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.
Selected public philosophy pieces
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.
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Selected works in progress
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Protest as Spectacle*
I argue for an account of the communicative structure of protest on which protestors exercise their voices through an act type that I term spectacle, i.e., an act that has a social meaning by virtue of the objects, people, and spaces that it involves.
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.