Stephen M. Engel

Stephen Marcus Engel is an American academic and political scientist who is currently an associate professor at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. He is an affiliated scholar with the American Bar Association, a bar association tasked with setting law school academic standards and the creation of Ethical codes in the United States.

He is known for his development of governmental inter-branch relations in American political development (APD) in his debut work, American Politicians Confront the Court: Opposition Politics and the Changing Responses to Judicial Power. Engel is credited with the creation of the "Less-than-whole citizens" designation in social theory. He outlines the classification in his third book, Fragmented Citizens: The Changing Landscape of Gay and Lesbian Lives, was released in 2016,^[1] in an account of the partiality of political change in the U.S. impacting the LGBTQ community.^[2]

Academic career

Stephen Marcus Engel graduated with honors from Wesleyan University in the school of social sciences in 1998. He received his master's degree from New York University (NYU) in 2001 in humanities and social thought. After a brief stint working at NYU, Engel attended Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut where he received his M.A., MPhil., and PhD in political science during the years 2005, 2006, and 2009, respectively.^[3]

Upon receiving his doctorate, he was appointed as an assistant professor of political science at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.^[4] During the summer of 2010, he went to New York City to work as a research scholar at the School of International and Public Affairs of Columbia University before concluding his professorship at Marquette in 2011. He went on to become a research scholar at the American Bar Association from August 2013 to July 2014.^[5]

In August 2011, he was appointed to the politics faculty of Bates College in Lewiston, Maine as an assistant professor. During the same year, he was designated an affiliated scholar of the American Bar Association–a distinction he holds as of April 2017.^[5] On August 27, 2015, Engel was promoted to associate professor with tenure.^[6] As of August 2015, he is the Chair of the Politics Department of Bates College.^[7]

Work and ideas

Engel's main research topics focus on the sociopolitical mobilization of the LGBTQ community, constitutional law, and political development.^[8] According to Google Scholar, he has been cited by 259 times by other academic scholarship as of May 2017.^[9]

'Less-than-whole' citizens

In Engel's third book, Fragmented Citizens: The Changing Landscape of Gay and Lesbian Lives, he recounts the increase in rights for same-sex couples in the late 2000s and early 2010s. He referred to the gay and lesbian couples of America as the titular "fragmented citizens," or most notably "Less-than-whole citizens"^[10] which encompassed the partiality of political change noted in their societal development. While the LGBTQ community received societal preference to other disadvantaged minority groups, they were considered a step above Second-class citizens, yet in the eyes of the law and society, not holders of full citizenship. This is to say, they did not reap the same awards from the citizenship they were given.^[10] Engel notes that it is the role of "American institutions to recognize gays and lesbians as full citizens."^[11]

He uses the example of gay marriage status in the U.S. to illustrate his term. In the U.S., gay and lesbian Americans still face discrimination in the workplace as of 2016.^[10] He states:

[The members of the LGBTQ community] still do not have full legal protections against workplace, housing, family, and other kinds of discrimination. There remains a continuing struggle of the state to control the sexuality of gay and lesbian citizens—they continue to be fragmented citizens. The understanding the development of the idea of gay and lesbian individuals as 'less-than-whole' citizens can help us make sense of the government's continued resistance to full equality despite massive changes in public opinion. Furthermore, it is the state's ability to identify and control gay and lesbian citizens that allowed it to develop strong administrative capacities to manage all of its citizens in matters of immigration, labor relations, and even national security. The struggle for gay and lesbian rights, then, affects not only the lives of those seeking equality but also the very nature of American governance itself.^[10] 

While typical restrictions on second-class citizens includes disenfranchisement, restrictions on language, religion, education, and property ownership. "Less-than-whole citizens" typically are restricted with limitations on civil or military service freedom of movement and association, marriage, gender identity and expression. In other words, "Less-than-whole citizens" are those who are denied post-materialist needs as opposed to materialist needs.^[10]

Personal life

Engel resides in Portland, Maine.^[10]

Selected bibliography

Books

• "The Unfinished Revolution: Social Movement Theory and the Gay and Lesbian Movement." New York: Cambridge University Press. 2001. 
• "American Politicians Confront the Court: Opposition Politics and the Changing Responses to Judicial Power." New York: Cambridge University Press. 2011.
• "Fragmented Citizens: The Changing Landscape of Lesbian and Gay Lives." New York: NYU Press. 2016 

Articles

• “Before the Countermajoritarian Difficulty: Regime Unity, Loyal Opposition, and Hostilities toward Judicial Authority in Early America," Studies in American Political Development 23 (Fall 2009).
• "Political Education in/as the Practice of Freedom: A Paradoxical Defense from the Perspective of Michael Oakeshott." Journal of the Philosophy of Education 41 (September 2007).
• "Organizational Identity as a Constraint on Strategic Action: A Comparative Study of Gay and Lesbian Interest Groups." Studies in American Political Development 21 (Spring 2007).
• "Marketing Everyday Life: The Postmodern Commodity Aesthetic of Abercrombie & Fitch." Advertising & Society Review 5 (October 2004).
• "Microcosms of Modernism: Understanding Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Urban Planning within the Dissolution of the Cartesian Project." Journal of Graduate Liberal Studies 6 (Fall 2000). 

References

External links

• Stephen Engel at Bates College
• Stephen Engel at ProQuest
• Stephen Engel at the American Bar Association