my research
[As of fall 2024]
I’m currently spending a lot of my time thinking about: the relationship between certain tragic aspects of the human condition and politics, the concept of judgment, Martin Luther King’s ideas of equality, what scholarly creativity really is, and the relationship between equality and domination.
In general, my research in political theory is focused on the meaning, development, and implications of political concepts. I’m interested in concepts in the context of American political culture and history, and I primarily study them using archival research and interpretive close reading. I find myself particularly drawn to texts in the tradition of Black political thought, capaciously understood.
I’ve also spent a fair bit of time working with — and critically thinking about — emerging computational text analysis methods, including generative large language models. I am currently at work on several papers which try to think about the capabilities of foundation models as a way of making sense of human capabilities for complex things like judgment and creativity.
work in progress
Papers-in-Progress
“Political Judgment” (research and writing underway; here is a (very) short version which I prepared as a 2024 talk at Northwestern’s Cognitive Science Program)
“In Pursuit of Scholarly Creativity” (with Emma Peterson, Anne Marie Vaudo, and Nora Webb Williams; research and writing underway)
Book Project
The Idea of Equality in America (Dissertation chair: Jack Turner)
The draft manuscript is complete and under review at Oxford University Press! Please feel free to email me for a copy of the introduction if you’re curious about the broad sweep of the argument. Here’s a brief abstract:
The idea of equality compels us to reflect on distributions of power. We envision a more equal world as one that better equalizes power, one that dismantles objectionable forms of hierarchy, oppression, and domination. The widespread use of equality language in America, from the founding era to contemporary social movements, reflects the deep appeal of this vision – especially among those disproportionately subject to such oppression and domination. Yet even those with less direct experience of oppressive hierarchies value equality because everyone can imagine, anticipate, and fear potential domination by others.
If equality harkens to such a widely shared American value, why has equalizing power proved so profoundly elusive in practice? In this book, I argue that the problem is not merely practical difficulties or a lack of genuine commitment to egalitarian principles. The issue lies in the very logic of equality. Thinking about equality as a means to equalize power—a framework I call equality as anti-domination—fails on its own terms. Through an analysis of multiple pivotal episodes in American history, I show that this framework is inherently paradoxical: it fosters suspicion and fear, justifies domination and violence to counter perceived threats, and ultimately reinforces the very inequalities it seeks to eliminate.
To break free from this impasse, I propose a shift toward a different and largely overlooked understanding of equality in America—equality as humility—drawn from the thought of Martin Luther King, Jr. Equality as humility directs our attention to the unavoidable reality that we are already equals: in our debts to history, in our need for others and for community to make sense of who we are, and in the tragic limits of our self-understanding, political projects, and ability to control the future. Accepting these equal limits and ambiguities can transform our political actions and attitudes, orienting us beyond fearful and ultimately futile efforts to prevent domination. Instead, I argue that our political projects should be directed toward living together as well as possible amidst the limits of reality.
Here’s an outline of the chapters, which should give a feel for the topics and thinkers I’m engaging in the book:
Chapter 1 / Introduction - Equality and Domination
Chapter 2 - Self-Evident: Equality in the Declaration of Independence
Chapter 3 - Moral and Social Equality: The Problem of Abolition
Chapter 4 - The Afterlives of Domination: Problems of Equality in the Republic
Chapter 5 - Revisiting Recognition and Social Equality with Du Bois
Chapter 6 - Reading an Alternative Idea of Equality in King
peer reviewed publications
Rodman, Emma. Accepted. “Alienation and Political Action, Revisited.” Polity. Draft available here.
Abstract: In this paper, I challenge our thinking about affect, and its relationship to politics, agency, and action, through a close reading of the concept of alienation in the fiction of Harlem Renaissance thinker Nella Larsen. Larsen's phenomenological account of the experience of alienation offers two novel perspectives on the relation between “negative” affect and politics. First, it offers a framework of non-sovereign political action which makes a radical claim: politics is not the way we get free from such feelings but, in fact, the product of their existence. Our efforts to overcome or elide painful feelings can unexpectedly pull us out into the world and drive our worldly political projects. Second, it makes a methodological case for theorizing affect from the ground up, “staying with the trouble” of our feelings rather than seeking grand interpretive theory which pathologizes, diagnoses, and seeks to cure.
