This category foregrounds theory as a tool for understanding experience. Articles here engage sociological, philosophical, and interdisciplinary frameworks to explore how meaning is constructed, how interpretation shapes response, and how sensemaking influences both personal and collective action.
How the space between conflict and resolution can become a threshold of transformation I recently shared dinner with friends I have known for many years. One of them, an attorney and a Sagamore of the Wabash, is a nationally recognized mediation professional. Our evening was devoted to friendship, food, and conversation rather than a […]
The question “Is religion true?” is often treated as though it has only two possible answers. Either religion is true because its doctrines correspond to objective metaphysical reality, or religion is false because its claims cannot be verified in the same way we verify historical, scientific, or empirical claims. On one side stands belief; on
The EIR Cycle Through a Social Constructionist Lens Why experience, interpretation, and response are never merely individual We often speak as though human beings move through the world by simply having experiences, thinking about them privately, and then choosing how to respond. That account is appealing because it preserves the image of the autonomous
Interpretive Frame This essay examines the rise of generative AI in higher education not as a student ethics crisis or a technological inevitability, but as a moment of institutional exposure. By focusing on governance, role clarity, and responsibility, it reframes faculty distress and exit not as individual failure, but as a predictable outcome of administrative
Interpretive Frame This essay examines the humiliation experienced by fat persons in the United States through the Experiences–Interpretations–Responses (EIR) cycle developed in my doctoral research. Rather than treating humiliation as a static event or internal emotional state, it situates humiliation as a recursive process of sensemaking shaped by power, recognition, and social construction. Humiliation as
Interpretive Frame This essay introduces the emergent self as an ongoing process shaped through experience, interpretation, and response rather than a fixed identity to be discovered or achieved. Drawing on sensemaking across personal, relational, and structural levels, it situates this site as a living inquiry into how selves are continually formed within—and against—the worlds they
This article situates the current U.S. political crisis within long-standing patterns of moral absolutism and social retreat. Rather than treating the present moment as unprecedented, it examines how fundamentalism and apathy function as recurring responses to uncertainty—and what this reveals about the limits of progress.