Episode 14: Jaime Kucinskas - The Mindful Elite

Jaime Kucinskas is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Hamilton College. Her research interests span sociology of religion, social movements, organizational and cultural change, and inequality. Her work centers on how people mobilize for, as well as resist, change within and across organizations and fields. She also studies spiritual experiences across different settings.  Jaime is the author of The Mindful Elite: Mobilizing from the Inside Out (Oxford University Press, 2019) and has published in journals such as the American Journal of Sociology, the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, and Sociology of Religion.   

In this Episode, Jaime Kucinskas discusses her book, The Mindful Elite (Oxford University Press, 2019), as she draws on first-hand accounts of the elite mindfulness circuit and describes how white, affluent and privileged networks became co-opted and beholden to institutional and corporate interests. In their efforts to "scale" mindfulness and make it accessible to the masses, Jaime tells us how this messianic movement led to a glaring social myopia, coming to reinforce the problems the Mindful Elite aspired to solve.