Jaime Kucinskas is Associate Professor of the Department of Sociology at Hamilton College and Visiting Professor at the Risk and Crisis Centre at Mid Sweden University for the 2024-2025 academic year.
She is fascinated by how people strive to be moral citizens and respond to wicked collective problems within, through, and/or outside of the different institutions in which they live their lives.
Kucinskas is the author of the The Mindful Elite, which 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. Through elite consensus-based tactics—these contemplative entrepreneurs have built a new multi-institutional contemplative field and legitimize meditation.
In her forthcoming book, The Loyalty Trap, (Columbia University Press) she shares how career federal civil servants responded to the Trump administration amid a leadership turn toward autocracy. Her first paper from this research, with Yvonne Zylan, explains the moral tightrope federal civil servants walked in the American Journal of Sociology.
She is also beginning a new project (with Hamilton Prof. Aaron Strong) comparing rural responses to climate change across central New York, Jämtland, Sweden and Canterbury Region, New Zealand.