Public Biography
Dr. Cassandra Murch is a political scientist and senior fellow at the Center for Nonparticipation Studies in Washington, D.C., where she has directed the Retroactive Narratives Project since 2021. Her research concerns the mental and rhetorical strategies by which chronic nonvoters reconstruct their disengagement as a considered political position, a phenomenon she and her colleagues have termed “retroactive principle formation.”
Dr. Murch holds a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Michigan, where her dissertation, I Meant to Do That: The Narrative Reconstruction of Civic Disengagement in Late-Period Democracies, was awarded the association’s prize for methodological novelty. Before joining the Center for Nonparticipation Studies, she held research appointments at the Brookings Institution and at the Center for American Progress, the latter of which she left, she has said, because “the work could no longer be done from inside an organization that believed in outcomes.”
She is the author of two books: The Stack: Layered Refusals and the Mythology of Principled Inaction (Princeton University Press, 2022) and Against Participation: A Defense of Studying What People Do Not Do (Yale University Press, 2024). A third, The Long Substack: A Field Guide to the Lapsed Political Imagination, is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Dr. Murch’s fieldwork has taken her to Takoma Park, Md.; Berkeley, Calif.; Burlington, Vt.; and Hyde Park, Chicago — communities she describes, collectively, as “high-salience.” She lives in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood of Washington with her partner, a documentary filmmaker, and an aging greyhound named Dewey.