E. Summerson Carr

E. Summerson Carr will spend the academic year at the Center drafting a monograph, tentatively titled Working like a Dog: The Hidden Life and Labor of Full-time Facility Dogs. Carr’s first book, Scripting Addiction (Princeton University Press, 2010), is an ethnography of mainstream American addiction treatment. Her second, Working the Difference: Science, Spirit and the Spread of Motivational Interviewing (University of Chicago Press, 2023), is an ethnography that chronicles the remarkable spread of a behavioral health method, called motivational interviewing, and the pragmatism that infuses it.  Her current project is a study of full-time canine workers—or “facility dogs”— in U.S. human service settings.  Though this research, Carr asks how and why American dogs have increasingly come to be seen as expert communicators and caregivers, and what their labor reveals about the perceived challenges and gaps of social service provision.  

Carr is a professor at the University of Chicago, jointly appointed in the Department of Anthropology and the Crown School of Social Work, Policy and Practice.  Working at the intersection of sociocultural, linguistic, and medical anthropology, her research examines how expertise is produced, authorized, and enacted within institutions and professional practice. Carr is particularly interested in expertise that takes human behavior and interiority as its object, such as social work, counseling psychology, and behavioral health.