I'm a doctoral candidate at the University of Pennsylvania, studying social movements, micro-sociology, and the escalation, propogation, and de-escalation dynamics of conflict. I want to understand how people find themselves in conflict, and how different parties attempts to handle that conflict lead to more conflict, toward a return to old rhythms of life, or toward the making of new patterns of relationship
Most of my work focuses on studying how the political process works in South Asia broadly, and India specifically. India's diversity, political history, economic power, arts, culture, and vigorous civic life--each are worth study on their own merits. But as historian Ramachandra Guha has said:
As a laboratory of social conflict the India of the twentieth century is – for the historian [and I might add, for the sociologist -- DS] – at least as interesting as the Europe of the nineteenth. . . . At no other time or place in human history have social conflicts been so richly diverse, so vigorously articulated, so eloquently manifest in art and literature, or addressed with such directness by the political system and the media.
That is to say, paying attention to Indian society provides an important view of society in other places. Beyond this, my interest in studying it also has biographical roots. Between age 2 and age 18, I lived in South Asia, first in the Maldives, then in Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, and Andhra Pradesh. I later did field work in Gujarat and Delhi, and studied Hindi and Urdu in Uttar Pradesh.
Along with the interest in conflict, and the interest in South Asia, I also have a deep and abiding interest in language. This comes from a conviction about the importance of interaction, language, and communication to understanding society more generally. Emanuel Schegloff, one of the founders of the subdiscipline of conversation analysis quite effectively sums up this viewpoint:
In many respects, the fundamental or primordial scene of social life is that of direct interaction between members of a social species, typically ones who are physically co-present. For humans, talking in interaction appears to be a distinctive form of this primary constituent of social life, and ordinary conversation is very likely the basic form of organization for talk-in-interaction. Conversational interaction may be thought of as a form of social organization through which the work of most, if not all, the major institutions of societies--the economy, the polity, the family, socialization, etc.--gets done.
I would go one step further than Schegloff here, though, and suggest that even when social interaction is not made up of face-to-face conversation--as when it involves the construction, appropriation, and inhabiting of political narratives--that conversational interaction is the dominant metaphor we live by. If this is true, it follows that we might expect elements of fractal self-similarity between micro- and macro-sociology, allowing us to apply lessons about micro-level conflict escalation and de-escalation to larger conflicts, as well as lessons from large-scale conflict to everyday situations.