Jeffrey Guhin

I’m a doctoral candidate in Sociology with an M.A. and M.Phil. from Yale and a BA from Loyola University New Orleans. Before graduate school, I lived in New York City for four years, where I worked as a caseworker in the South Bronx and as a high-school teacher in downtown Brooklyn.

Research Interests: I basically wear four sociological hats:
(1) The sociology of religion, especially Sunni Islam, Evangelical Protestantism, and Roman Catholicism. I am interested in secularism studies, religion and politics, and debates about tradition and democracy in a postcolonial context.
(2) The sociology of education. I look at how schools form moral subjects and the language of justification used about and within this formation. I work within a tradition of qualitative, organizational studies of schooling, and one of my ongoing goals is to help bring back a sociological focus on education at the level of the school rather than the level of the student.
(3) Science and technology studies. Unlike other sociologists in STS, I am more interested in how science and technology work in real life than in “laboratory life”. I’m particularly interested in the relationships between science and religion and between technology and morality, both of which are dichotomies I’d like to challenge in my work.
(4) Sociological theory and methodology. I’m with Durkheim that sociology is just a way to work out if philosophy works. And good methods are the only way to do it.

All of these interests intersect in my dissertation, which is a four-part comparative ethnography of Christian and Muslim high schools in Amman, Jordan and New York City. I’m looking at how science and technology interact with religious life, and I’m using surveys, interviews, and participant-observation in each of these four schools to answer four questions: (1) How do these communities explain the relationship and occasional disconnect between scripture and science education? (2) How do these communities maintain virtual network and how might these connections—through text messaging, Facebook, etc.—affect their religious identities? (3) How does the massive amount of information and identity-exploration provided by the internet strengthen or challenge these communities? (4) How might the use of technology and science to accomplish religious tasks allow for a reexamination of how prayer and scripture themselves can be “moral technologies”, that is, human-constructed tools that help their users accomplish tasks? All of these questions will help me to understand how these communities are able be “in the world but not of it”. I expect to find that Muslims and Christians in the United States have more in common with each other than they do with fellow Muslims and Christians in Jordan, disproving the idea that religious identity will determine everything else. In fact, these schools’ stories reveal selves with many identities—certainly Muslim and Christian—but also Jordanian and American, technological and scientific, religious and secular—the diffuse identities, in other words, that mark any members of modern life.

Additional Information:
E-mail:	jeffrey.guhin (at) yale.edu