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 20, 746-64.

2014   “Moral Experience – Introduction,” in Ethos, vol. 42, no. 1 (co-authored with Jason Throop).

2013   “Human Rights as Moral Progress? A Critique,” in Cultural Anthropology, vol. 28, no. 4.

2011    “HIV Is God’s Blessing”: Rehabilitating Morality in Neoliberal Russia. Berkeley: University of California Press.

2007   “Moral Breakdown and the Ethical Demand: A Theoretical Framework for an Anthropology of Moralities,” in Anthropological Theory, vol.7, no.2.