Selected Publications
“Cultural Objects as Objects: Materiality, Urban Space, and the Interpretation of AIDS Media in Accra, Ghana,” The American Journal of Sociology 115 (2010)
"The (re)Presentation of an Epidemic in Everyday Life." Social Psychology Quarterly 71, 4 (2008)
“Erasing the Brown Scare: Referential Afterlife and the Power of Memory Templates” (with Gary Alan Fine), Social Problems 54 (2007)
Kellogg Institute Grants
2014
2013
Terry’s recent research explains why HIV/AIDS media campaigns often fail to change peoples’ belief and behavior in response to the disease. Understanding people’s creativity is at the core of this work. He finds that communities often use AIDS campaigns in unexpected ways—women reconstitute female condoms as bangle bracelets and people decorate their homes with AIDS advertisements. Work from this project was recently published in the American Journal of Sociology and won an honorable mention for the Geertz Prize in Cultural Sociology. For his next project Terry turns his attention to developing a sociology of misinterpretation.