Dr. Staci Newmahr

I'm a transdisciplinary scholar of consciousness, limit experience and embodied knowledges. I think and write at the intersection of sociology, anthropology and phenomenology, about body, biography, society and world. I study feelings (figurative and literal), how and why they matter, and what we can, and should, do with them.

I’m an ethnographer and contemplative methodologist, jointly trained (PhD) in sociology and anthropology. My first book was about intimacy, trust and risk. I illustrated how we construct feelings of intimacy through crossing boundaries with one another, and argued that a feminist approach to risk-taking needs to account for risks that people take with and through emotion, and toward and for emotional experiences. This work inspired and fed my interest in experiential boundaries: the sorts of things we do to reach new heights and depths, to alter our experience of everyday realities, and how exactly those things work for us.

My current research challenges the social (and epistemic) construction of mind, body and spirit as separate experiential processes, focusing on three levels: the social mediations and machinations between our inner and outer realities, the epistemic tension between subjectivity and objectivity, and the ontology of interiority and exteriority.

I write about all this (and also media, and meaning-making, and magic) at Intima on Substack. I’m currently writing a sociological memoir about the (always-embodied) emotional habitus of gender and class.

"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