Dakota E. Park-Ozee

My primary scholarly focus is on identity and inequality in U.S. political discourse, particularly the tensions among elite and citizen voices and interests. I am concerned with who is heard, how, and under what circumstances in a mediated and elite-driven political culture. A commitment to critically conscious social science that advances understanding and action on pressing political and policy issues drives my scholarship. Knowing the dominant narratives and how they limit discussions of what is politically possible—in terms of problem-solving and legible political identities—is the first step to challenging those narratives and rewriting how politics is discussed and lived in the U.S.

In an ongoing book project, I highlight a top versus bottom political tension that is rarely brought to the fore in a nation primarily concerned with left versus right. Booming class antagonisms of the last few years (e.g., Redditors attempting to take down a hedge fund) and the last decade (e.g., Occupy Wall Street and Senator Sanders’ presidential primary campaigns) highlight not just the role of money in politics but money in political identity. Wealth is the basis of an ongoing framing contest about who holds political power in the United States. What is said about money or wealth and those who do or do not have it can both create and disseminate frames about who and what matters in U.S. politics. Thus, I interrogate the ways elite, press, and everyday discourses frame the U.S. political hierarchy in terms of wealth and wealth-based identities.

These discursive political hierarchies exist for other identity and status groups overlapping with and beyond wealth and class. Much of my research examines elite and mediated representations of political actors from presidents to protestors and the ways their identities and unequal social standing interact with those representations. I also grapple with the same inequalities and contested identities but from the perspectives of everyday individuals.