my research

[As of spring 2024]

I’m currently spending a lot of my time thinking about: the concept of judgment, Martin Luther King’s ideas of equality, what political theory really is, what scholarly creativity really is, and the relationship between equality and domination.

In general, my research in political theory is focused on the meaning, development, and implications of political concepts. I’m interested in concepts in the context of American political culture and history, and I primarily study them using archival research and interpretive close reading. I find myself particularly drawn to texts in the tradition of Black political thought, capaciously understood. I’ve also spent a fair bit of time working with — and critically thinking about — emerging computational text analysis methods that have the potential to augment the creative process of political theorizing.

work in progress

“On Political Theory and Large Language Models” (Forthcoming at Political Theory; OnlineFirst Open Access copy available here)

Abstract: Political theory as a discipline has long been skeptical of computational methods. In this paper, I argue that it is time for theory to make a perspectival shift on these methods. Specifically, we should consider integrating recently developed generative large language models like GPT-4 as tools to support our creative work as theorists. Ultimately, I suggest that political theorists should embrace this technology as a method of supporting our capacity for creativity – but that we should do so in a way that is mindful of the content and value of theorizing, the technical constraints of the models, and the ethical questions that the technology raises.

Note: I am currently thinking about and trying to build a generative model trained on a large collection of political theory texts. If you are interested in talking more about this project, please feel free to send me an email!

“Political Judgment” (research and writing underway; email me for a (very) short version which I prepared as a 2024 talk at Northwestern University’s Cognitive Science Program)

“In Pursuit of Scholarly Creativity” (with Anne Marie Vaudo; research and writing underway)

“Alienation and Political Action, Revisited” (under review; draft paper prepared for the 2023 Social Philosophy Workshop at the Safra Center for Ethics)

Abstract: Alienation is typically invoked as a pathology: a disease that individuals and societies can develop, which the theorist seeks to explain and to cure. In this paper, I challenge this conception of alienation, and its relationship to politics, agency, and action, through a close reading of the fiction of Harlem Renaissance thinker Nella Larsen. Larsen's phenomenological account offers two interventions in the standard account of alienation. First, it offers a framework of non-sovereign political action which makes a radical claim: politics is not the way we get free from alienation but, in fact, the product of alienation's very inevitability. Our efforts to overcome alienation may inevitably fail but they pull us out into the world and drive our worldly political projects. Second, it makes a methodological case for theorizing affect from the ground up, “staying with the trouble” of our feelings of alienation rather than seeking grand theory which pathologizes and diagnoses.

Book Project: The Idea of Equality in America (Dissertation chair: Jack Turner)

Revision from the dissertation is underway! Please feel free to email me for a copy of the draft introduction.

Free-standing chapter from the manuscript: “The Inegalitarian Equality of the Declaration of Independence”

Abstract: The idea of equality in America tends to be understood as a straight-forwardly democratic aspiration enshrined in a set of broadly shared principles. That is to say, the concept of equality is often read normatively rather than descriptively. This is particularly true of the famous invocation of equality in the opening lines of the American Declaration of Independence. In this paper, I make two claims: first, I argue that there is a good reason for reading the Declaration descriptively rather than normatively. Second, I argue that the descriptive meaning – what the authors were plausibly describing at the time they used the word equality in the text – is very different from the normative or aspirational meaning which is almost universally ascribed to the text today. In short, I offer a new conceptual history of equality in the founding period, and in so doing I point toward a new method for more broadly and holistically studying the changing meaning of concepts like equality in the American context.

peer reviewed publications

Moore, Chelsea and Emma Rodman. 2022. “'It Would 'Mean Little' Absent Governmental Recognition': Theorizing State Power and the New Jurisprudence of Dignity.” Law, Culture, and the Humanities. 18(3): 698-715. https://doi.org/10.1177/1743872118822725. (Paper)

Abstract: Dignity is increasingly central to the justificatory logic of US Supreme Court decisions. Yet the perils inherent in this jurisprudence of dignity, which we argue frames the right to dignity as a right to recognition, have been overlooked. Understanding dignity as synonymous with recognition clarifies its effects: dignity dethrones the autonomous, rights-bearing individual, instead figuring individuals as intersubjectively vulnerable and dependent upon institutional recognition. Dignity also casts state action as innocent, elides structural harms, and exacerbates injuries of marginalization. Applying our theoretical frame to Obergefell v. Hodges, we argue that the effects of the emerging jurisprudence of dignity are troubling.

Rodman, Emma. 2021. “'Not Equals But Men': Du Bois on Social Equality and Self-Conscious Manhood.” American Political Thought. 10 (3): 450-480. doi: 10.1086/715113. (Paper)

Abstract: While recent scholarship has argued for the utility of W. E. B. Du Bois’s thought for democratic theory, his career-long emphasis on the problem of social equality – and the solution of self- conscious manhood – has gone largely unnoticed. In this paper, I argue that while Du Bois’s emphasis on social equality powerfully situates racial oppression as a social and epistemic problem, his solution of self-conscious manhood paradoxically reproduces the very conditions of social inequality he seeks to combat. Open to people of all races, genders, and classes, the path of self-conscious manhood consists in radical truth-telling, a free anarchy of the spirit, a will to strive and act, and the purity of isolation. However, through a close reading of Du Bois’s works of biography, editorial, and fiction, I show that self-conscious manhood centers an exclusionary, atomized, and individualized ethic of self-creation rather than producing a democratic political and social order.

Rodman, Emma. 2020. “A Timely Intervention: Tracking the Changing Meanings of Political Concepts with Word Vectors.” Political Analysis. 28 (1): 87-111. Replication code | Paper

Abstract: Word vectorization is an emerging text-as-data method that shows great promise for automating the analysis of semantics – here, the cultural meanings of words – in large volumes of text. Yet successes with this method have largely been confined to massive corpora where the meanings of words are presumed to be fixed. In political science applications, however, many corpora are comparatively small and many interesting questions hinge on the recognition that meaning changes over time. Together, these two facts raise vexing methodological challenges. Can word vectors trace the changing cultural meanings of words in typical small corpora use cases? I test four time-sensitive implementations of word vectors (word2vec) against a gold standard developed from a modest dataset of 161 years of newspaper coverage. I find that one implementation method clearly outperforms the others in matching human assessments of how public dialogues around equality in America have changed over time. In addition, I suggest best practices for using word2vec to study small corpora for time series questions, including bootstrap resampling of documents and pre-training of vectors. I close by showing that word2vec allows granular analysis of the changing meaning of words, an advance over other common text-as-data methods for semantic research questions.

Lesnikowski, Alexandra, Ella Belfer, Emma Rodman, Julie Smith, James Ford, John Wilkerson, Robbert Biesbroek, and Lea Berrang Ford. 2019. “Frontiers in Data Analytics for Adaptation Research: Topic Modeling.” WIREs: Climate Change. 10 (3). https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.576

Abstract: Rapid growth over the past two decades in digitized textual information represents untapped potential for methodological innovations in the adaptation governance literature that draw on machine learning approaches already being applied in other areas of computational social sciences. This Focus Article explores the potential for text mining techniques, specifically topic modeling, to leverage this data for large-scale analysis of the content of adaptation policy documents. We provide an overview of the assumptions and procedures that underlie the use of topic modeling, and discuss key areas in the adaptation governance literature where topic modeling could provide valuable insights. We demonstrate the diversity of potential applications for topic modeling with two examples that examine: (a) how adaptation is being talked about by political leaders in United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change; and (b) how adaptation is being discussed by decision-makers and public administrators in Canadian municipalities using documents collected from 25 city council archives.