Political Science Faculty and Staff
Chad Lavin
Assistant Professor
Ph.D., Penn State University, 2003
Ph.D., Penn State University, 2003
His teaching and research interests include modern and contemporary democratic theory, American political thought, political responsibility, food politics, Marxism, and political communication. Most broadly, his work focuses on how technologies of work, wealth, leisure, and communication shape self-understandings and, thus, the possibility and desirability of political action. He is particularly interested in public anxieties that arise from a sense of political powerlessness in an age of corporate control, a loss of privacy in an age of digital surveillance, and desire for individual authenticity in an age of ubiquitous marketing.
His first book, The Politics of Responsibility (University of Illinois Press, 2008), explores the history of the indispensable but deeply troubling concept of responsibility in political thought of the past two centuries. Through studies of the work of Karl Marx and Judith Butler, the book makes a case for what he calls a ?postliberal? theory of responsibility that roots responsibility not in the familiar territory of individual will and causal blame, but instead in a persistent ability to respond.
Dr. Lavin is currently at work on a number of related projects. One, a book tentatively titled Eating Anxiety: The Political Economy of Digestion and the Decline of Liberal Sovereignty, looks at food anxieties as symptoms of broader political anxieties. The book shows how current debates surrounding vegetarianism, genetically modified organisms, weight gain, food safety, and factory farming consolidate and displace myriad threats the global economy poses to individual and national sovereignty. He is also studying the concept of crisis, and how abstract understandings of crisis mediate the experience and production of concrete life-or-death crises like the flooding of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Dr. Lavin is also studying current fascination in both popular culture and the social sciences with the tools and tropes of epidemiology, exploring the political implications that arise from characterizing non-contagious conditions like obesity and social trends like crime waves as epidemics.
His work has appeared in Polity, Rethinking Marxism, Social Theory & Practice, Space and Culture, and New Political Science.