Emily B. Campbell is an SNF Agora Institute postdoctoral fellow. A trained political and cultural sociologist, her research engages drug politics, public health, emotions, social movements, race and ethnicity, and community life.
Campbell is currently writing her first book, Grieving Overdose, which documents community responses to the drug overdose crisis. Through a five-year ethnography of New England, she theorizes the role of grief in shaping politics, foregrounding the work of mothers as they fight on behalf of their children in life and death.
At the SNF Agora, Campbell is working with Professor Hahrie Han in collaboration with More in Common to develop a model to fortify plural, democratic culture in collective settings.
Campbell earned her BA in Sociology from Indiana University, Bloomington and PhD in Sociology from the CUNY Graduate Center. She was a predoctoral research fellow to the Department of Sociology, Organization, Migration and Participation at the Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany and graduate research fellow in Mexico City where she researched the human rights implications of the drug war. She is a Faculty Fellow at the Center for Cultural Sociology, Yale University.
Prior to joining the SNF Agora, she taught at College of the Holy Cross and, during graduate training, at Lehman College, CUNY in the Bronx. In 2021-2022, she co-led an art and writing workshop at a community center for people recovering from addiction and homelessness culminating in two public art exhibitions in Worcester, Massachusetts. Her writing has appeared in Contexts, Critical Research on Religion, Open Theology, Humanity and Society and, Teachers College Record, among others.