Political Science

Alberto is a seventh-year Ph.D. candidate specializing in political theory with a secondary specialization in American politics. He holds a B.A. with Honours and an M.A. from The University of British Columbia, both in Political Science. His research stands at the intersection between democratic theory, affect theory, and ordinary language philosophy. Particularly, Alberto is interested in how things and phenomena become public and the political subjectivities that crystallize in such processes of publicization. His work focuses on the aesthetic and ordinary dimensions of the public sphere; he investigates the politics of publicity by looking at the embodied and sensorial practices in the day-to-day lives of democratic citizens. Methodologically, Alberto relies on hermeneutics and phenomenology to critically interpret works of literature and popular culture as well as political texts.

Alberto’s dissertation, “Reality Checking Democracy: World Alienation, Quixotism, and Common Sense,” is concerned with our ordinary practices of verification and justification and explores the conditions under which citizens feel justified to disavow the public aspect of any given phenomenon. It argues that contemporary democracies face a constellation of problems best understood as an inward turn that, first, alienates citizens from the publicity and plurality of world and, second, orients them exclusively toward the subjectivity of their ‘private’ experience. 

Job Talk Title:

Don Quijote and the Scandal of Telling

Job Talk Abstract:

How might our practices of verification cope with the strains wrought by those that bring incommensurable sets of identifications to the table? I establish a conversation between the novel Don Quijote de la Mancha and the work of Hobbes, Nebrija, and Wittgenstein to offer new ways to go on in the face of political impasses that arise when our use of criteria is put into crisis. I argue that an understanding of language as referential generates anxieties over figures like don Quijote. Further, I elaborate an alternate mode of political engagement inspired by Sancho Panza, don Quijote’s squire. Sancho learns to acknowledge the different ‘grammars’ that orient don Quijote and the rest of the inhabitants of La Mancha. Sancho engages in what Wittgenstein calls “aspect-dawning.” Sancho’s aspect-dawning is an invitation towards a more plural engagement with the world that sees a multiplicity of expression and use in materiality itself.