Joshua Wakeham

Graduate Student in Sociology

Biographical Note

Joshua is currently a Ph.D. Candidate in the Sociology Department, as well as a Research Fellow in the Criminal Justice Policy and Management Program at the Kennedy School. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in several juvenile justice organizations, his research explores issues of sense-making and organizational cognition in the face of a problem marked by a high degree of ambiguity and uncertainty. In particular, he is interested in how competing and contradictory understandings of the same problem—youthful criminality—hold together in these organizations, despite the fact that evidence of the success or failure of any one course of action is often very difficult to come by. In addition to this empirical research, Joshua is also developing theoretical ideas about the social nature of cognition, drawing from an array of disciplines, including organizational behavior, cognitive science and psychology, anthropology, science and technology studies, philosophy, and micro-sociology.

11/26/2011

Research Interests

Organizations, Juvenile Justice, Social Services, Law, Justice and Morality, Cognition and Knowledge, Decision-Making and Sense-Making, Social Theory, Pragmatism, Ethnography and Qualitative Methods

Previous Degrees

B.A. Williams College--2002

Contact

617-496-5794 (FAX)

618 William James Hall
33 Kirkland Street
Cambridge, MA 02138