Alyson Cole

Alyson M. Cole is an American political scientist. She is a professor of Political Science, Women's and Gender Studies, and American Studies at Queens College, City University of New York and the CUNY Graduate Center, where she has also served as the Executive Officer of the political science program. Cole studies political philosophy and American culture, and has published works on the politics of victimhood and vulnerability in America, the politics of gender equality, and the nature of capitalism as a way of life.

Education Cole holds a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.

Research In 2007, Cole published her first book, The cult of true victimhood: from the war on welfare to the war on terror. The book builds on the study of the rhetoric of victimization in American politics, in which the notion of victim is viewed as a useful device for the political establishment to translate failures of the system into individual faults with some group of people. Early writers on this topic include the psychologist William Ryan. Disagreements about victimhood can therefore cause inter-group conflicts through processes like identity politics. She also studies the implications of these rhetorical tools to policies including civil and criminal justice reform and the extent of the welfare state. In addition to The cult of true victimhood, Cole has also written about the political use of victimhood and vulnerability in peer-reviewed journal articles.

Published and editorial works Together with George Shulman, Cole co-edited the 2019 book Michael Paul Rogin: Derangement and Liberalism. She was also a co-editor in 2019, with Estelle Ferrarese, of How Capitalism Forms Our Lives.

Cole has published on topics like victimhood and vulnerability in news publications like Salon and Fortune, and her work has been covered in outlets like the BBC and Truthout.

Selected bibliography The cult of true victimhood: from the war on welfare to the war on terror (2007) "All of Us Are Vulnerable, But Some Are More Vulnerable than Others: The Political Ambiguity of Vulnerability Studies, an Ambivalent Critique", Critical Horizons (May 2016). This article is also Chapter 7 in * The Politics of Vulnerability. (1st ed., ebook). Routledge, 2017. . Estelle Ferrarese edited the work and wrote the introduction, "Vulnerability: A concept with which to undo the world as it is?", a text that was originally published in Critical Horizons, 17:2, May 2016, pp.149-159. Other contributors to the work: Robert Castel, Veena Das, Penelope Deutscher, Sandra Laugier, and Noémi Michel. How Capitalism Forms Our Lives, co-editor with Estelle Ferrarese (2019)