Be Stone

2024-2025 cohort

Be Stone (they/them) is Assistant Professor of Politics and Law at Rhodes College. Their research and teaching interests are at the intersections of American political culture, public policy development, ordinary language analysis, and critical addiction studies. Stone’s work examines the interplay between the symbolic and the material in political discourse, considering how the cultural resonances of key terms influence public policy outcomes from a feminist and critical race perspective. Their dissertation received the 2024 Stephen E. Bronner Dissertation Award from the American Political Science Association’s Caucus for Critical Political Science.

Stone uses a theoretically informed interpretive approach to study public policymaking as a contest over ideas in the context of political culture. Their book manuscript, Addiction in U.S. Political Culture, uses ordinary language analysis to examine the concept of addiction as a keyword in the U.S. political lexicon that has been largely neglected by mainstream political science. Ordinary language analysis is a Pitkinian-inspired approach that Stone adapts to investigate how and why addiction is used by political actors in unconventional policy contexts––such as to characterize America’s relationship to fossil fuels or U.S. anti-poverty policy.

They argue that political actors consistently using the term addiction in a policy debate signals that the issue at hand is arousing long-standing anxieties in American political culture regarding subjection, dependence, and unfreedom. Stone shows that pundits, advocates, and politicians deploy the term in policy debates where they want to create the appearance of hegemonic American values being threatened, and to cast their policy solutions as shoring up those values by eradicating the alleged addiction. The term heightens the symbolic stakes of these policy debates, making their outcomes not just about the material interests involved, but about neutralizing a perceived threat to the masculinized, white-racialized dominant political culture.

Stone is also developing a second monograph, titled Who Is Responsible for an Addiction Epidemic? The Concept of Culpability in the Opioid and Tobacco Settlement Cases. In this project, they investigate how public conceptions of who can be held responsible when individual addictions reach epidemic proportions has shifted over the last thirty years. Their subjects are the opioid settlement cases––a collection of recent lawsuits seeking damages from pharmaceutical companies for their role in the opioid epidemic––and the tobacco settlement cases of the 1990s, in which tobacco-makers paid billions for misleading the public about the addictiveness of nicotine and the health effects of smoking. 

In this project, Stone argues that the underlying stakes of these cases are competing conceptions of individual, collective, and mutual responsibility––potent themes in the American liberal-individualist political tradition. These cases are an underappreciated venue for examining how the public, in contemporary terms, is debating the relationship between social determinants and individual autonomy, how these popular beliefs inform political, legal, and social practices in the U.S., as well as how political entrepreneurs use responsibility-related terms to further their legal and policy agendas.

Stone earned their Ph.D. at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and has taught courses in American politics, public policy, and political theory at Baruch College and Brooklyn College, CUNY, and at Rhodes College. They can be reached at stoneb@rhodes.edu or on X at @BeStone_Phd.

Their website is tinyurl.com/bestonephd.