What does freedom mean to you?
Freedom is one of those words that is almost meaningless given its many conflicting uses, but it is also one we cannot afford to give up! As an American, and more specifically a Californian, I find myself caught between a libertarian vision of freedom as non-interference, e.g., individual protection from the state and external domination, and a more social vision of freedom as capabilities, e.g. people are only free if society provides them the means to develop and pursue their ends. These ideas are both important to me, but they frequently come into tension. As a sociologist, I've become most interested with how the idea of freedom plays out in our lives and cultural institutions.

How does freedom feature in your work?
 I use ethnography to study dilemmas that arise when individual freedom presents problems for social order. In my book, Sons, Daughters, and Sidewalk Psychotics, I investigate the control of psychiatric patients after the closure of the United States' mental asylums. I ask: how can authorities manage serious mental illness when patients have strong rights to refuse care and control? This work shows how, in the context of a weak welfare state, supposed freedom easily turns into abandonment. In another project, I joined a "no rules" fight club run by libertarians. I ask: how can participants organize a space of violent freedom while mitigating the real concern for injury and death? I find that there is a whole unspoken set of norms that guide behavior, all while sustaining the illusion of rule-lessness. My hope is that investigating freedom empirically, as ways of life and cultural practice, will eventually help with normative and political understandings of how best to organize freedom in our societies.

What project(s) are you working on during your fellowship at the Forum Basiliense?
While at the forum I'm working on how liberal states manage asylum-seeking and migration. Back in San Diego I'd recently started fieldwork at the US-Mexico border and in migrant homeless encampments, and I'm grateful for the opportunity to live in Switzerland and learn about European approaches to these issues.