John Hartley

John Hartley is a relational and comparative sociologist with strong interests in social theory and conflict transformation. His work lies at the intersections of religion, politics, cultural sociology and field theory. It aims to cultivate moral imagination, particularly regarding relations between committed members of competing communities (e.g., conservatives v liberals, Christians v Muslims v humanists, blacks v whites, Iranians v Americans, sociologists v political scientists), empirically illuminating ways those dynamics enrich (and degrade) communal and common goods in social and political life. He uses mixed methods to examine ways habitus, belief, narrative and performance interact through struggles for symbolic capital and so influence agency that activates and alters symbolic boundaries.

Current projects examine Muslim-Christian relations to develop a theory of religious exclusivism, explore the empirical relationship between intellectual humility and recognition of the other, investigate the function of ethnographic authority among American evangelicals, evaluate commensurabilities between Muslim and evangelical articulations of religious freedom and develop conceptual critiques of “religious radicalism.”