Deva Woodly 

Deva Woodly is professor of political science at Brown University and a Charles F. Kettering Foundation research fellow. She is the author of the award-winning book Reckoning: Black Lives Matter and the Democratic Necessity of Social Movements (Oxford University Press 2021) and The Politics of Common Sense: How Social Movements Use Public Discourse to Change Politics and Win Acceptance (Oxford University Press 2015). Woodly has held fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study, located in Princeton, New Jersey, as well as the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard. Her research spans a variety of topics, including social movements, race and imagination, media and communication, and political understandings of economics. Her newest work is on the politics of futurity and what it means to take the concept of political world-building seriously in the 21st century. Regardless of topic, she focuses on the impacts of “common sense” on the political meanings of social and economic issues as well as how common understandings change democratic practice and public policy. 

Follow Woodly on Bluesky