E. Summerson Carr, PhD

Professor Carr's current project is a study of Canine-Assisted Therapy (CAT). It seeks to understand how an iconic therapy animal with a rich service history—the American Dog—is trained and deployed in a variety of clinical and social service settings. This project extends her ongoing inquiry into the social histories, logics and economics of therapeutic practices and institutions, as well as her broader interest in expertise. Specifically, her research investigates how and why American dogs have increasingly come to be seen as expert communicators and caregivers—particularly in an age when more and more American humans grapple with our lack of care for other species.

Professor Carr's most recent monograph, forthcoming with the University of Chicago Press, is based on her ethnographic study of a prominent behavioral intervention called motivational interviewing (MI). The book documents how helping professionals learn, train, and institutionalize MI in various practice settings, and how their ideas about the nature and meaning of their work transform accordingly.  The book is titled Working the Difference: Science, Spirit and the Spread of Motivational Interviewing.

Professor Carr’s first book, Scripting Addiction: The Politics of Therapeutic Talk and American Sobriety (Princeton, 2010), traces the cultural and clinical history of American ideas about addiction and sobriety and examines how these ideas are put into play at a drug treatment program in the Midwestern U.S., where she conducted extensive research.  The book addresses the puzzling question of why mainstream American addiction treatment entails rehabilitating drug users’ relationship to language as much as reconfiguring their relationship to drugs.  The book received the Society of Linguistic Anthropology’s Edward Sapir Award, and has been reviewed by American Anthropologist, Choice, Contemporary Sociology, Dicourse Studies, Ethnos, Hedgehog Review, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Qualitative Social Work, Social Service Review, Social Anthropology, Society, and Somatosphere. 

Professor Carr also co-edited a volume, titled Scale: Discourse and Dimensions of Social Life (University of California Press) with Michael Lempert (University of Michigan).  The book explores how, why, under what circumstances, and to what ends social actors, in diverse circumstances, scale their worlds. For instance, American social work has long organized its pedagogical practices, if not its actual labor by way of the ubiquitous macro-meso-micro distinction. Rather than taking such scalar distinctions as ready-made platforms on which professional practice simply unfolds, Carr argues—in her teaching as well as her research—that we should investigate the effects of divvying up social life in this manner and explore alternatives.