Research

My research focuses on memory, race, and commemoration. I work in both political theory (focusing on fugitivity in Black political thought, memorialization, race and ethnicity, and feminism and popular culture) and empirical political science research (focusing on Confederate monuments, whiteness, race and ethnicity, and teaching and learning in the political science classroom).

Political Theory

Current Book Project: Fugitivity and Black U.S. Political Thought

My current book project is about the diverse ways enslaved people in the United States escaped slavery and how these different modes of fugitivity can speak to both fugitive theorizing in Black political thought and contemporary politics of resistance. Drawing on the concrete experiences of fugitives from slavery in the United States and its colonies and territories, this book demonstrates the value of the politics engaged in by Black fugitives and created from Black fugitivity. In particular, it moves beyond the exceptionalism and individualism often perpetuated by mythical retellings of escape on the Underground Railroad to explore how flight within geographies of enslavement can enrich contemporary politics of resistance to systems of violence. In particular, many forms of fugitivity leaned on – and strengthened – entanglements, relationships, and communities of care. This ethos can be generative for contemporary fugitive politics and theory.

“’Just Keep Coming Home’: Fugitive Truancy in Octavia Butler’s Kindred and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Water Dancer.” Accepted in Contemporary Political Theory.

This article reads the historical practice of fugitive truancy alongside two fictional slave narratives, Octavia Butler’s Kindred and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Water Dancer, to argue that truancy is a political project of resistance that highlights the world-building potential of relational ties. Truancy was a form of fugitivity in which enslaved people fled temporarily and then returned. As truancy often took the form of covert visits to loved ones enslaved elsewhere or otherwise helped strengthen kinship bonds, it was a way to resist the system of family separation that was central to American slavery and that created conditions of social death. I argue that fugitive truancy is a type of political resistance that points toward a tentative, melancholy hope for the future. The relational and often gendered nature of truancy activates ideas of relationality, melancholy hope, and home as incomplete and constantly unfolding. As a form of resistance to enslavement borne out of a tenuous connection to ideas of home, I argue that truancy can activate fugitive hope.

“Contentious Vulnerability: The Case of Rwandan Genocide Memorials.” Memory Studies, 2025. https://doi.org/10.1177/17506980241255073.

The memorials commemorating Rwanda’s 1994 genocide are rare in their use of human remains and depictions of violence. These memorials have been widely criticized by European and North American scholars, who focus on the danger of depicting bodily vulnerability, arguing that it supports the regime’s politics of exclusion. However, by conflating what is exclusionary about the framing of the aesthetic of bodily vulnerability at Rwandan memorials with the aesthetic itself, these critics write off vulnerability altogether, risking a colonialist stance that reduces the Rwandan context to the non-political by fitting its commemorative politics into a false dichotomy of emotion and reason. In conversation with theories of vulnerability and the human by Judith Butler and Achille Mbembe, I argue that the aesthetic of vulnerability, when framed in an inclusive and critical way, can provide hope by supplying a way to see others’ bodies as non-disposable and oppose debasing forms of power.

“Trauma as Cultural Capital: A Critical Feminist Theory of Trauma Discourse,” with Wilson H. Hammett. Hypatia, 2024. www.doi.org/10.1017/hyp.2024.22.
This essay theorizes a dilemma for feminism and the mental health fields posed by a particular form of trauma discourse. Feminists have played an important role in the development of current cultural and clinical conceptions of trauma and its destigmatization, but one result of the destigmatization of trauma has been that the language of trauma has begun to be used as a form of cultural capital. Using Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of capital, distinction, and inequality to understand the circulation of trauma discourse, we critically reflect on the use of trauma as cultural capital by the privileged and powerful to enhance their power, distinguish themselves from those without such cultural capital, and reinforce hierarchies. We put the struggle to understand and treat trauma in the context of feminist interventions in the mental health and medical fields. We then outline, using several examples from contemporary U.S. popular culture, the appropriation of trauma talk to entrench existing inequalities and give cultural capital to those in positions of power and those seeking to evade accountability for abuse. This discussion has important implications not only for those in the mental health professions and trauma survivors, but also for feminist thought and those interested in deconstructing structural injustices and relations of inequality more broadly.

Public Writing: Washington Post “The Monkey Cage” Piece

“Memorial Day was political from the beginning. Here’s how the holiday was shaped by race and the Civil War.” The Monkey Cage – The Washington Post (2021). Link.

Race in U.S. Politics

Book project on the political effects of Confederate monuments on Southerners

• Emily Wager (Western Carolina University) and I are working on a book-length project asking this research question: What are the measurable effects of public Confederate monuments on the political behavior, attitudes, and engagement of U.S. Southerners, and do these effects vary by race?
• The article described below represents the first study in this project. Other studies will focus on the effects of Confederate monuments on civic engagement like voting, the effects of Confederate monuments on how Southerners are treated by their local governmental institutions, and the effects of removing Confederate monuments and replacing them with monuments to other histories and narratives, like heroes of the Civil Rights Movement.

