Research
Peer-reviewed publications
The Role of Imagination in Protest (2024). Analysis. Advance online publication.
Recent literature on social movements assigns a central role to the imagination. One way for activists to further their aims is through dramatic, confrontational acts of protest. I argue that transcendent imagining is key to understanding what protest does qua act of speech. A common approach to protest sees it as a speech act of condemning some feature of the socio-political world and appealing for change. While this is a helpful general template for what vocal dissent is, it is insufficient to explain what gives protests their political power. Specifically, it overlooks the fact that effective protests usually create a theatrical spectacle of norm breaking. Displays of defiance lift a constraint on how we imagine our socio-political world, and so allow us to begin reshaping it.
Public philosophy
Painful Spectacles and their Links to Creativity (2024). The Junkyard.
I discuss spectacles that evoke painful emotions and how women use them to respond to sexual violence. I draw on three examples: a 2004 protest by women in Manipur, a 2005 performance art piece by Guatemalan artist Regina José Galindo titled Perra, and a 2023 protest by Indian Olympic wrestlers.
Selected works in progress
(* indicates draft available on request; email me)
A paper on the communicative structure of protests* (under review)
I argue that protests are instances of a larger communicative kind that I call spectacle, in which speakers stage symbolic displays to provoke specific emotional and imaginative responses in their audience. Understanding the communicative structure of protests requires us to supplement speech act analyses with a framework that explains how protestors exercise their voices through the social meanings of objects and spaces.
Rough Days and Hot Topics: Explaining Unexpected Meanings
Adjectives like rough, heavy, hot, and rigid describe attributes of material objects. Why, then, can we talk about rough days, heavy conversations, hot topics, and rigid people? I consider some answers to this question.