Staci Newmahr

Dr. Newmahr spends most of her time thinking about limit (“edge”) experiences, from a feminist-phenomenological and interactionist perspective. Her work is on gender, emotion, risk, transgression, consciousness, and feminist epistemology. She is currently studying neo-shamanism and witchcraft, writing about ghost hunting in the UK, and finishing a book about upward mobility, feminist epistemologies and transcendence.

Her current priorities include resisting increasingly dangerous encroachments on academia from the U.S. Christofascist movement, as well as from the broader corporatization of the university. Dr. Newmahr is passionate about furthering antiracist and feminist agendas within the academy, and developing and disseminating radical approaches to teaching.

Her first book, Playing on the Edge (2011), theorizes the relationship of intimacy to risk. Based on an ethnography of a public BDSM community, she argues that people create intimacy through jointly transgressing meaningful boundaries. Subsequent work lays the foundation for a feminist approach to edgework, arguing for an understanding of (deliberate and skill-based) emotional risk-taking as emotional edgework. She is the co-editor of Selves, Symbols and Sexualities, an anthology of original work theorizing sexuality from an interactionist perspective, and has published in several journals, including Journal of Contemporary Ethnography and Symbolic Interaction.

She has served as Associate Editor of Symbolic Interaction and as President of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction in 2020. She is an Institute for Advanced Study fellow (2019, Durham University) and a recipient of the Presidential Award for the Promotion of Equity and Diversity at Buffalo State University.

"Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretative one in search of meaning."

- Clifford Geertz