Owen Whooley
Biographic Data
| ID | 254096 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Owen Whooley |
| GIVEN NAMES | Owen |
| FAMILY NAME | Whooley |
| SIGNATURE | WHOOLEY O |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of New Mexico |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 129 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France
The history of Western psychiatry has been troubled and tragic. Psychiatric knowledge remains riddled with gaps where one would expect to find explanations of the underlying mechanisms of mental distress. Instead of inducing professional humility, this persisting ignorance often has been met with hubris on the part of psychiatrists. The hubris has spawned wanton experimentation, callous disregard, and aggressive “treatments”—most infamously, lobo…
The long tail of Covid and the tale of long Covid: Diagnostic construction and the management of ignorance
We bring together insights from the sociology of diagnosis and the sociology of ignorance to examine the early diagnostic unfolding of 'Long COVID' (LC). Originally described by patient activists, researchers set out to ponder its unwieldy clinical boundaries. Using a scoping review method in tandem with qualitative content analytic techniques, we analyse medicine's initial struggles to construct a LC diagnosis. Paying attention to the dynamics o…
How Long Does Madness Take? Time and the Construction of Mental Illness in Community Mental Health Work
How do temporal understandings shape the construction of social problems and the work of addressing them? This article takes up a social problem with an explicit time dimension - severe and persistent mental illness (SPMI) - to advocate for a focus on time in the analysis of social problems. Drawing on interviews with community mental health workers (n=100) and observations of a police department and a psychiatric emergency department, I show how…
Desperate Remedies: Psychiatry's Turbulent Quest to Cure Mental Illness
Uncertain and under Quarantine: Toward a Sociology of Medical Ignorance
At the center of the COVID-19 pandemic lies a ubiquitous feature of medicine. Medicine is permeated with ignorance. Seizing this moment to assess the current state of medical sociology, this article articulates a sociology of medical ignorance. We join insights from earlier medical sociological scholarship on uncertainty with emerging research in the sociology of ignorance to help make sense of the omnipresent but sometimes invisible dynamics rel…
Criminalizing the brain: Neurocriminology and the production of strategic ignorance
PTSD: A Short History
On the Heels of Ignorance: Psychiatry and the Politics of Not Knowing
Teenage Suicide Notes: An Ethnography of Self-Harm
The Diagnostic System: Why the Classification of Psychiatric Disorders is Necessary, Difficult, and Never Settled
The DSM and the spectre of ignorance
Psychiatry has long been plagued by a stubborn, inconvenient fact: the knowledge regarding the nature of mental distress remains elusive. For the past four decades, nosological reforms have been the primary means by which American psychiatrists have staved off the effects of their ignorance and propped up their professional authority. Central to these efforts have been revisions to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), …
Thomas A. Apel. Feverish Bodies, Enlightened Minds: Science and the Yellow Fever Controversy in the Early American Republic
In Feverish Bodies, Enlightened Minds: Science and the Yellow Fever Controversy in the Early American Republic, Thomas A. Apel examines the debates over yellow fever in order to illuminate the character of scientific inquiry in the early American republic. He reveals how the pressing question of what causes yellow fever got resolved (incorrectly, as it would turn out) during a period when intellectual inquiry was a “gentlemanly pursuit” bereft of…
A (Pragmatic) Defense of (Some) Science
In this commentary, a response to MacKendrick (2017), I examine the dilemma that recent science activism poses for sociologists of science. How can we maintain their critical integrity while condemning the anti‐science actions of the Trump administration? I propose that sociologists of science engage in two exercises to marshal a qualified defense of science. First, we should unpack what we might mean by the “science” we wish to defend. Then, we …
Measuring mental disorders: The failed commensuration project of DSM-5
Shauna Devine. Learning from the Wounded: The Civil War and the Rise of American Medical Science
The nineteenth-century United States has long been portrayed as a medical dark age, an era of unchecked epidemic disease, rancorous sectarian competition, and crude heroic therapies that harmed more than helped. While this portrayal has its merit—United States physicians certainly lagged behind their European counterparts in the medical sciences—it can mislead if taken too far, rendering too stark a juxtaposition between mid-nineteenth-century me…
Nosological Reflections: The Failure of DSM -5, the Emergence of RDoC, and the Decontextualization of Mental Distress
Since the establishment of the symptoms-based categories in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders ( DSM), Third Edition, sociologists have raised concerns about the DSM’s failure to appreciate social, contextual factors when defining mental disorders. The author describes recent developments in psychiatric nosology—the DSM-5 revision process and the emergence of the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC)—and then considers their impl…
Influenza and Inequality: One Town’s Tragic Response to the Great Epidemic of 1918
Threat Perceptions: The Policing of Dangers from Eugenics to the War on Terrorism
Organization Formation as Epistemic Practice: The Early Epistemological Function of the American Medical Association
