Graduate Associate, 2008- | Department of Political Science

Doctoral Student, Department of Political Science, University of Toronto.

Tobold Rollo’s current research seeks to understand citizens as moving bodies as well as embodied voices, interests, and identities. His work brings recent literature on embodied social cognition and non-verbal communication to bear on democratic theory, particularly to the problem of conceptualizing citizen self-rule and the roots of political legitimacy.

Tobold argues that understanding democratic citizenship requires an account of the meanings that inhere to bodily practices on both the enactive and symbolic registers. Conventional political ontologies premised on purely symbolic representational models of meaning (semiotics and signification) neglect the range of ‘silent’ bodily interactions among citizens by which they negotiate conflict in the course of everyday life, establish norms, and sustain bonds of political trust, recognition, and compromise. The traditional theoretical and institutional focus on language (ie, on conversation, dialogue, embodied discourse, deliberation, speech acts, narrative and testimony) has concealed the non-significatory modes of interaction that enable and constrain democratic life. Likewise in the past three decades theorists have posited the body as a more or less passive ‘medium’ or ‘location’ of power and resistance (ie, in comportment, habit, habitus, practices, care of the self, etc) neglecting how the flesh is itself a generative and originary source of political meaning.

Tobold deploys an interdisciplinary and comparative approach to political theory, drawing on recent work in phenomenology, developmental psychology, feminism and philosophy of mind, as well as East Asian and Indigenous perspectives, to explore the ‘intercorporeal’ roots of democracy. His related investigation into the undisclosed affective and perceptual dimensions of intersubjectivity underlying contemporary theories of recognition has been published as a book entitled Embodied Recognition: Toward a Phenomenology of Political Affirmation.

Tobold Rollo received his BA in Political Science from the University of British Columbia and his MA in Political Science from the University of Victoria, where he was nominated for the Governor General’s Academic Gold Medal. His research is currently supported by a SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship.

Email: tobold.rollo@utoronto.ca