Rachel wahl
About
Rachel Wahl is Professor of the Social Foundations of Education at the University of Virginia, where she directs the Good Life Political Project at the Karsh Institute of Democracy. Her research and teaching focus on democracy, political disagreement, and civic life.
Wahl’s research examines one of the central challenges facing contemporary democracies: how citizens can live together amid profound disagreements about politics, morality, and social change. Drawing on ethnographic and qualitative methods, she has spent more than a decade studying political dialogue in settings ranging from college campuses and civic organizations to police-community forums and human rights initiatives. Her work explores why conversations across difference are so difficult, what people learn from them, and how they shape democratic relationships and institutions.
She is the author of Keeping Our Enemies Closer: Political Dialogue in Polarized Democracies (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2026), which draws on years of original research with college students, community members, activists, and public officials to investigate what actually happens when people engage political opponents in dialogue. Challenging both the belief that dialogue can solve polarization and the claim that dialogue is a distraction from justice, the book offers a nuanced account of the possibilities and limits of conversation in democratic societies.
Wahl is also the author of Just Violence: Torture and Human Rights in the Eyes of the Police (Stanford University Press, 2017), a study of how police officers in India understand violence, justice, and human rights. Across both books, her scholarship seeks to understand how people make moral and political judgments in contexts marked by conflict, inequality, and competing visions of the good society.
Her research has been supported by the National Academy of Education, the Spencer Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, and the Lilly Endowment through the Educating Character Initiative. She has shared her work with audiences at universities including Harvard, Columbia, Bowdoin, and The Ohio State University; with national organizations such as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Institute for Civil Discourse; and with K-12 schools, religious organizations, and community groups.
Her writing has appeared in outlets including The Conversation and CNN, and she has been interviewed by NPR, public radio, podcasts, and national media on political polarization, democratic citizenship, free speech, and higher education. At the University of Virginia, she teaches courses on political dialogue, democracy, civic education, and the purposes of education.
Through her research, teaching, and public engagement, Wahl seeks to understand how democratic citizens can sustain a shared political community without requiring consensus or abandoning deeply held convictions.