Research
My research examines possibilities for exercising political agency in everyday life. It focuses upon politics in its most elemental sense — the activity of struggling with power. What opportunities for power-struggle arise in the course of everyday life? What types of power and struggle do they involve? What makes them meaningful? Why are they sometimes realized and sometimes lost? And how do they open new ways of thinking about citizenship, democracy, and the significance of politics itself? To answer these questions, I read political theory alongside contemporary accounts of everyday life in memoir, ethnography, and history.
My dissertation, Politics That Matters: Struggles with Power in Everyday Life, argues that those who do not change structures of governmental, economic, and social power are still meaningful agents of everyday politics. I examine this politics in chapters that explore the motivational logic of Rousseau’s pessimism, the everyday implications of Sheldon Wolin’s “fugitive democracy,” and the promise of James C. Scott’s “arts of resistance” for a world of surveillance and documentation. The dissertation is supervised by Jeffrey Green (chair), Rogers Smith, Nancy Hirschmann, and Loren Goldman.
I have three articles in progress. The first is an invited contribution to a special issue of Democratic Theory. The second, “Pessimism and Political Agency: Everyday Politics in Rousseau’s Emile,” is under review. The third, “‘Go While My Head Is Turned’: The Everyday Resistance of an Intermediary Subject,” is also under review.
To learn more, download my CV or contact me at tpattiz@sas.upenn.edu.
