Joshua Wakeham

Graduate Student in Sociology

Biographical Note

I was born and raised just north of Boston in the city of Lynn, Massachusetts. Thirteen years of Catholic school education brought me to Williams College, where I double majored in Sociology and Asian Studies (with a focus on China). While at Williams, I became involved with nearby detention center for juvenile delinquent boys, first as a tutor, and then as a researcher. Through a combination of historical archival research and ethnography, I realized that a fundamental tension between the deterministic, structural explanations that the experts of the institution proffered and the demands for moral agency that the social order placed on these young men was being played out within the different levels of the institution. After graduation, I decided to join the ranks of Teach for America, which brought me to summer school in the South Bronx and then middle school in San Francisco. Again, I saw a very similar struggle being played out within the school district and the school--the desire to understand where students were coming from and the daily need to control and safely order their days often conflicted. After this brief stint as a teacher, my wanderings took me to fishing boat in Southeast Alaska for six months, and then back home to the Boston area, where I worked in financial services. It was the problem I encountered both in the worlds of juvenile justice and education that brought me back to sociology and the academy however. It is my plan to pursue this problem, as well as others where moral ideas and philosophies get played out in very real, very consequential ways in institutions throughout the social order.

10/26/2007

Research Interests

morality, social welfare institutions, bureacracy, sociology of justice, crime, law, occupations and work, social theory, philosophy, ethnography

Previous Degrees

B.A. Williams College--2002

Contact

617-496-3846 (Phone)
617-496-5794 (FAX)

611 William James Hall
33 Kirkland Street
Cambridge, MA 02138