About
Jen Triplett is a qualitative comparative-historical sociologist working in the subfields of political sociology, sociology of culture, gender, collective behavior and social movements, and (increasingly) international migration. She investigates how top-down political projects that link together, or "articulate," disparate social groups into a unifying political identity are facilitated or constrained by the cultural dynamics of boundary-making, identity work, and subject formtaion that such projects entail.
Jen's dissertation examines how cultural constraints on projects of political articulation change over time and are refracted through key events, such as military, political, or economic crises. This event-driven approach illuminates how struggles to survive moments of crisis condition leaders' attempts to promote solidarity and shape new subjects. In analyzing roughly 30,000 pages of transcribed political speeches and print media from Cuba (1959-1971), she finds that critical events do not delay or impede articulatory projects as we might expect. Rather, leaders intensify these efforts during moments of crisis and tailor them to the specific features of the events. These findings suggest that projects of political articulation are a tool for navigating crises and therefore play an important role in regime consolidation more broadly. This project thus has important implications for understanding contemporary identity-based inequalities in socialist and post-socialist societies as well as the challenges to achieving equitable political and economic participation across such settings.
