Episode
Nick Dorzweiler, Wheaton College - Understanding the Relationship Between Politics and Anxiety
- Podcast
- The Academic Minute
- Published
- Jun 29, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 150
- Processing state
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Summary
How do we best understand the relationship between politics and anxiety? Nick Dorzweiler , professor of the practice of political science and women’s and gender studies at Wheaton College , delves into this. Faculty Bio: Nick Dorzweiler joined Wheaton College in 2015, after completing doctoral work at Northwestern University. His research is guided by an overarching interest in the history of the social sciences and its impacts on political life beyond the academy. Nick has published on topics including the politics of popular culture, the history or the social sciences, democratic theory, feminist pedagogy, and the development of Critical Theory in the American academy in outlets such as Perspectives on Politics, Contemporary Political Theory, Polity, Constellations, New Political Science, and The History of the Human Sciences.Nick is a passionate teacher, and has developed courses at Wheaton that span the fields of international relations, political theory, and women’s and gender studies. In each of his classes, Nick seeks to uncover the history of our present in order to encourage his students to think deeply about who we are, how we got here, and where we can go – both as individuals and as members of larger political communities. Transcript: We live, we’re told, in an age of exceptional anxiety – a “polycrisis” of political polarization, economic uncertainty, environmental collapse, and rapid technological change. But this isn’t the first time Americans have felt this way. In the late 1930s, the US faced a similarly overwhelming slate of challenges, from the Great Depression to the rising specter of world war to dizzying technological innovation. My research unearths a provocative but forgotten effort to manage Americans’ collective anxieties during this period of…