Rodman, Emma. 2024. “On Political Theory and Large Language Models.” Political Theory. 52 (4): 548-580. http://doi.org/10.1177/00905917231200826 (Open Access copy available here)
Abstract: Political theory as a discipline has long been skeptical of computational methods. In this paper, I argue that it is time for theory to make a perspectival shift on these methods. Specifically, we should consider integrating recently developed generative large language models like GPT-4 as tools to support our creative work as theorists. Ultimately, I suggest that political theorists should embrace this technology as a method of supporting our capacity for creativity – but that we should do so in a way that is mindful of the content and value of theorizing, the technical constraints of the models, and the ethical questions that the technology raises.
Moore, Chelsea and Emma Rodman. 2022. “'It Would 'Mean Little' Absent Governmental Recognition': Theorizing State Power and the New Jurisprudence of Dignity.” Law, Culture, and the Humanities. 18(3): 698-715. https://doi.org/10.1177/1743872118822725. (Paper)
Abstract: Dignity is increasingly central to the justificatory logic of US Supreme Court decisions. Yet the perils inherent in this jurisprudence of dignity, which we argue frames the right to dignity as a right to recognition, have been overlooked. Understanding dignity as synonymous with recognition clarifies its effects: dignity dethrones the autonomous, rights-bearing individual, instead figuring individuals as intersubjectively vulnerable and dependent upon institutional recognition. Dignity also casts state action as innocent, elides structural harms, and exacerbates injuries of marginalization. Applying our theoretical frame to Obergefell v. Hodges, we argue that the effects of the emerging jurisprudence of dignity are troubling.
Rodman, Emma. 2021. “'Not Equals But Men': Du Bois on Social Equality and Self-Conscious Manhood.” American Political Thought. 10 (3): 450-480. doi: 10.1086/715113. (Paper)
Abstract: While recent scholarship has argued for the utility of W. E. B. Du Bois’s thought for democratic theory, his career-long emphasis on the problem of social equality – and the solution of self- conscious manhood – has gone largely unnoticed. In this paper, I argue that while Du Bois’s emphasis on social equality powerfully situates racial oppression as a social and epistemic problem, his solution of self-conscious manhood paradoxically reproduces the very conditions of social inequality he seeks to combat. Open to people of all races, genders, and classes, the path of self-conscious manhood consists in radical truth-telling, a free anarchy of the spirit, a will to strive and act, and the purity of isolation. However, through a close reading of Du Bois’s works of biography, editorial, and fiction, I show that self-conscious manhood centers an exclusionary, atomized, and individualized ethic of self-creation rather than producing a democratic political and social order.
Rodman, Emma. 2020. “A Timely Intervention: Tracking the Changing Meanings of Political Concepts with Word Vectors.” Political Analysis. 28 (1): 87-111. Replication code | Paper
Abstract: Word vectorization is an emerging text-as-data method that shows great promise for automating the analysis of semantics – here, the cultural meanings of words – in large volumes of text. Yet successes with this method have largely been confined to massive corpora where the meanings of words are presumed to be fixed. In political science applications, however, many corpora are comparatively small and many interesting questions hinge on the recognition that meaning changes over time. Together, these two facts raise vexing methodological challenges. Can word vectors trace the changing cultural meanings of words in typical small corpora use cases? I test four time-sensitive implementations of word vectors (word2vec) against a gold standard developed from a modest dataset of 161 years of newspaper coverage. I find that one implementation method clearly outperforms the others in matching human assessments of how public dialogues around equality in America have changed over time. In addition, I suggest best practices for using word2vec to study small corpora for time series questions, including bootstrap resampling of documents and pre-training of vectors. I close by showing that word2vec allows granular analysis of the changing meaning of words, an advance over other common text-as-data methods for semantic research questions.
Lesnikowski, Alexandra, Ella Belfer, Emma Rodman, Julie Smith, James Ford, John Wilkerson, Robbert Biesbroek, and Lea Berrang Ford. 2019. “Frontiers in Data Analytics for Adaptation Research: Topic Modeling.” WIREs: Climate Change. 10 (3). https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.576
Abstract: Rapid growth over the past two decades in digitized textual information represents untapped potential for methodological innovations in the adaptation governance literature that draw on machine learning approaches already being applied in other areas of computational social sciences. This Focus Article explores the potential for text mining techniques, specifically topic modeling, to leverage this data for large-scale analysis of the content of adaptation policy documents. We provide an overview of the assumptions and procedures that underlie the use of topic modeling, and discuss key areas in the adaptation governance literature where topic modeling could provide valuable insights. We demonstrate the diversity of potential applications for topic modeling with two examples that examine: (a) how adaptation is being talked about by political leaders in United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change; and (b) how adaptation is being discussed by decision-makers and public administrators in Canadian municipalities using documents collected from 25 city council archives.