Alberto recently finished his Ph.D. in political theory with a secondary specialization in American politics. His teaching and research focus on 20th century political theory, early modern Spanish and British political thought, and the intersection between political theory and literature. His dissertation, Reality Checking Democracy: Quixotic Encounters with Political Theory, argues that democracies in the digital age face a crisis of reality. Such a crisis takes the shape of a radical skepticism over the fact of our shared lives and the meaning and value of our public realm and institutions. From public health and education to the most basic democratic procedures, such as elections, individuals and groups increasingly disavow the possibility of a shared reality by turning towards the seeming solipsism of their so-called private experiences. When one’s perspective becomes one's reality, the authority of one’s experience becomes increasingly difficult to contest, and one’s capacities to engage in discourses and practices that produce a common world deteriorate. The risk here is that—lacking processes of disagreement, contestation, negotiation, and persuasion—citizens might be forced to take a caricatured version of the democratic commitment to tolerance, whereby we must accept all perceptions because each perception is someone’s reality. The dissertation brings together two different archives: representative works of the Spanish Baroque alongside mid 20th century political theory and philosophy centered around language, phenomenology, and performativity to explore the political impasses that arise when individuals increasingly favor interiority at the expense of a public orientation to the world. Instead of withdrawing from plurality and publicity towards the familiar comforts of our intimate lives, the dissertation aims to generate critical distances from which individuals can reevaluate the habits, concepts, and affects they use when making sense, enabling the cultivation of more robust forms of democratic citizenship.
In addition to his work in the Political Science Department, Alberto was part of the leadership team for the Stone Inequality Initiative and a Collaborative Humanities Fellow at the Cogut Institute for the Humanities, both at Brown. He has been invited to present his work in Canadian and US universities such as UBC, Harvard, and Princeton. He also holds a B.A. with Honours and an M.A. from The University of British Columbia, both in Political Science.
Job Market Paper Title
A Safe Space for Whiteness? James Baldwin and the "Psychological Distress" of History
Job Market Paper Abstract
This paper analyzes the proliferation of so-called anti-critical race theory and diversity and inclusion bills that have flooded the floors of US state legislatures since the beginning of the 2020s. It argues that these bills are best approached as infrastructures of sense-making. This means that instead of seeing their language as mere nonsense or plainly untrue, we should approach it obliquely by imagining what it would be like to live under the terms dictated by such discourse. Making sense of the world by following the language of anti-CRT bills means to occupy what the paper calls a safe space for whiteness. The bills attempt to hermetically seal such safe space by narrowly circumscribing what it means to be an agent. According to the bills, agents are only responsible for their intentional actions, and they are disconnected from the histories that make them. Such an impoverished sense of agency further dictates a very limited set of terms under which one can relate to the realities of racial domination: innocence or guilt. Hence the name safe space, for its goal is to secure innocence by eradicating potential feelings of guilt and other forms of what the divisive concepts bills call “psychological distress” borne out of sharing a world with those who are systematically disenfranchised. The bills' concern with managing feelings of guilt and innocence invites us to read them alongside the work of James Baldwin. Throughout his oeuvre, Baldwin argues that racial domination in the United States is predicated on the “innocence” of white Americans. For Baldwin, their concern with innocence reflects an evasive attitude that ultimately seeks to deny the realities of racial domination and injustice. However, instead of refusing to grant the much-sought status of innocents to whites, Baldwin makes such status suspect. At the same time, Baldwin also seeks to release whites from their imagined guilt. Ultimately, the compass of guilt-innocence is inadequate to guide one’s actions in democratic politics because it expresses both an incomplete recognition of the claims of others and an unwarranted sense of one’s own importance in the world.
