Joseph
E. Davis is a Research Associate Professor of Sociology, and Director
of Research at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture.
He holds
a B.A. in Anthropology from the University of Minnesota and an M.A. and
Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Virginia. Prior to returning
to graduate school, he was director of a human rights group and program
director of a charitable foundation.
Professor
Davis's research centers on questions of self and morality, psychiatric
classification and medicalization, narrative and bioethics. He is the
author of Accounts of Innocence: Sexual Abuse, Trauma, and the Self
(University of Chicago Press, 2005) and editor of Identity and Social
Change (Transaction, 2000) and Stories of Change: Narrative and
Social Movements (SUNY Press, 2002). His articles on issues of identity,
victimization, technology, memory, and narrative have appeared in Social
Problems, Qualitative Sociology, Society, The Hedgehog Review, and
others.
Currently,
he is at work on articles dealing with representations of victims, secularization,
suffering, and public perspectives on ADHD/Ritalin and the limits of medicalization.
His larger projects include a study of public perception of psychopharmacology
and the ideal self, and a book project tentatively titled, Your Confident
Self is Waiting: Shyness, Medicalization, and the New Pharmacology.