Diagnostic ambivalence: Psychiatric workarounds and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
In 1980 the American Psychiatric Association (APA), faced with increased professional competition, revised the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Psychiatric expertise was redefined along a biomedical model via a standardised nosology. While they were an integral part of capturing professional authority, the revisions demystified psychiatric expertise, leaving psychiatrists vulnerable to infringements upon their autonomy…
Objectivity and its Discontents: Knowledge Advocacy in the Sally Hemings Controversy
The sociology of knowledge, derived from research on the hard sciences, overlooks the potential for outsiders to determine the content of knowledge within professional disciplines. Using the case of the Sally Hemings affair, I introduce the concept of "knowledge advocacy" to analyze how outside groups shape historical knowledge. The Hemings controversy involved not only historical evidence, but also the understanding of objectivity in historical …
Collective Identity
Within social movement theory, collective identity refers to the shared definition of a group that derives from its members’ common interests, experiences, and solidarities. It is the social movement's answer to who we are, locating the movement within a field of political actors. Collective identity is neither fixed nor innate, but rather emerges through struggle as different political actors, including the movement, interact and react to each o…
The political work of narratives: A dialogic analysis of two slave narratives
Tied to meaning-making, narratives are saturated with political relevance. Narratives do political work on both the individual and collective levels. To achieve a comprehensive understanding of the political work performed by a given narrative, both the historical context and local context must be analyzed. This paper uses a comparative dialogic analysis derived from M. M. Bakhtin to illuminate the different types of political work that narrative…
Locating Masterframes in History: An Analysis of the Religious Masterframe of the Abolition Movement and its Influence on Movement Trajectory
Critiqued as being a-historical, current social movement theorists argue for a more dynamic, theoretical model that focuses on processes within historical contexts (McAdam, Tarrow, Tilly, 2001). This paper seeks to apply existing social movement theory on framing to the historically, embedded case of the American abolitionist movement. Specifically, this paper analyzes the influence of the adopted religious masterframe of the abolitionist movemen…
International Nongovernmental Organizations and Carbon Dioxide Emissions in the Developing World: A Quantitative, Cross-National Analysis
This quantitative, cross-national study is designed to test hypotheses linking the activities of international nongovernmental organizations to reductions in carbon dioxide emissions in the developing world. While many quantitative studies of variation in carbon dioxide emissions have been published, none have included a control for the presence of international nongovernmental organizations. We review the literature that discusses the many ways …
Diagnostic ambivalence: Psychiatric workarounds and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
In 1980 the American Psychiatric Association (APA), faced with increased professional competition, revised the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Psychiatric expertise was redefined along a biomedical model via a standardised nosology. While they were an integral part of capturing professional authority, the revisions demystified psychiatric expertise, leaving psychiatrists vulnerable to infringements upon their autonomy…
International Nongovernmental Organizations and Carbon Dioxide Emissions in the Developing World: A Quantitative, Cross-National Analysis
This quantitative, cross-national study is designed to test hypotheses linking the activities of international nongovernmental organizations to reductions in carbon dioxide emissions in the developing world. While many quantitative studies of variation in carbon dioxide emissions have been published, none have included a control for the presence of international nongovernmental organizations. We review the literature that discusses the many ways …
Measuring mental disorders: The failed commensuration project of DSM-5
Uncertain and under Quarantine: Toward a Sociology of Medical Ignorance
At the center of the COVID-19 pandemic lies a ubiquitous feature of medicine. Medicine is permeated with ignorance. Seizing this moment to assess the current state of medical sociology, this article articulates a sociology of medical ignorance. We join insights from earlier medical sociological scholarship on uncertainty with emerging research in the sociology of ignorance to help make sense of the omnipresent but sometimes invisible dynamics rel…
A (Pragmatic) Defense of (Some) Science
In this commentary, a response to MacKendrick (2017), I examine the dilemma that recent science activism poses for sociologists of science. How can we maintain their critical integrity while condemning the anti‐science actions of the Trump administration? I propose that sociologists of science engage in two exercises to marshal a qualified defense of science. First, we should unpack what we might mean by the “science” we wish to defend. Then, we …
The political work of narratives: A dialogic analysis of two slave narratives
Tied to meaning-making, narratives are saturated with political relevance. Narratives do political work on both the individual and collective levels. To achieve a comprehensive understanding of the political work performed by a given narrative, both the historical context and local context must be analyzed. This paper uses a comparative dialogic analysis derived from M. M. Bakhtin to illuminate the different types of political work that narrative…
