Deva Woodly to Speak on the Necessity of Democratic Insurgency at Institute for Advanced Study

Deva Woodly, Assistant Professor of Politics at The New School, will a give a public lecture, “An Antidote to the Politics of Despair: Enabling Conceptions of Justice and the Democratic Necessity of Insurgency,” on Friday, May 13 which will take place at 5:30 p.m. in Wolfensohn Hall on the Institute campus. This event is sponsored by the Association of Members of the Institute for Advanced Study.

Using the work of Iris Young, Amartya Sen, and John Dewey, along with the empirical case of the contemporary Movement for Black Lives, Woodly will develop the argument that both the idea of justice and citizens themselves benefit from democratic insurgencies that emerge from ordinary people and challenge prevailing notions about existing arrangements of power and privilege.

A Friends of the Institute for Advanced Study Member (2012–13) in the School of Social Science, Woodly’s research examines how democratic politics happens in the contemporary context. While most American political science inquiry focuses on institutions, choice and decision-making, Woodly’s non-traditional approach focuses on the way public meanings define the problems that the polity understands itself to share and the range of choices that citizens perceive to be before them. Woodly analyzes the importance of discourse in democratic politics as we experience it as members of the polity, and utilizes methodologies, both theoretical and empirical, that reveal political discourse as a practical source of information, including statistical examinations of discursive content and theoretical analyses of the meanings unearthed therein.

Woodly obtained her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 2008. Most recently, Woodly published The Politics of Common Sense: How Social Movements Use Public Discourse to Change Politics and Win Acceptance (Oxford University Press, 2015). In addition to her position as Assistant Professor of Politics at The New School, Woodly is also the Director of Undergraduate Studies in Politics.

This event is free and open to the public. To register for this lecture visit www.ias.edu/events/woodly-lecture. For more information on other events at the Institute, visit www.ias.edu/events.