Political Science

Deva Woodly is a Professor at Brown University. She is the author of Reckoning: Black Lives Matter and the Democratic Necessity of Social Movements (Oxford 2021) and The Politics of Common Sense: How Social Movements Use Public Discourse to Change Politics and Win Acceptance (Oxford 2015). She has held fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton as well as the Edmund J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard. Her research covers a variety of topics, from media and communication to political understandings of economics, to race and imagination, and social movements. In each case, she focuses on the impacts of public discourse on the political meanings of social and economic issues as well as how those common understandings change democratic practice and public policy. Her work centers the perspective of ordinary citizens and political challengers with an eye toward how the demos impacts political action and shapes political possibilities.