Polina Whitehouse is a first-year DPhil student in political theory. Supervised by David Leopold, she is working on a thesis that defends the holistic and systematic dimensions of utopia, understood as a method for political theory, and interprets prison and family abolition as constructive utopian projects rather than merely negative objectives. She completed her MPhil thesis on a closely related topic, approached through engagement with the work of Theodor Adorno, Alexander Bogdanov, and Angela Davis. Previously, she received her bachelor's degree in Social Studies at Harvard University, where she wrote her undergraduate thesis on restorative justice as a participatory democratic practice.
Research Areas and Interests
Utopian political thought and utopia as method
Totality and negativism in critical theory
Ideal and non-ideal theory
Criminal justice, restorative justice, and prison abolition
Marx and Marxism
Feminism
Democracy
