About Me

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 About Me

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 everyday accomplishment of modern social life. The Dionysian Naturalist explores religious naturalism, mysticism, embodiment, ritual, ecotheology, and the possibility of encountering nature itself as sacred. Wild Flesh ventures further into the unruly territories of desire, sexuality, the body, queer experience, pleasure, transgression, and liberation.

These subjects may seem far apart. I increasingly think they belong together. Each asks how we might become more awake—to other people, to suffering and injustice, to our bodies, to the more-than-human world, and to the astonishing fact that we are alive at all.

I write from the conviction that careful attention can become a form of recognition, and recognition can become a practice of transformation.

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