More About Me

My personal background, education and life experiences have given me a deep commitment to democracy and community empowerment which uniquely qualifies me to serve on the Chicago Police District Council (#24). As a council member, I hope to put my ideas into practice, drawing on the collective wisdom of local residents, with all their demographic diversity, and, more importantly, the diversity of their insights and viewpoints.

I have lived for 30 of the last 35 years in West Ridge, in the 24th Police District. I believe this, along with my professional training and previous civic involvements, will aid me to advocate strongly for you on issues of public safety in our neighborhood.

Trained as a sociocultural anthropologist, I have taught social sciences on the university level, most notably at the University of Chicago. I have also taught at DePaul University, the University of Illinois at Chicago, the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Kuban State University (Krasnodar, Russia) and the University of Kurdistan Hewler (Iraq). I can read in German, Arabic, and Modern Syriac (also called Assyrian or Northeastern Neo-Aramaic).

In recent years, I have written numerous reports on public meetings the nonprofit civic media lab City Bureau, based on the city’s South Side. These include detailed accounts on the Police Board, the Chicago City Council Public Safety Committee, and the Community Safety Coordination Center. A professional dialogue facilitator, I have conducted many discussions with Los Angeles police, recruits, and community members. Other jobs I have held include writing program evaluations for the Cultural Connections Program at the Field Museum and for a newcomers’ “school within a school” in the Chicago Public Schools, and running a jobs program for Assyrian and Romanian refugees. I have also taught English as a Second Language and citizenship classes.

I have also become active the last several years in organizations that promote an upgrading of civics in American society. I served as a Civic Saturday Fellow with Citizen University, and participated in Urban Rural Action United for Action program on the local media team.

In connection with work both as a scholar and as a practitioner, I am an inveterate reader of social and political theory.

I grew up in the college town of Storrs, Connecticut, where, from an early age, I took an interest in befriending people from different social classes and backgrounds. Noticing this, my peers at our local public E.O. Smith High School drafted me into serving as Class President.

I went on to study cultural anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, where I graduated magna cum laude with distinction in the major. I continued my studies at the University of Chicago, in the Department of Anthropology. I won the Roy D. Albert Prize for my Masters thesis, in which I compared aspects of the world views of Marx, Nietzsche, and Weber. I also gained a fellowship to continue my studies in Arabic in the Center for Arabic Study Abroad at the American University of Cairo.

Later I taught in the Social Science Core Program in the University of Chicago for seven years, including three as a full-time Harper Fellow. During that period, I was the only member of the University of Chicago faculty without a Ph.D.

At the University of Kurdistan Hewler (UKH), I was elected chair of our fledgling "academic staff association" (the equivalent of a faculty senate). There, I had a traumatic experience that both gave me empathy for those at the receiving end of police intimidation, and deepened my commitment to the building of democratic institutions. Having discovered that our university vice-chancellor (the equivalent of college president) was guilty of criminal fraud, I acted as a whistleblower, and experienced retaliation in the form of termination, not-so-secret police (in camouflage) coming to my door pointing AK–47s at me, and forced deportation. Unintimidated, I later returned and wrote a social survey for an Australian oil exploration company.