A Conversation with Professor of Political Science Deva Woodly

March 18, 2025

A Conversation with Professor of Political Science Deva Woodly

Interviewee: Deva Woodly, Professor of Political Science

Interviewer: Toby Arment, Stone Inequality Initiative

Toby: Could you tell us a little bit about yourself and your background?

Prof. Woodly: My name is Deva Woodly, and I'm a professor of politics at Brown. I’ve just come here—I'm only in my third semester. I study social movements, and I also study public meaning and discourse. My research is right at the intersection of empirical American politics and democratic theory.

I think about the ways that social movements invigorate democracy and the reasons that they're necessary for democracies to remain democracies, because otherwise they slide into oligarchy. And I look at the ways that ordinary people think about politics, particularly when they organize together. I'm particularly interested in the phenomena of organizing as distinct from mobilizing.

When I say that, in political science, typically when we think of people acting together politically, we think of them acting as an aggregate—individuals who are all doing the same thing. That phenomenon is called mobilizing—you mobilize people to go to the polls, to vote. You could mobilize people to show up in a particular place to protest—that’s called activism. But organizing is a long-term process of subjectivity formation and capacity building. That means that through a process of organizing people not only learn about a political topic, but they learn what they want to do together about it. That learning is adaptive, it is not only task-oriented. They think about how they can become political actors who act in ways that they think need to be accomplished. That is a really powerful process in democratic politics, but it is one that has not been really well studied.

There's an emerging field for the study of organizing that I'm deeply involved in as well. And particularly in times of democratic backsliding, organizing is particularly important. The study of organizing has led me to be really interested in studying civil society and its decline. I think that has also gotten away from us as political scientists.

Toby: Could you tell us a little bit about your current project and what initiated it?

Prof. Woodly: I'm working on a new book project that's called The Politics of Futurity. That project is really meant to invite and present a particular sort of roadmap for thinking about politics after the “end of history.” So, thinking about politics in a way that really embraces the notion that the future is going to be really, really different than the past. We're not going to be returning to any golden age of any kind at any point in the 20th century. So what does that mean? Most of social science has set itself up in the late 20th century as grounds where we look at probabilities. The thing about looking at politics as a matter of probabilities is that you assume that you can control which variables will vary. But if you're in a critical juncture, you're in a moment where everything can vary. That makes probability an inadequate lens to look at things through, so you have to think about something that is a little bit more attuned to possibilities. How do you think about possibilities in a way that is both grounded and empirically centered, but also allows for a robust practical imagination? That's what the politics of futurity is about—conceiving of how we can have a grounded practical imagination about what the 21st century could be.

This is not just a kind of speculative project. It's really a project that is meant to embrace the legacy of early 20th century scholarship. We need to behave in the same way with an eye toward the notion that 2080 should be as different—and  hopefully as much better—from 1980 as 1980 was from 1880. That’s a big leap. And I think that that is really beyond the imagination of most of social science right now.

This project is about making that really squarely at the center of our thinking, particularly at a moment when anti-democratic visions of the future are ascendant. It's imperative that people who have democratic visions of the future give themselves both the permission and understand the urgency and necessity of ambitious projects for a democratic 21st century.

The empirical part of the project is that because probabilities are not adequate for us to understand the current political moment, and they're really not adequate for us to understand futurity, I think we really need to build robust, qualitative data sets. The thing about qualitative data is that it helps us to understand how people are reasoning about politics.

One of the things that's so striking about the current moment is that we have a lot of large, quantitative, survey-based data. Some of them are large datasets that run every year or every other year that we have kept for more than a half century, adding questions very judiciously. The problem with all of these data is that it can tell us what people think given a set of choices—what people are sampling from the top of their head when we ask them a certain question. But these data cannot tell us how people are reasoning about politics. They cannot tell us how people are relating the political to their lived experience, how they are making sense of things, whether they are making sense of things. Whether they feel they have the capacity and agency to do so, how they're attributing blame and responsibility, and critically for my project of futurity, what they think is probable, possible, and desirable for the future.

We don't have data about what people want the 21st century to be, because we don't ask them. So not only do we not have data about how people are understanding this particular moment, we also don't have data about the world that they want, that they desire, that could be built by all of us together going forward.

Toby: What is the final product of this project going to look like?

Prof. Woodly: It is my hope that the Qualitative Data Lab will begin with a regional set of long-form interviews with people from diverse demographics that ask them a set of semi-structured interview questions about democracy, inequality, and futurity. We will record and archive the answers in a way that can be publicly accessible—very similar to how survey data is often publicly accessible—and within ethical guidelines, thinking about anonymity and other sorts of things.

The first run that we do will be a regional survey, and, if we're fully funded, we will expand to a national level survey that would then run annually. We would then have a large sample of qualitative data that would provide a lot of information that we just don't have about how people are thinking of the present moment—how they connect their lives and their values to politics, whether they think whether they do that, or whether they're making assessments in a different kind of way. There's just a large kind of black box of a lack of information that we have in terms of how people are reasoning and what people want for their lives and their futures.

Toby: What do you hope people will take away from the Qualitative Data Lab?

Prof. Woodly: I hope that people will have a window into how their fellow citizens of this nation are thinking about who they are, who they think we are together, what they think their role is in politics, and what they want for the future.

Toby: How have inequality and concentrated wealth played into the creation of this project?

Prof. Woody: I think that we make a lot of assumptions about how people both experience and understand inequality and its significance, both in their lives and in politics. We make these assumptions on the right and the left and all the way in between. I think that, right now, they're not evidence-based. The Qualitative Data Lab is an opportunity to develop some evidence-based information about how folks experience and reason about inequality and its relationship to politics.

Toby: Is there anything else you would like to share about the project that we should know?

Prof. Woodly: I think that there's an incredible need for this kind of information because so often we're working out of assumptions that are outdated. Frankly, we cannot bring the assumptions of the late 20th century into this moment. The world has changed.

To understand how people are reasoning about that change, how people are experiencing it, and what parts of it they find fruitful and what parts of it they find excruciating, we just have to ask them. And that's something that qualitative data does that quantitative data cannot do. These data would also make quantitative data much, much more precise. It would open up a lot of opportunities to ask different kinds of questions that are rooted in the things people tell you they care about, and how people tell you their lived experience relates to democracy, inequality, and futurity.