Wayne Mellinger

There is a norm of anonymity which governs behavior in public between strangers. Normally strangers quickly g…

Speeding down Highway 217, which links Highway 101 to UC Santa Barbara, you might not even notice a small, un…

Santa Barbara, often referred to as "the American Riviera," is renowned for its picturesque landscapes, Medit…

The United States incarcerates more people than any other nation on earth, and within this vast system, a cri…

Datura, commonly known as jimsonweed or devil’s trumpet, played a significant role in Chumash culture as both…

Santa Barbara confronts a stark reality: there are up to 1,000 individuals experiencing homelessness in our c…

Conversation Analysis (CA) is an approach to studying everyday social interactions which focuses on how parti…

A major mental health crisis is severely impacting unhoused people living in cities across the United Sates. …

In American society, people who experience homelessness are portrayed as a distinct type. This brief essay ex…

The Book of Job is perhaps the most memorable and remarkable book in the Bible, in part, because of its fine …

How you see the world can help you to develop a deep ecological consciousness. One meaning of that assertion …

Social scientists refer to this as “the criminalization of homelessness,” which is defined as laws, policies …

Our current approach to homelessness is not working very well. Since I became active as an advocate in local …

We often are numb to the suffering around us, unconsciously avoiding facing the harsh realities of modern lif…

Our unexamined habits in everyday life can be hell. To repeatedly perform activities without ever considering…

"A great wind blows among the tress, and everywhere fruit falls down - truths. The squandering of an all-too-…

If we still tell our lives as stories, we may nonetheless be coming today to experience them more as web surf…

May we no longer step blindly past the stranger who huddles in the cold outside the door. May I no longer pre…

Our capacity for self-knowledge distinguishes humans from other animals. We are the only creatures truly capa…

Our society, our species and our planet face a number of severely grave problems that threaten our survival. …

To stay filled with hope, one must act with hope. If we go crazy with despair, we simply add to the craziness…

I have met people for whom the 1960s cartoon The Flintstones must have been a reality television show. Contra…

The public discourse on homelessness has deteriorated to such a degree recently that open and hostile "hate s…

To put yourself in another person's shoes, you gotta first unlace your own. In our increasingly cosmopolitan …