“Living in a house not built for you is difficult to do.”
At its core, my research agenda is motivated by questions about freedom: what does it mean to be free, and how do individuals resist conditions of oppression? My work examines the psychological dynamics of resistance across regime types, historical contexts, and intellectual traditions. By tracing how individuals navigate the inner demands of conscience, dissimulation, and resistance, I argue that freedom cannot be understood solely in institutional or structural terms. Rather, our understanding of freedom must also account for the psychological dimensions of political life and the way that resistance shapes how citizens think, speak, and act in their pursuit of a more just world.
Within this broader research agenda, I focus on a more specific question: how do individuals resist oppression when doing so openly carries such significant risk? Many scholars think of political resistance as big, bold acts of political defiance, but my work shows that resistance can also be more subtle and nuanced, especially under conditions of political precarity. I examine the political and psychological implications of these practices of equivocation – ambiguity, dissimulation, modulation, and omission – that allow individuals to pursue political change while avoiding (or at least attempting to avoid) violence. I investigate how influential figures across intellectual traditions and historical contexts weigh whether these strategies advance or undermine political freedom, revealing both their emancipatory potential alongside their risks and limits.