Daphne Fietz

Daphne Fietz is a Ph.D. student at the Department of Sociology and a Graduate Fellow of the European Studies Council at Yale. Before joining Yale, Daphne studied in Germany, South Africa and the UK, where she completed a M.Sc. Culture and Society at the LSE (distinction in all subjects). Her award-winning M.Sc. dissertation Ordinary Liberals versus Brexit Britain: The Re-Creation of Liberal Order via Moral and Ethical Operations examined liberal meaning-making in a moment of crisis. 

Her current research continues to focus on the other side of right-wing mobilization in Western democracies: How have citizens sustained and rearticulated social-democratic commitments and practices from Post-War Germany to the present day? Using contemporary climate activism as a lens, she asks how the crisis articulation of the younger generation differs from that of earlier generations formed by the experiences of World War II and particularly the social movements of the late 1960s to 1980s? Does young people’s closeness to the current crisis lead to new responses and what facilitates and hinders this process?

Daphne hopes to find new vocabularies beyond the eroding frames of neoliberalism and late modernity to better illuminate the present moment and facilitate reflexive responses to its challenges. Her work has appeared in The American Sociologist and the LSE Brexit Blog.