“The Racialized Impacts of Confederate Symbols in Public Spaces: The Case of Courthouses,” with Emily Wager. FirstView in the Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics. https://doi.org/10.1017/rep.2025.10015

Commemorations of the Confederacy remain pervasive throughout the southern U.S. Historians have long established that many of these symbols were erected during the Jim Crow era to reinforce white political dominance in public spaces. However, little is known about how these enduring symbols shape perceptions among people of different racial identities today. This study examines Confederate monuments where they are most prominently placed: courthouse grounds. Using an original survey experiment of Black, white, and Latino Southerners, it investigates whether the presence of a Confederate monument in front of a courthouse influences feelings of personal safety and welcomeness, as well as perceptions of the fairness of the court system. Findings reveal that a Confederate monument made Black and Latino Southerners feel less safe and welcome at the courthouse and led Black Southerners to perceive the court system as less fair toward people like them. In contrast, Confederate monuments had no overall effect on white Southerners’ perceptions of courthouses or the judicial system. These results underscore the role of contentious symbols in reinforcing inequalities in public spaces.

“Meanings and Impacts of Confederate Monuments in the U.S. South,” with Emily Wager and Tyler Steelman. Du Bois Review, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1742058X2000020X

How do citizens interpret contentious symbols that pervade our environment? And what downstream effects does state protection of these symbols have on how citizens of different backgrounds feel they belong in that environment? We approach these questions through the lens of race and Confederate monuments in the American South. Data from two original surveys illustrate the symbolic meanings Americans attach to these monuments and how state protection of them impact residents’ feelings of belonging. We find perceptions of Confederate monuments vary by race: Whites are drastically less likely to perceive them as symbolic of racial injustice than are African Americans. Further, state protection of Confederate monuments leads to a diminished sense of belonging among African Americans, while generally leaving Whites unaffected. This research moves beyond the literature that examines simple support or opposition toward contentious symbols, and instead develops a deeper understanding of what meaning symbols can hold for citizens and how they can have tangible consequences for how citizens engage in the public and political sphere. This paper is recently published at the Du Bois Review.

“White privilege, white grievance, and the limitations of white antiracism,” with Leah Christiani. Politics, Groups, and Identities, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1080/21565503.2023.2224779.

Calls to cross-racial solidarity in contemporary politics often claim that whiteness needs to first be made visible before racial healing can begin. But what does this mean in 2016, when whiteness has already been made visible – in two divergent ways? On the right, white identity politics centers around claims of white oppression in the face of threatening minorities, while on the left, white progressives in the Black Lives Matter era focus on making white privilege visible. We run a survey experiment to better understand the impacts of these two divergent frames of whiteness (against a control) on policy positions, racial attitudes, and cross-racial solidarity. Under review.

“White NIMBYism and Diversity Close to Home,” with Andreas Jozwiak. Social Science Quarterly, 2024. https://doi.org/10.1111/ssqu.13457 (Paper 1) and working paper (Paper 2).

In the wake of the “Great Awokening,” white Democrats have professed increasingly racially progressive attitudes. However, the question remains open whether Democrats’ racial progressivism predicts important decisions that white Americans make “when the rubber hits the road” – like when deciding where to send their children to school or where to live. White people continue to make decisions on an individual level that have created levels of racial residential segregation at levels similar to the 1970s. Using a survey experiment (paper 1) and text analysis of citizen complaints about housing development at city government meetings (paper 2), we observe the effects of nonwhite families moving into white liberals’ neighborhoods on white liberals’ willingness to support racially progressive policies.

Teaching and Learning

Two chapters in forthcoming edited volume, Beating the Clock: The Power of Short Games and Active Learning in the Political Science Classroom, edited by Derek Glasgow, Mark Harvey, Ryan Gibb, and James Fielder, with Taylor and Francis Publishing.

• “Does Gender Essentialism Creep In? Exploring Theories of Gender through Single-Sex Education” presents an original active learning strategy for teaching debates within feminist theory about gender essentialism
• “Index Cards Activity for Understanding Complex Terms and Ideas” presents an original active learning game for lessons or units with lots of “vocab words” that students must learn

“Institutions and Arguments: Simulating the US Policy-Making Process,” with Ryan Williams. PS: Political Science and Politics. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1049096521001013.

In U.S. government courses, simulations have been shown to increase students’ engagement with course material and knowledge retention. We introduce procedures for and data on the effectiveness of an original simulation on civil liberties and U.S. federal institutions. Students play members of Congress, lobbyists for a pro- or anti-natural gas pipeline group, or Supreme Court justices. The simulation is unique in its combination of reflection on the strength and type of various normative arguments for and against a policy with the procedures of government as the policy makes its way through federal institutions.

“Medicare-for-All or the Status Quo? Simulating Lobbying, Policy Debate, and the Party Line in Congress.” In Simulations in Political Science: Games Without Frontiers, Ed. Mark Harvey, James Fielder, and Ryan Gibb (Routledge, 2023).

This book chapter lays out the purposes and procedures for an original simulation of the lobbying and policymaking process in U.S. politics. Aimed at illustrating one of the ways that private groups can influence policy outcomes, this simulation divides students into lobbyists or members of Congress and brings the lawmaking process alive through active learning.