My work interrogates the meaning and possibility of political agency and justice in moments of crisis, when the futures that once justified it become increasingly implausible. 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.
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 moral-temporal orientations when one becomes untenable.
I ask: What moral backgrounds enable actors to adapt rather than withdraw? Which moral repertoires constrain adaptation and render continued engagement untenable?
I argue that variation is shaped less by resources alone than by distinct moral backgrounds: differing conceptions of obligation, temporality, and the good that condition what counts as meaningful action when success becomes unlikely.
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.
Beyond this project, I am developing what I call a phenomenology of social critique: an analysis of how critique is experienced, inhabited, and made durable in practice.
Across these projects, my aim is to interrogate the assumptions that structure sociological accounts of crisis, agency, and emancipation, and to recover alternative grammars of political action under conditions of constrained futurity.
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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