David Cunningham
Associate Professor of Sociology, Director of Graduate Studies
email: dcunning@brandeis.edu
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Focus of Research Social Movements/Collective Action, Community Structure, Race and Ethnicity, Organizations, Popular Culture, Research Methods. Education Ph.D., Department of Sociology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 2000 M.A., Department of Sociology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 1996 B.S., Civil Engineering, University of Connecticut, 1993 B.A., English, University of Connecticut 1993 |
My current research and teaching interests focus on community-level contexts for the emergence of social change. I have recently completed a project on state-based efforts to limit social protest, dealing specifically with the FBI's counterintelligence programs (COINTELPROs) in operation between 1956 and 1971. A book based on this research, There's Something Happening Here: The New Left, the Klan, and FBI Counterintelligence, was published in February 2004 by the University of California Press. My current research focuses on the mobilization of Ku Klux Klan activity during the Civil Rights era. While the Klan successfully organized in many areas of the South during the 1960's, the patterning of this mobilization was far from even, with the KKK thriving in certain communities while never making meaningful inroads in others. I seek to understand how community-level factors facilitated or circumscribed residents' entries into such activities.
Additionally, I have an interest in emerging forms of activism, as well as the social processes that mediate activist identities. These topics consume much of my teaching energy, and provide a focus for two “on the road” programs that enable members of the Brandeis community to directly engage with a wide range of communities. The first of these – titled “Possibilities for Change in American Communities” – was offered in 2001, and incorporated a month-long trip around the U.S. in a sleeper bus to examine historical and contemporary activist work in nearly two dozen communities. In 2006, I teamed with Brandeis anthropologist Mark Auslander to offer “Memory and Cultural Production in the Mississippi Delta.” As part of a semester-long course, students will spend ten days in the Delta pursuing oral history and other community-based work.
Check out the "Possibilities for Change" website at http://www.brandeis.edu/departments/sociology/bus.
Current Projects
White Hoods and Tar Heels: The Rise and Fall of the Civil Rights-era Ku Klux Klan. Book manuscript in progress.
”Collective Memory and the Greensboro (NC) Truth and Reconciliation Commission.” (with Caitlin Slodden, Colleen Nugent, and Brian Fair)
”Making Domestic Threats: The FBI, the Detroit Police, and the Republic of New Africa.” (with Christian Davenport)
"Capturing the Structure of Musically-Based Youth Subcultures: The Case of 'Emo.'" (with Emilie Hardman and Ann Morrison Spinney)
“Heterodox Political Communities.” (with Miranda Waggoner)
Selected Publications
”Truth, Reconciliation, and the Ku Klux Klan.” Forthcoming in Southern Cultures.
”Contexts for Mobilization: Spatial Settings and Klan Presence in North Carolina, 1964-1966,” with Benjamin T.Phillips. Forthcoming in American Journal of Sociology.
”What If She's From the FBI?” The Effects of Covert Social Control on Social Movements and their Participants,” with John Noakes. Forthcoming In Surveillance and Governance: Crime Control and Beyond, edited by Mathieu DeFlem. New York: Elsevier.
”Paths to Participation: A Profile of the Civil Rights-Era Ku Klux Klan.” Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change 27: 283-309 (2007).
”Surveillance and Social Movements: Lenses on the Repression-Mobilization Nexus.”Contemporary Sociology 36, 2: 120-125 (2007).
“All the Klan’s Men.” Boston Globe (2005).
”What the G-Men Knew.”The New York Times Magazine (2004).
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There's Something Happening Here: The New Left, the Klan, and FBI Counterintelligence. University of California Press (2004). |
“Comparative Collective Community-Based Learning: The ‘Possibilities for Change in American Communities’ Program,” with Cheryl Kingma-Kiekhofer. Teaching Sociology 32: 276-290 (2004).
“The Emergence of ‘Worthy’ Targets: Official Frames and Deviance Narratives within the FBI,” with Barb Browning. Sociological Forum 19, 3: 347-369 (2004).
"The Patterning of Repression: FBI Counterintelligence and the New Left." Social Forces 82, 1: 207-238 (2003).
"Understanding State Responses to Right Vs. Left -Wing Threats: The FBI, the Klan, and the New Left." Social Science History 27, 3: 327-370 (2003).
"State vs. Social Movement: The FBI's COINTELPRO Against the New Left." In Jack Goldstone, ed., States, Parties, & Social Movements: Protest and the Dynamics of Institutional Change. Cambridge University Press (2003).
"An Education in Activism: Teaching and Learning About Social Change on the Road." Brandeis Review 22,1: 38-45 (2001).
"American Sociological Association Elections, 1975-1996: Exploring Explanations for 'Feminization'," with Rachel A. Rosenfeld and Kathryn Schmidt. American Sociological Review 62: 746-759 (1997).