Jennie Ikuta is an Associate Professor of Political Theory at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Her research focuses on the history of 19th and 20th century thought, with an emphasis on the role of moral psychology in politics. Born in San Diego, California and raised in Yokohama, Japan, she returned to the U.S. as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago (2007) and received her PhD in political theory at Brown University (2014). She is the author of 'Contesting Conformity: Democracy and the Paradox of Political Belonging' (Oxford UP, 2020), which employs the thought of Tocqueville, Mill, and Nietzsche to investigate the notion of non-conformity and its relationship to modern democracy. Since then, she has turned her attention to the kinds of motivations necessary for generating change in contexts of historical injustice; this is the focus of her second book project, 'White Losses.' Her articles have appeared in the Journal of Politics, Political Theory, Polity, Constellations, and Philosophy & Social Criticism. She currently serves as the Communications Director of Nomos (the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy).
Project: Can public acknowledgment of historical wrongs motivate the pursuit of racial justice? Current approaches by political theorists and proponents of public history are informed by the idea that the answer is yes. In light of the increasing salience of public history initiatives, the aims of 'White Losses: Moral Psychology and the Demands of Racial Justice' (under advance contract, Oxford UP) are two-fold. First, it develops a theory of the limits of historical acknowledgment as a response to racial injustice. Second, it directs our attention to sources besides knowledge for transforming the moral psychologies of white Americans such that they are likely to work to create—or at least, accept—a more racially just society. Combining close textual analysis of figures such as Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. Du Bois and James Baldwin with normative political theory, the book examines the deep-seated tactics of racial dominance with which advocates of racial justice must contend. More broadly, this project contributes to debates about moral psychology, the politics of disinformation, and historical memory.