Organization Formation as Epistemic Practice: The Early Epistemological Function of the American Medical Association
Locating Masterframes in History: An Analysis of the Religious Masterframe of the Abolition Movement and its Influence on Movement Trajectory
Critiqued as being a-historical, current social movement theorists argue for a more dynamic, theoretical model that focuses on processes within historical contexts (McAdam, Tarrow, Tilly, 2001). This paper seeks to apply existing social movement theory on framing to the historically, embedded case of the American abolitionist movement. Specifically, this paper analyzes the influence of the adopted religious masterframe of the abolitionist movemen…
Collective Identity
Within social movement theory, collective identity refers to the shared definition of a group that derives from its members’ common interests, experiences, and solidarities. It is the social movement's answer to who we are, locating the movement within a field of political actors. Collective identity is neither fixed nor innate, but rather emerges through struggle as different political actors, including the movement, interact and react to each o…
The long tail of Covid and the tale of long Covid: Diagnostic construction and the management of ignorance
We bring together insights from the sociology of diagnosis and the sociology of ignorance to examine the early diagnostic unfolding of 'Long COVID' (LC). Originally described by patient activists, researchers set out to ponder its unwieldy clinical boundaries. Using a scoping review method in tandem with qualitative content analytic techniques, we analyse medicine's initial struggles to construct a LC diagnosis. Paying attention to the dynamics o…
The Diagnostic System: Why the Classification of Psychiatric Disorders is Necessary, Difficult, and Never Settled
Objectivity and its Discontents: Knowledge Advocacy in the Sally Hemings Controversy
The sociology of knowledge, derived from research on the hard sciences, overlooks the potential for outsiders to determine the content of knowledge within professional disciplines. Using the case of the Sally Hemings affair, I introduce the concept of "knowledge advocacy" to analyze how outside groups shape historical knowledge. The Hemings controversy involved not only historical evidence, but also the understanding of objectivity in historical …
Threat Perceptions: The Policing of Dangers from Eugenics to the War on Terrorism
Locating Masterframes in History: An Analysis of the Religious Masterframe of the Abolition Movement and its Influence on Movement Trajectory
Critiqued as being a-historical, current social movement theorists argue for a more dynamic, theoretical model that focuses on processes within historical contexts (McAdam, Tarrow, Tilly, 2001). This paper seeks to apply existing social movement theory on framing to the historically, embedded case of the American abolitionist movement. Specifically, this paper analyzes the influence of the adopted religious masterframe of the abolitionist movemen…
International Nongovernmental Organizations and Carbon Dioxide Emissions in the Developing World: A Quantitative, Cross-National Analysis
This quantitative, cross-national study is designed to test hypotheses linking the activities of international nongovernmental organizations to reductions in carbon dioxide emissions in the developing world. While many quantitative studies of variation in carbon dioxide emissions have been published, none have included a control for the presence of international nongovernmental organizations. We review the literature that discusses the many ways …
The political work of narratives: A dialogic analysis of two slave narratives
Tied to meaning-making, narratives are saturated with political relevance. Narratives do political work on both the individual and collective levels. To achieve a comprehensive understanding of the political work performed by a given narrative, both the historical context and local context must be analyzed. This paper uses a comparative dialogic analysis derived from M. M. Bakhtin to illuminate the different types of political work that narrative…
Collective Identity
Within social movement theory, collective identity refers to the shared definition of a group that derives from its members’ common interests, experiences, and solidarities. It is the social movement's answer to who we are, locating the movement within a field of political actors. Collective identity is neither fixed nor innate, but rather emerges through struggle as different political actors, including the movement, interact and react to each o…
Objectivity and its Discontents: Knowledge Advocacy in the Sally Hemings Controversy
The sociology of knowledge, derived from research on the hard sciences, overlooks the potential for outsiders to determine the content of knowledge within professional disciplines. Using the case of the Sally Hemings affair, I introduce the concept of "knowledge advocacy" to analyze how outside groups shape historical knowledge. The Hemings controversy involved not only historical evidence, but also the understanding of objectivity in historical …
Organization Formation as Epistemic Practice: The Early Epistemological Function of the American Medical Association
Diagnostic ambivalence: Psychiatric workarounds and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
In 1980 the American Psychiatric Association (APA), faced with increased professional competition, revised the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Psychiatric expertise was redefined along a biomedical model via a standardised nosology. While they were an integral part of capturing professional authority, the revisions demystified psychiatric expertise, leaving psychiatrists vulnerable to infringements upon their autonomy…
