Research Interests: Politics, Culture, and Ignorance

Ian Mullins is a political and cultural sociologist who studies conservative politics in the United States. He deploys ethnographic and historical methods to investigate the cultural practices through which conservatives produce knowledge or come to see particular information as being truthful or trustworthy. He is writing a book length manuscript that demonstrates both the historical linkages between the conservative movement in the twentieth century and the current crisis of public knowledge, and how this past affects the ways people involved in contemporary conservative political organizations produce and validate truth claims.

He earned his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California San Diego in 2018, M.A. in Sociology from the California State University at Northridge in 2007, and B.A. in American Studies and Sociology from the University of Minnesota in 2005.