Jaime Kucinskas is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Sociology at Hamilton College. Broadly speaking, her teaching and research interests center on the intersections of: the sociology of morality and meaning-making, religion/spirituality, social movements, cultural and organizational change, and inequality. In particular, she is fascinated by how people strive to be moral citizens and respond to collective problems within, through, and/or outside of the different institutions in which they live their lives.
Her book The Mindful Elite investigates how Buddhist modernist meditators transformed meditation in America into a mainstream practice embraced by esteemed secular organizations such as Fortune 500 companies, Ivy League schools, hospitals, the U.S. military, and K-12 schools. Her work contributes to scholarship on social movements, institutional change, and field theory by identifying various ways actors and movements use consensus-based tactics—rather than confrontation and protest as much of the research on movements and contentious politics suggests—to build a new multi-institutional contemplative field and legitimize meditation.
Her co-edited book (with Brian Steensland and Anna Sun), Situating Spirituality: Context, Practice and Power, Kucinskas examines the many ways transcendent spiritual and meaningful states are influenced by different physical places, activities, and social contexts.
Kucinskas is currently writing a book, The Loyalty Trap, on how career federal civil servants responded to the Trump administration and conditions of emergent autocracy. Her first paper from this research, with Yvonne Zylan, was published in the American Journal of Sociology.
She is also beginning a new project (with Hamilton Prof. Aaron Strong) comparing rural responses to climate change internationally.