Dominic Wetzel

Faculty Fellow

Dominic Wetzel is Associate Professor of Sociology at Kingsborough Community College of the City University of New York, where he teaches Sociology of Gender, Sociology of Religion and Social Problems. His current research examines the rise of movements of religious nationalism, anti-Enlightenment thought and practices, and their implications for gender, sexuality and other forms of freedom. He recently published the article “The Rise of the Catholic Alt-right” in the Journal of Labor and Society. Other work has been published in Situations: Project for the Radical Imagination, of which he is also a member of its editorial collective; Socialism and Democracy; Research in the Sociology of Work; Capitalism, Nature, Socialism; the Routledge anthology Religious Queers, Queering Religion and Scholar and Feminist Online. He is currently working on a book manuscript examining the Catholic charismatic movement, titled Re-enchanting the World: Gender, Sexuality and Religion. He is the former interim Director of Kingsborough’s Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and is currently the co-facilitator of Kingsborough’s critical pedagogy project, the Faculty Initiative on Teaching Reading (FITR).

Participating Years

2023–2024

The State. Abolitionist? Fascist? Communist? Bourgeois?

In imagining and forging the future, there is much talk of the state, but often with little detail. What should public goods consist of, and how might they be organized? Can the need for coercion (e.g., to pay taxes for public goods) be realized without the carceral and its underlying apparatuses of organized violence? What forms of sovereignty and its delegation (above or below) are possible and desirable?

2020–2021

The Agrarian Question Today

In the context of what appears to be inexorable urbanization, it is just as clear that agrarian questions are deeply enmeshed in the political, social, economic, and cultural challenges of contemporary existence. How have newer regimes of capital, particularly those associated with agri-business and food conglomerates, both formed and fractured agricultural communities?