Jennifer Carlson, a sociologist and associate professor at the University of Arizona, was awarded a 2022 MacArthur Fellowship, also known as the “genius grant,” in recognition of her work examining gun culture, politics and trauma.
Carlson, 40, was among 25 scholars throughout the country who were nominated anonymously and later selected for the fellowship this year. They will each receive an $800,000 stipend from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to pursue their passions.
“I’m still shocked. I’m still amazed at the opportunity and the responsibility,” Carlson said Thursday, the day after the list of awardees was released to the public. “I have a lot of gratitude for everybody, all of my mentors who have made this possible, and for the work of the MacArthur Foundation.”
The MacArthur Fellowships provide awardees in a variety of fields with the no-strings-attached stipends to encourage them to pursue their own creative, intellectual and professional inclinations. The fellowships are seen as investments in people, not projects, in recognition of extraordinary creativity and dedication, the foundation says.
“Carlson’s insights into how gun ownership has become a highly charged political issue offer a potential path toward overcoming the entrenched social divisions that characterize gun policy discussions,” the MacArthur Foundation said in a statement.
Researching gun culture
For Carlson, the fellowship reflects more than a decade of work examining and trying to understand the different forces that have shaped gun culture and politics in the United States.
She said she began researching gun culture while she was a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley. At the time, she said, there was heavy news coverage about a surge in gun and ammunition sales, as well as of groups standing on either side of the debate about gun ownership.
She realized sociologists hadn’t done much research on the topic that was quickly becoming a pressing public debate.
“Basically at that moment, I was like, ‘OK, this is what I need to study,’” she said, adding that she was also driven by her curiosity of trying to truly understand the conservative culture of the Midwestern U.S., where she grew up.
Since then, Carlson has published two books and has a third coming out next year.
Her first book, “Citizen-Protectors: The Everyday Politics of Guns in an Age of Decline,” examines why individuals choose to own and carry firearms. Her second book, “Policing the Second Amendment: Guns, Law Enforcement and the Politics of Race,” identifies the mentalities associated with policing and gun carrying.
She noted that while her research is focused on gun culture and politics, her findings say a lot more about overall U.S. culture.
“When you study guns, you realize that you really are studying the deep fabric of American society,” Carlson said. “In many ways, whether you’re talking about gender or race or socioeconomic mobility … the state, policing, partisanship, democracy — like, guns are at the center of all of those issues.”
She said she believes gaining a better understanding of the complexities behind gun ownership and trauma could help reframe conversations about guns in the U.S. in a way that is more productive.
Forthcoming work
Carlson is now working on a large-scale study of trauma among people affected by gun violence, according to a news release from the University of Arizona College of Social and Behavioral Sciences.
Roughly 45,000 people are killed and at least another 80,000 injured by guns every year, Carlson said in that news release. “And even those figures fail to put the impact of gun violence on American society into its proper perspective: Gun violence impacts families, friendship circles, schools, workplaces and communities.”
“My goal as a sociologist isn’t to solve the U.S. gun debate. That’s for us as a society to work through,” Carlson said. “Rather, my goal is to help people better understand how guns matter in such starkly different ways to different people in the U.S. I believe that is key to transforming our current, deadlocked debate about guns in the U.S.”
She has a book to be released in 2023 that will focus on the increase in gun sales since 2020 in light of pandemic insecurities, police violence and political polarization.
As for her plans with the MacArthur Fellowship, Carlson said she can’t give too many details just yet. So far, one thing she’s decided is to use a portion of the money to support graduate students at the UA School of Sociology.
“It’s a really overwhelming amount. It’s an open invitation. It is a huge responsibility,” she said. “I have a lot of thinking to do because there’s so many worthy things that that money could be used for.”
