[In May I had the honor of giving the inaugural “Distinguished Alumni Lecture” at the Sociology Department of the University of Chicago. I gave a paper I am currently working on called “The Securitization of Venezuelan Politics and the Reassertion of U.S. Empire.” As part of the deal, they asked me to write a brief essay about my work for their newsletter. I am republishing it below.]
It was a great honor to return to the U of C Sociology Department to give the first Distinguished Alumni Lecture. The invitation was especially meaningful given the somewhat unorthodox path I have taken in the twenty-six years since graduating. Starting as a theory-driven ethnographer of religion focused on relational sociology and pragmatist theories of culture, I have increasingly devoted my work to interpreting Venezuela’s deepening crisis, while never setting aside my core scholarly commitments. Most publicly engaged scholars begin with their academic research projects. Once the main analyses have been written or published, they produce more accessible versions for broader audiences. In my case, it has been the disorderly unfolding of a crisis that has driven the process. In responding to urgent and continually changing issues, I have started by commenting in the media and writing opinion pieces on the fly, using empirical knowledge combined with sociological intuition and often only a rough familiarity with the existing scholarly literature. In most cases that is actually enough to provide analyses significantly at odds with polarized and simplistic discussions regarding Venezuela. When a set of issues persists and my commentary and writings accumulate, it leads me to more deeply engage academic literatures and collaborate with colleagues on scholarly publications. For example, the shrill denunciations of Hugo Chávez’s efforts to create a participatory democracy in his first term, matched by the romantic enthusiasm of others, led me to write up analyses of actual participatory projects for policy and activist audiences. This eventually generated collaboration with other scholars focused on participation and produced In Hugo Chávez’s second term, criminal violence surged, leading to wild and flailing interpretations ranging from collective neurosis to the frustration-aggression hypothesis to the inevitable effort to portray criminal violence as political violence. Several colleagues and I built upon years of media work and policy publications to put forward an interpretation based on actual data and relational criminology: During the government of Nicolás Maduro, when I found myself advising the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs on their negotiation efforts in 2019, my efforts focused on pushing back against the simple versions of game theory used by many critics of negotiations. I based this on the large body of social scientific research—from symbolic interactionism to behavioral economics—that has shown how social interaction itself can shape the terms of exchange. This eventually took more systematic form and engaged the literature on negotiations in “International Peacemaking in Venezuela’s Intractable Conflict.” The talk I gave in the Albion Small Room in May followed a similar path. While my original plan for 2025 was to set aside day-to-day analysis of Venezuelan politics to concentrate on my academic projects, it became clear in the first months of Donald Trump’s second term that Venezuela would become a central element of his domestic and foreign policy. During 2025 I wrote six opinion pieces for various newspapers and magazines. Based on empirical knowledge and a sociological outlook, I sought to debunk the idea of a Tren de Aragua invasion of the U.S., question the existence of a “Cartel of the Suns” drug cartel led by Nicolás Maduro, and show how the Venezuelan opposition was using these fictions to generate U.S. intervention. In 2026 I am putting these analyses together, deepening the empirical account, and thickening the sociological explanation with scholarship on securitization and informal empire. These concepts are new to my writing, although not to my reading or teaching. Here again, it is the course of empirical events that is guiding my work and the literatures I engage. I am describing here a career path that was not planned, and which I do not necessarily recommend. Our professionalized discipline rewards using empirical study to advance new concepts and methodologies, not the extension of known concepts and methods into new empirical realities. And it definitely does not reward a generalist that jumps from issue to issue. I do not wholly reject these incentives—the dilemmas and challenges of every age need to be met with new tools including social scientific concepts and methods. This is why I have always used my public engagement as a springboard to publications in scholarly outlets. But given the circumstances of studying and living in a country coming apart at the seams, it has been my ethical decision to prioritize contributing to public debate. This has actually been more of an opportunity than a sacrifice: opening doors to a more diverse set of interlocutors and leading to a broader engagement of existing bodies of knowledge. It has also kept alive the passion that led me to become a scholar in the first place--the belief that knowledge really can change the world. I see this way of being a sociologist as consistent with Edward Said’s provocative endorsement of the values and prerogatives of “amateurism.” In Representations of the Intellectual he argues for a scholarly practice “that is fueled by care and affection,” and is not restricted to the pursuit of narrow specialization, nor to debate with colleagues in the profession (Random House 1994. p.82).
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