About Me
What I do
My name is Sarah Stein Lubrano and I am a writer, content strategist, and researcher. My writing focuses on social and political life and its relationship to psychology, and I am releasing a book with a major publisher in spring of 2025. I write and speak publicly on a variety of topics. My public-facing thinking often happens through the Sense and Solidarity Initiative, a platform I founded with Max Haiven where people who want to radically change the world can learn together and build individual and collective capacity.
I am also Head of Research for the The Future Narratives Lab, where our work focuses on narratives about social and political change. And I am Head of Content for the Ahead app. This keeps me very busy! So I only occasionally work with other clients with aligned goals.
I also serve on the Institute of Imagination’s Global Imagination Board, as well as several other advisory boards related to education and the public sphere.
For many years I was the Head of Content at The School of Life in London, where I helped create some of the earliest YouTube videos for its now-thriving channel, which boasts over five million viewers. I have done research, writing, and design for everything from films to apps to interactive workshops. You can see a bit more about my past professional work on LinkedIn. I have previously taught learning design and content strategy to people in a wide range of fields, and provided consultancy in content strategy and communications.
What I think about
I am currently waiting to defend my DPhil in Political Theory at Oxford University, studying the relationship between emotion and politics in democracies. My research specifically focuses on the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance and the role it plays in poor political reasoning, democratic life and political discourse. I look at how the mind processes contradictions, how our psychological resistance to contradiction may impede collective political reasoning, and how critical theorists can build on this body of psychological research to further their theoretical insights.
I have also published about best teaching practices in legal education, and am working on a public history project on "polyam-ish" relationships with Bri Watson. You can see our work profiled in Forbes!
I have a bachelor’s degree from Harvard College and an MPhil in Political Thought and Intellectual History from Cambridge University. In earlier lives, I made films, and worked as a prison tutor, student welfare officer, and obituary writer.