The Senior Project

Stella Frank '19: Gramsci Prize Winner for Outstanding Senior Project from the Political Studies Program

"In Fear We Trust: Anxious Political Rhetoric & the Politics of Punishment, 1960s-80s"

Stella Frank was awarded the Gramsci Prize in 2019. This award recognizes an outstanding Senior Project written in Bard's Political Studies Program. Stella won for her project "In Fear We Trust: Anxious Political Rhetoric & the Politics of Punishment, 1960s-80s" a study of the politics of fear driving increased incarceration. Stella did original archival work at the Rockefeller Archive Center, examining a range of texts, speeches, policy documents, and private letters. She discovered that the politics of fear can be disaggregated into two forms of “emplotment”: the fear that arises when crime is plotted in a “Western,” cowboy narrative; and the fear that arises when crime is plotted in a “zero-sum” narrative of economic scarcity. Together, Stella argues that these two ways of plotting fear comprise the larger emotional context in which the punitive turn in American politics could unfold. Her project combines political theory, the history of emotions, sociological studies on crime and punishment, and her own archival work.