Current Focus
My current research develops a sociology of enchantment — a general theory of how modern life generates fascination, intrigue, and wonder from within. The project revisits the classical disenchantment thesis and identifies a mechanism the classical diagnosis overlooked: the ambiguity of the sacred — the constitutive tension between its pure and impure, beneficent and terrifying poles — which charges culture and social life with affective energy. Far from suppressing this tension, the conditions of modernity amplify it and render the sacred volatile — mobile, dispersed, easily mistaken for absence — powering decentralized forms of enchantment woven into everyday environments. I develop this argument across strategic domains of modern experience — mystery, escape, and hope — where the mechanism can be observed at work.
The program draws my three research lines into a single architecture: the theory of cathexis supplies its affective microfoundation; the theory of mystery elaborates its most developed domain; and the theory of narrative and temporality constructs the temporal dimension of the entire scheme — for every form of enchantment, from mystery to escape to hope, unfolds in time according to its own pattern.
A sociology of enchantment is conceived as a program larger than any single study. Its questions — the spirituality of those who belong to no church, the pull of cities and screens, the work of hope in personal and collective futures — open onto multiple fields and invite many hands. The program is taking institutional form: in fall 2026, I will launch the Hope and Crisis Lab at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, where one of the program's domains — hope — becomes a site of collective inquiry.
Recent Research
Sociological Theory of Cathexis
In this project, I address a longstanding blind spot in cultural sociology: the constitutive role of emotion and affect in meaning-making. I argue that affect is not external to meaning but intrinsic to it, and I develop the concept of cathexis—the attachment of emotions generated in social interaction to objects, symbols, and ideas—as the fundamental mechanism through which meanings acquire force, stability, and direction.
Building on Durkheim’s insights into collective emotions and collective effervescence, I reconstruct cathexis within a Durkheimian framework, making explicit what remained implicit in classical theory. This move reorients cultural sociology away from linear subject–object models and toward an understanding of meaning-making as extended, enacted, and environmentally situated, animated by affectively charged objects of diverse kinds.
The project specifies the key features of cathexis—persistence, thresholds of intensity, boundary-making and surface creation, spontaneity, and the mutual enactment of cathexis and affordances—and demonstrates their analytical consequences. Taken together, these insights open the study of the "energetic" architectures of environments of action, laying the foundation for a more emotionally attuned cultural sociology.
Theory of Mystery
A second major line of my recent research rethinks enchantment and modernity through a sociological theory of mystery. While classical and contemporary accounts often frame enchantment—when they acknowledge it at all—as a residual survival or as external to cultural meaning, this work identifies mystery as an endogenous cultural structure that thrives within modernity itself. Mystery transforms ordinary absences of knowledge into sites of affective tension, imaginative projection, and sustained engagement.
Across articles and a co-authored book project, I show how mystery operates as a distributed structure of experience, with its own microphysics of clues, delays, thresholds, and cathectic intensities. Focusing on figures such as the mysterious stranger and on urban forms shaped by transparency, mobility, and infrastructural concealment, this research demonstrates that enchantment in modernity often does not arise from religion-like centers—where we are inclined to search for it using conceptual optics trained on pre-modern paradigmatic sites—but from the very texture of social life itself. By reframing mystery as a central engine of modern cultural life, the project offers a new vision of modernity and opens novel directions for research on spirituality, passion, urban life, intimacy, and popular belief.
Narrative and Temporality
A third major line of my research examines the temporal dimension of cultural meaning. While most cultural structures operate transversely to time, I focus on longitudinal organization—how narratives and sequences shape experience along temporal flow. Building on Ricoeur’s theory of narrative, I introduce timeliness as a dimension capturing how the duration, tempo, and ordering of narrative segments produce harmony or dissonance between subjective and social time. Applying this framework to longitudinal data on educational decision-making, I show how students revise their plans not due to external changes, but because of conflicts emerging from the temporal logic of the narratives they live by.