My work lies at the intersection of social and political philosophy, feminist philosophy, philosophy of language and mind, and social epistemology. One of my central interests is understanding the oppositional communicative structure that characterizes protests and related forms of symbolic speech. My dissertation works towards this goal by identifying a new and distinctive communicative act type — Spectacular Communication — with symbolic, affective, and imaginative hallmarks. I am also interested in the ethics, politics, and epistemology of resistance and oppression, as well as linguistic phenomena like polysemy and metaphor, and what these phenomena can tell us about our social and cognitive structures.
Peer-reviewed publications
The Role of Imagination in Protest (2025). Analysis 85 (1): 38-47. (Online first: 2024).
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
(* indicates draft available; email me)
Protest as Spectacle* [under review]
I argue for an account of the communicative structure of protest on which protestors exercise their voices through spectacles, i.e., acts that have social meanings by virtue of the objects, people, and spaces that they involve.
Spectacular Communication* [under review]
I introduce a communicative act type that I call spectacular communication. I identify two conditions on this act type. First, spectacular communication involves intentionally staging a spectacle. Second, speakers of an act of spectacular communication reflexively intend for their audience to have two responses to the spectacle that they stage: an imaginative escape from some aspect of the social world, and an affective jolt.
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.
The Epistemic Value of Civil Disobedience
I argue that members of a political state have epistemic limitations when it comes to identifying whether the state is just, and that acts of civil disobedience can help them to overcome these limitations to better understand what justice requires. Under certain conditions, I argue, punishing an act of civil disobedience takes away from its important epistemic value.