About

The Emergent Self is a space for examining how identity, meaning, and responsibility are formed through lived experience, interpretation, and response. The essays gathered here are written from the conviction that who we are is not fixed, but continually shaped through relationship, culture, power, and practice.

My work is grounded in sociology, phenomenology, and interpretive theory, with particular attention to how people make sense of themselves within systems that both constrain and enable human flourishing. I am especially interested in moments of tension—when personal experience collides with cultural narratives, institutional practices, or inherited symbols—and in what those moments reveal about the work of becoming.

I hold a PhD in Human and Organizational Development from Fielding Graduate University (Santa Barbara, CA). My doctoral research examined how individuals make meaning of humiliation in a society structured by stigma, focusing on the lived experiences of people whose bodies are routinely misrecognized or devalued. That work led to the development of what I describe as an Experiences–Interpretations–Responses (EIR) cycle, a way of understanding how meaning is continuously produced through recursive engagement with the world. Experiences shape interpretation; interpretations guide response; responses, in turn, generate new experiences. This cycle operates at personal, relational, cultural, and systemic levels.

Before and alongside my academic work, I have lived several professional lives. I was formed early in a religious tradition that emphasized ritual, moral reflection, and service, and I served for a number of years as a Roman Catholic priest. I later worked extensively in organizational and systems contexts, including decades in healthcare administration and information technology, where I focused on process improvement, organizational learning, and large-scale systems change. I have also taught for many years in higher education, primarily in sociology and organizational theory, working with students from around the world in fully online environments.

These varied contexts—religious, educational, corporate, and academic—have shaped how I think about culture and meaning. They have made it clear to me that abstract theory is never merely abstract. Ideas are lived. Narratives organize behavior. Systems reward some interpretations while marginalizing others. And transformation, whether personal or collective, is not accidental. It requires deliberate work.

This site is not a blog in the conventional sense, nor is it a platform for commentary or opinion. It is an archive of essays concerned with sensemaking: how meanings come to feel natural, how they are contested, and how they might be reimagined. The writing here draws on social constructionism, symbolic interactionism, and communication theory—not to name theories for their own sake, but to make visible the processes through which realities are constructed and sustained.

I write for readers who are willing to think slowly, tolerate ambiguity, and take responsibility for their own participation in the worlds they inhabit. If these essays do anything, I hope they encourage attentiveness: to language, to power, to experience, and to the quiet but consequential choices through which selves—and societies—are continuously made and remade.