Every May, for more than a decade, an ever-increasing number of motorcyclists have made the “Run for the Wall,” a cross-country journey from Southern California to the “Wall,” the Vietnam war memorial in Washington, D.C. While the journey’s avowed purpose is political — to increase public awareness about those who remain either prisoners of war or missing in action in Southeast Asia — it also serves as a healing pilgrimage for its participants and as a “welcome-home” ritual many veterans feel they never received.

Run for the Wall is a highly readable ethnographic account of this remarkable American ritual. The authors, themselves motorcyclists as well as Run participants, demonstrate that the event is a form of secular pilgrimage. Here key concepts in American culture— “freedom,” and “brotherhood,” for example—are constructed and deployed in a variety of rituals and symbols to enable participants to come to terms with the consequences of the Vietnam war. While the focus is the journey itself, the book also explores other themes related to American culture and history, including the nature of community, the Vietnam war, and the creation of American secular ritual.

In moving, first-hand accounts, the book tells how participation in the POW-MIA social movement helps individuals find personal and collective meaning in America’s longest and most divisive conflict. Above all, this is a story of a uniquely American form of political action, ritual, pilgrimage, and the social construction of memory.

Professional interests
criminological theory
international human rights
immigration and border policy
social justice
corporate
environmental and political crime
Academic interests and affiliations
Most of my academic career has been focused on studying the relationships between law and justice on the one hand, and political and economic power on the other. While I have employed research tools ranging from advanced quantitative analyses to post-modernist modes of inquiry, in recent years I find my work relying most frequently on ethnographic and qualitative methods. Right now, two projects are particularly important to me.
One is a close-grained ethnographic exploration of the nature, goals, and strategies of social action groups concerned with immigration along the Arizona-Mexico border. As part of this research I am working with and/or observing a variety of social movement organizations. Some of these, such as the Border Action Network, No More Deaths, Samaritans, Derechos Humanos, Humane Borders and the Florence Project are concerned with protecting and extending the rights of undocumented migrants from Mexico and nations further south.
Others, such as the Minutemen and the Border Guardians are focused on sealing the US border against further undocumented migration. My long-term goal is to both write about and perhaps develop a video documentary on the social and political struggles taking place over immigration in southeastern Arizona.
My other current project involves continuing an inquiry begun in 2003 into the possible violations of international law associated with the invasion and occupation of Iraq. This work extends the articles on the illegality of the Iraq War that I published with my colleague Ron Kramer in Social Justice and the British Journal of Criminology.
I am currently examining the possible the violations of the U.N. Charter concerning state sovereignty, illegal attempts to convert the Iraq economy into a neo-liberal market system in violation of the Nuremburg Charter, and offenses in violations of the Geneva Convention, international humanitarian law and E.U. laws as they relate to the failure to protect citizens in a conquered country, unlawful detentions and torture at places such as Abu Grahib and Camp X-ray at Guantanamo, and the use of "renditions" to send suspected "enemy combatants" to be interrogated in countries known to use torture.