My work interrogates the meaning and possibility of political agency and justice in moments of crisis, when future-directed problem-solving becomes increasingly unrealistic. Unlike ideal frameworks that outline principles for a just order and progressive change and then measure empirical reality against them, I begin from crisis conditions and examine the concrete practices, attachments, and relationships that sustain dignity and endurance. This vantage opens space for multiplicity and creativity—qualities imperative in periods of rapid transformation.
My dissertation, Resisting the End Times: Agency, Temporality, Transcendence, analyzes how climate resistance groups in the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom re-anchor order, meaning, and agency when the path toward ecological collapse is met with shrinking opportunities to effect change. For decades, climate action has been framed as a modern problem-solving project: future-oriented practices aimed at building a better, more sustainable world through human intervention. Yet this model presumes an open, controllable future—tropes that have become unstable. Drawing on sociology, phenomenology, and moral philosophy, I develop a ground-up, temporally sensitive approach that traces how actors pivot among different temporal orientations when one becomes untenable.
What begins as an open-future, externally anchored problem-solving project, legitimized by science and law, motivated by strategy, and organized around efficacy, gives way to a present-
oriented existential ethics in which endurance, responsibility, and care ground agency. Ironically, by shifting from overcoming crisis to living meaningfully, activists preserve the place in which political action is possible.
By foregrounding the burdens of staying engaged, I decenter assumptions that highlighting climate solutions and visions of sustainable futures creates hope and action. A more honest recognition of climate trajectories and their effects, paired with the skills required to navigate them, comes into view—a shift not narrowly about adaptation versus mitigation, but, as I show, about a deeper reordering of temporality and morality.
Besides the dissertation, I am interested in what we could call a phenomenology of social critique: how critique is experienced and how it functions in situ to mobilize communities. I am also interested in a comparative-historical approach to crisis confrontation, tracing how temporal shifts recur across spatial and historical cases. In all of this, I pursue a critique of critique itself: a sociological interrogation of the assumptions that structure how we understand crisis, agency, and emancipation.
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I received an MFA from the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and an MSc (with distinction in all subjects) in Sociology from the London School of Economics where I was awarded three Hobhouse Memorial Prizes, inter alia for my dissertation Ordinary Liberals versus Brexit Britain: The Re-Creation of Liberal Order via Moral and Ethical Operations, which studied liberal meaning-making in a moment of crisis.
At Yale, I received the Sterling Prize Fellowship as the best candidate of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and spent a year at Cambridge University as a Fox Fellow.
I hold a membership of the American Sociological Association, where I currently serve as a Graduate Council Member of the Theory section. I am also affiliated with the European Studies Center at Yale, the Social Science History Association, and the Association for Protest and Movement Research (ibp).
Contact: daphne.fietz@yale.edu