Daphne Fietz
Dissertation: Resisting the End Times: Morality, Temporality, and Collective Action in the Climate Crisis
Research Areas: Political and Cultural Sociology; Sociology of Morality; Social Movements and Organizations; Environmental Sociology; Theory
Fields of Interest: Temporalities and Futures; Collective Action; Climate Change; Moral Norms; Institutional Transmission
Daphne Fietz is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at Yale University. Her research examines how changing horizons of possibility reshape moral judgment, organizational life, and political agency, with climate politics as her primary empirical site. Her dissertation draws on a multi-year comparative ethnography of German and U.S. climate resistance groups to explain why movements facing deteriorating ecological and political prospects follow different trajectories. Rather than treating political exhaustion as a failure of hope, imagination, or strategy, she theorizes it as moral-temporal misalignment: a broken link between what actors consider worthwhile and what they consider attainable. Comparing processes of moral adaptation and moral involution, the dissertation shows that acknowledging horizon closure can create new grounds for collective action, while making an open future obligatory can redirect effort inward toward organizational optimization. It further demonstrates that horizon closure is socially produced through political and scientific developments, available moral frameworks, and organizations’ capacities for collective interpretation.
Daphne is currently extending this agenda across cases of climate activism, medical training, humanitarian aid, and insurgency to theorize how changing horizons destabilize and reorganize evaluative commitments. Her work has appeared in Environmental Politics, the Journal of Classical Sociology, and The American Sociologist and has received graduate paper awards from the American Sociological Association’s Theory Section and History of Sociology and Social Thought Section. Her research has been supported by Yale’s Sterling Fellowship, the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, and a Fox Fellowship at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. Before Yale, she earned an MFA from the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and an MSc with distinction in all subjects in Culture and Society from the London School of Economics.
Yuqing “Dorothy” Wu
Dissertation: Ambient Soft Power: Digital Media and the Circulation of National Images in East Asia
Email: dorothy.wu@yale.edu
Research Areas: Culture; Global and Transnational Sociology; Communication, Information Technologies, and Media Sociology; Political Sociology; East Asia
Fields of Interest: Soft Power; Cultural Globalization; Platform Studies; Digital Ethnography and Computational Content Analysis; Nationalism and National Image; Youth Culture and Fandom; East Asia
Yuqing (Dorothy) Wu is a PhD candidate in Sociology at Yale University. She is a cultural sociologist working at the intersection of media, geopolitics, and everyday meaning-making, with a regional focus on East Asia. Her research asks how national images travel across borders through ordinary digital practice rather than through state messaging, and what happens to those images once they are absorbed into the vernacular forms of particular platforms and audiences. Drawing on the strong program in cultural sociology, she treats soft power as a problem of cultural structure and interpretation rather than of policy and intent.
Her dissertation develops the concept of “ambient soft power,” influence that accumulates through sustained cultural presence rather than strategic persuasion, across three empirical cases: the transformation of China’s representation in Western digital spaces on TikTok, the reception of Japanese popular culture among Chinese youth, and the circulation of K-pop among Japanese and Chinese youth. Together these cases specify both the mechanisms through which cross-national cultural influence operates and the limits of its spillover into political affinity. Her methods combine ethnography, systematic content coding with close reading, in-depth interviews, and longitudinal survey data. She has served as a teaching fellow for Introduction to Sociology, Visual Sociology, Social Networks, Inequality in China and is a Junior Fellow at the Center for Cultural Sociology.
Adora Svitak
Dissertation: Working to Love: Expertise and Effort in Young U.S. Elites’ Romantic Relationships
Email: adora.svitak@yale.edu
Website: adorasvitak.com
Research Areas: Sex & Gender; Sexualities; Economic Sociology; Culture; Science, Knowledge, and Technology
Fields of Interest: Feminist and Queer Theory, Elites, Status, Intimate Life, Work, Reproduction, Contemporary Literature and Literary Publics
Adora Svitak is a doctoral candidate in the joint PhD program in Sociology and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her interdisciplinary sociology bridges interests in gender, sexuality, power, and various forms of capital. In her research, she investigates experiences at the nexus of attachment, pleasure, and structure. Her dissertation, “Working to Love: Expertise and Effort in Young U.S. Elites’ Romantic Relationships,” uses qualitative methods to examine the intimate lives of elite professionals (ages 24-40) without children. This work explores relational dynamics as they are interlinked with labor, desire, and class distinction. It brings a critical lens to a status group that often goes unmarked yet has the disproportionate ability to influence norms; it is also a generational cohort that is not always captured by operationalizations of “elite” (e.g., ultra high net worth) that privilege older adults. Adora is the coordinator of the Institution for Social and Policy Studies’ Graduate Policy Fellowship. Her work has been published in Cultural Sociology, Post45, and the San Francisco Chronicle. In addition, Adora has extensive experience in the technology non-profit field; prior to Yale, she was at the Wikimedia Foundation, and was a Visiting Fellow at the AI Now Institute in 2024.
Jiwon Yun
Dissertation: Multiple Staging for Multiple Recognitions: Recognition Gap and the Invisible Hand of Privilege
Email: jiwon.yun@yale.edu
Website: www.jiwon-yun.com
Research Areas: Race and Ethnicity; Migration; Inequality; Culture; Media; Organization
Fields of Interest: Social Recognition; Intercultural Interaction; Transnational Migration; Mediated Migration and Mobilities; Nonprofit and NGOs; Arts and Music
Jiwon Yun is a PhD candidate in Sociology at Yale University (expected graduation in May 2027). He is a cultural sociologist with a substantive focus on race and ethnicity, migration, and media. His research agenda examines the incorporation of minorities in everyday settings. His projects are driven by questions such as: How can people from different walks of life work with each other when they have little in common?; How do majority and minority populations differ in the way they navigate different physical and digital spaces?; How can we improve minority participation and experience in elite sectors? To answer these questions, he examines social interactions that take place in various spaces where different populations come into contact with each other. using a variety of research methods, including ethnography, in-depth interviews, archival analysis, visual methods, and quantitative analysis.\
His dissertation, “Multiple Staging for Multiple Recognitions: Recognition Gap and the Invisible Hand of Privilege,” draws from more than three years of comparative ethnographic data from the Northeastern US and South Korea to investigate structural barriers to minority participation in elite sectors dominated by a single demographic group. Using the case study of classical music as a sector that is dominated by white, upper-class values, he demonstrates the structural disadvantage faced by minority individuals and their struggles to be recognized as a musician like their white peers. His work has been published in leading journals such as International Migration Review, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, New Media and Society, and Mobilities, with an award from the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction