Associate Professor of Sociology Jaime Kucinskas presented her research on the changing moral landscape of the federal government under the Trump administration and career civil servants' likelihood of speaking up in the face of democratic decline in a session on Advances in Political Sociology at the American Sociological Association meetings in Los Angeles on Aug. 9.
With co-author Evan Stewart (University of Massachusetts, Boston), Kucinskas also presented their research testing whether spiritual practitioners are as likely as their religious counterparts to vote and engage in other political behavior. Their research will be published in a forthcoming paper in the American Sociological Review.
During the meetings, Kucinskas also served as a "critic," in an Author Meets the Critics session reviewing Carolyn Chen's (University of California, Berkeley) new book Work, Pray, Code. The book explains how mindfulness in Silicon Valley has been channeled to serve the purposes of tech firms, and entice workers to derive increasing meaning and purpose from their workplaces, to the detriment of local communities and American democracy.
