My research brings together markets, risk, and democratic politics. More specifically, I study financial regulation, the history of profit, and the participatory politics of social movements as three complementary aspects of the problem of risk and justice. Profits, the subject of my first book manuscript, embody the technocratic ambition to use markets as tools for social problem-solving, from just distribution to risk-management. Financial regulation, the subject of another book-length project, acts as an experimental setting for competing market models and reveals their limits and social costs. Risk-based social movements, finally, which I discuss in a recent article, provide an alternative to regulatory responses to risk by mobilizing diverse publics and offering new modes of collective decision-making. These separate projects are united by an overarching question: how has uncertainty shaped contemporary social inequalities and what should justice look like in a political economy dominated by risk?
I am an Assistant Professor of Government and Political Theory at the School of Political Sciences at Haifa University. I received my PhD from the Political Science Department at UCLA, where I specialized in political theory and in the history of economics. Before coming to Haifa I was a Polonsky Academy Fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute and a Visiting Lecturer at the Program for Philosophy, Economics, and Political Science at the Hebrew University. In past years, I held resident fellowships at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University and at the Center for the History of Political Economy at Duke University. In addition, I held a postdoctoral fellowship in Markets, Ethics, and Law at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Tel Aviv University.
Roni Hirsch 