Research

Publications

The Role of Imagination in Protest. Analysis (2024). Advance online publication. 

[link] [penultimate draft]

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. 

Selected works in progress

(* indicates draft available on request)

Protest as Spectacle*

I argue that protests are instances of a larger communicative kind that I call spectacle: they involve staging striking, symbolic displays to provoke specific emotional and imaginative responses in their audience. Understanding the communicative structure of protests requires us to supplement speech act theory with an analysis of how protestors use the social meanings of the objects and spaces around them. 

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 explore semantic and pragmatic answers to this question.

Public philosophy

Painful Spectacles and their Links to Creativity

for The Junkyard [link]

I discuss spectacles that evoke painful emotions and how women use them as a response to sexual violence.