Miranda Lace

Miranda Lace is a PhD candidate in political theory whose research surrounds political agency, power, and emotion, attending primarily to questions related to the human experience of pain. Her dissertation project, prospectively titled “Painful Politics” argues for a reevaluation of the limits of political imagination rooted in a reckoning with the human tendency to conflate the desires to be free from the experience of pain with the desire to have others acknowledge their pain and the unique problems this creates for political action. Relying on the work of a variety of thinkers including, foremost Simone Weil, St. Augustine, and Immanuel Kant the project offers a critique of secular interpretations of theodicies which separate belief and practice in the political realm.