I am a multimethod sociologist with a comparative orientation, whose work examines how changing horizons of possibility reshape moral judgment, organizational life, and political agency when established models of efficacy and progress lose credibility, with climate politics as my primary empirical site.
My dissertation, Resisting the End Times: Collective Action in the Climate Crisis analyzes how climate resistance groups in the United States and Germany reorganize order, meaning, and agency when the path toward ecological collapse is met with shrinking opportunities to effect change. Rather than understanding exhaustion primarily as a failure of hope, imagination, or strategy, I approach it as moral-temporal misalignment: a broken link between where moral frameworks locate worth, whether in outcomes, present conduct, or inherited obligations, and the temporal horizons those locations presuppose.
Drawing on pragmatism, phenomenology, and moral philosophy, I develop a practice-centered, temporally sensitive approach to how actors reorganize moral orientations in situations of crisis. My multi-year comparative ethnography (2023–2026) reveals two trajectories:
In moral adaptation, actors relocate worth from preventing catastrophe toward present defiance and responsibility, a recursive process that acknowledges and turns adverse developments into a new basis for action. In moral involution, actors hold onto the primacy of better climate futures, but as those futures become increasingly implausible, turn inward, redirecting effort away from creating political change toward organizational optimization.
Across these trajectories, the foreclosure of climate futures emerges not as an effect of structural developments alone but as a social horizon produced at the nexus of scientific projections, political developments, infrastructures for collective interpretation, and available moral frameworks, from normative optimism to historically grounded obligations of noncomplicity.
The findings also expose a broader communicative anachronism: public discourse and policy continue to rely on a temporal model in which crises are framed as controllable events even when they are experienced as ongoing conditions. By showing how settling on closure can generate new grounds for action and how culturally available moral repertoires sustain meaning and agency under contracting horizons, my research informs climate communication, education, and public engagement.
I am currently extending this line of inquiry through a theoretical account of moral-temporal mis- and realignment, drawing on cases spanning climate activism, medical training, humanitarian aid, and insurgency. By theorizing morality and temporality as co-implicated, this account opens a new research agenda on their dynamic reinforcement, destabilization, and reconstitution.
Beyond this project, I am interested in how institutions authorize horizon closure, in apparent tension with socioeconomic mandatesof development, planning, and improvement.
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Before beginning my Ph.D. in Sociology at Yale, I earned an Akademiebrief, equivalent to an MFA, from the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and an MSc distinction in all subjects) in Culture and Society from the London School of Economics, receiving three Hobhouse Memorial Prizes.
At Yale, my research has been supported by the Sterling Fellowship and the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies. I also spent a year as a Fox Fellow at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge.
My work has appeared in Environmental Politics, the Journal of Classical Sociology, and The American Sociologist, and was recognized by graduate paper awards from the American Sociological Association’s Theory Section and History of Sociology and Social Thought Section.
I currently serve as a Graduate Council Member of the ASA Theory Section and am a Graduate Fellow of Yale’s European Studies Council.
Contact: daphne.fietz@yale.edu