Threat Perceptions: The Policing of Dangers from Eugenics to the War on Terrorism
Influenza and Inequality: One Town’s Tragic Response to the Great Epidemic of 1918
Nosological Reflections: The Failure of DSM -5, the Emergence of RDoC, and the Decontextualization of Mental Distress
Since the establishment of the symptoms-based categories in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders ( DSM), Third Edition, sociologists have raised concerns about the DSM’s failure to appreciate social, contextual factors when defining mental disorders. The author describes recent developments in psychiatric nosology—the DSM-5 revision process and the emergence of the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC)—and then considers their impl…
Shauna Devine. Learning from the Wounded: The Civil War and the Rise of American Medical Science
The nineteenth-century United States has long been portrayed as a medical dark age, an era of unchecked epidemic disease, rancorous sectarian competition, and crude heroic therapies that harmed more than helped. While this portrayal has its merit—United States physicians certainly lagged behind their European counterparts in the medical sciences—it can mislead if taken too far, rendering too stark a juxtaposition between mid-nineteenth-century me…
Measuring mental disorders: The failed commensuration project of DSM-5
The DSM and the spectre of ignorance
Psychiatry has long been plagued by a stubborn, inconvenient fact: the knowledge regarding the nature of mental distress remains elusive. For the past four decades, nosological reforms have been the primary means by which American psychiatrists have staved off the effects of their ignorance and propped up their professional authority. Central to these efforts have been revisions to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), …
Thomas A. Apel. Feverish Bodies, Enlightened Minds: Science and the Yellow Fever Controversy in the Early American Republic
In Feverish Bodies, Enlightened Minds: Science and the Yellow Fever Controversy in the Early American Republic, Thomas A. Apel examines the debates over yellow fever in order to illuminate the character of scientific inquiry in the early American republic. He reveals how the pressing question of what causes yellow fever got resolved (incorrectly, as it would turn out) during a period when intellectual inquiry was a “gentlemanly pursuit” bereft of…
A (Pragmatic) Defense of (Some) Science
In this commentary, a response to MacKendrick (2017), I examine the dilemma that recent science activism poses for sociologists of science. How can we maintain their critical integrity while condemning the anti‐science actions of the Trump administration? I propose that sociologists of science engage in two exercises to marshal a qualified defense of science. First, we should unpack what we might mean by the “science” we wish to defend. Then, we …
On the Heels of Ignorance: Psychiatry and the Politics of Not Knowing
Teenage Suicide Notes: An Ethnography of Self-Harm
The Diagnostic System: Why the Classification of Psychiatric Disorders is Necessary, Difficult, and Never Settled
Criminalizing the brain: Neurocriminology and the production of strategic ignorance
PTSD: A Short History
Uncertain and under Quarantine: Toward a Sociology of Medical Ignorance
At the center of the COVID-19 pandemic lies a ubiquitous feature of medicine. Medicine is permeated with ignorance. Seizing this moment to assess the current state of medical sociology, this article articulates a sociology of medical ignorance. We join insights from earlier medical sociological scholarship on uncertainty with emerging research in the sociology of ignorance to help make sense of the omnipresent but sometimes invisible dynamics rel…
Desperate Remedies: Psychiatry's Turbulent Quest to Cure Mental Illness
The long tail of Covid and the tale of long Covid: Diagnostic construction and the management of ignorance
We bring together insights from the sociology of diagnosis and the sociology of ignorance to examine the early diagnostic unfolding of 'Long COVID' (LC). Originally described by patient activists, researchers set out to ponder its unwieldy clinical boundaries. Using a scoping review method in tandem with qualitative content analytic techniques, we analyse medicine's initial struggles to construct a LC diagnosis. Paying attention to the dynamics o…
How Long Does Madness Take? Time and the Construction of Mental Illness in Community Mental Health Work
How do temporal understandings shape the construction of social problems and the work of addressing them? This article takes up a social problem with an explicit time dimension - severe and persistent mental illness (SPMI) - to advocate for a focus on time in the analysis of social problems. Drawing on interviews with community mental health workers (n=100) and observations of a police department and a psychiatric emergency department, I show how…
Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France
The history of Western psychiatry has been troubled and tragic. Psychiatric knowledge remains riddled with gaps where one would expect to find explanations of the underlying mechanisms of mental distress. Instead of inducing professional humility, this persisting ignorance often has been met with hubris on the part of psychiatrists. The hubris has spawned wanton experimentation, callous disregard, and aggressive “treatments”—most infamously, lobo…
Psychology (15 works) · Sociology (14 works) · Law (12 works) · Political science (12 works) · Epistemology (10 works) · Philosophy (10 works) · Mental Health and Psychiatry (7 works) · Computer Science (6 works) · History (6 works) · Ignorance (6 works)