ABOUT

Gauri Wagle is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of political science at Brown University. She earned her MA from Columbia University in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies and her BA from Johns Hopkins University in International Studies.

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Gauri’s research and teaching consider the dynamics of injustice and democratic repair in the United States. Specifically, Gauri focuses on political imagination in contexts of systemic inequality and how imagination might be a resource to claim freedom and justice, even as it can be dangerous.

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Gauri’s dissertation, “Imagining Together: Political Community, Domination, and Freedom,” examines the role of political imagination in shaping political communities and repairing unjust democracies. Contemporary democratic theory tends to understand political imagination in largely positive, emancipatory terms; to link it to creative, heroic action; and to neglect its deep connection to the spaces and objects that comprise the material world. By contrast, my account acknowledges the positive potential of imagination but is also alive to its dangers. Political imagination can be a site of domination and exclusion, as in the case of the American racial hierarchy. Yet because imagination holds transformative potential, is not determined by the reality of domination, and can bring people together, it can also be a resource for freedom, change, and collective action that challenges the existing power structures and makes new forms of belonging possible. Drawing on thinkers ranging from Benedict Anderson and Edward Said to James Baldwin, W.E.B. DuBois, Saidiya Hartman, and Kevin Quashie, the dissertation shows political imagination to be an important resource for people who resist domination as well as a central aspect of experiencing freedom, even in the face of domination. The dissertation also argues that political imagination has an important material dimension, meaning both that political imagination is tied to practices of political economy and that the physical spaces and objects that comprise our surrounding environment operate as anchors – though not constraints – for political imagination.

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