Daphne Fietz is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Sociology. Drawing on fieldwork with climate resistance groups in Germany, the UK, and the US, her dissertation, Resisting the End Times: Agency, Temporality, Transcendence, explores how communities sustain agency and meaning when the future horizons contract. She develops a framework of temporal orientations—problem-solving, duty/practice, and existential—to analyze how actors pivot between orientations and refunction traditionally embedded concepts, such as strategy, in the process. The project aims to provincialize modern assumptions about political action by analyzing how different temporal grammars shape practices of resistance. Her broader interests lie in social and political theory, comparative-historical method, crisis, resistance, and modernity.
Daphne Fietz received an MFA from the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and an MSc (with distinction in all subjects) in Sociology from the London School of Economics. She was awarded three Hobhouse Memorial Prizes for her performance and her master’s 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, she was awarded 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.
She is affiliated with the ASA Theory, Culture and Political Sociology sections, the European Studies Center at Yale, and the Association for Protest and Movement Research (ipb).
Publications
- Fietz, D. (forthcoming). Making Meaning of Crisis: Unpacking Crisis Consciousness and Response through Mannheim’s Generational Theory. Journal of Classical Sociology.
- (2021). Integrating Meaningful Selfhood into the Sociological Study of Political Languages: Blending Mead’s Pragmatism and Taylor’s Hermeneutics. The American Sociologist.
- (2019). Rational High Ground or Compromise? Liberal Strategies for Coping with Brexit. LSE BREXIT.