I primarily work on the metaphysics and epistemology of oppression, and related social categories, from an intersectional and critical theoretical perspective.
The social ontology branch of my work develops a systematic account of oppression, intersectionality, race, and gender. The social epistemology branch of my work explores the ways that oppressive social structures shape our information, reasoning, and attention, especially in ways that reinforce oppression.
You can find a more detailed overview of my work, including links to papers, below. Drafts not linked to here may be available upon request.
Research
Journal Articles
Responsibility for White Ignorance: A Multi-Dimensional Framework for Inquiry
Forthcoming in Responsibility for Extreme Beliefs (ed. Rik Peels, Chris Ranalli, and Naomi Kloosterboer), OUP
Abstract: This chapter is intended to serve as a guide for inquiry when responsibility is assessed in cases of white ignorance. It develops a four-dimensional framework that maps out the normative terrain of white ignorance. The first dimension encompasses the kinds of normative standards one uses; identifying moral and epistemic failures is of particular interest. The second dimension identifies different objects of assessment, including the agent, the agent’s ignorance, the downstream implications of the ignorance, and the social structures involved. By considering whether each object of assessment satisfies the relevant moral and epistemic standards, the author identifies the normative failings. The third dimension encompasses the bearers of responsibility for those failures, whereas the fourth dimension considers the kinds of responsibility they bear. The chapter develops and explains this framework in detail and shows how it can be used to think through some core cases of white ignorance.
Visions of Gender Abolition: Against the Total Elimination of Gender
Forthcoming in Oxford Intersections: Gender Justice
Pre-print available here.
While the oppressive nature of gender has led many feminists to see abolition as the proper aim of gender liberation movements, when we look more closely at what different theorists mean by this, we see vastly different visions. This article argues that we should reject a radical form of gender abolitionism that seeks a total elimination of gender— including, in particular, gender terms, categories, and identities. It does so by sketching an alternative approach to gender abolition that reconstitutes gender along the lines of self-determination and showing that this alternative lacks the oppressive features that have largely motivated gender abolitionism. While the reconstitutive approach eliminates gender norms and roles, it does not eliminate gender traits, categories, or terms altogether. Instead, it radically transforms them by leaving them open to individual interpretation. The reconstitutive alternative shows that justice plausibly does not require the total elimination of gender. Thus, since accepting the total elimination view comes with significant moral risks, the article concludes that we should not aim for the total elimination of gender.
Explaining Oppression: An Argument Against Individualism
Online-First in Journal of Social Philosophy
Pre-print available here.
The recent, widespread focus on implicit bias has sparked a debate about how we should explain persistent, systematic injustice. Virtually everyone in the debate has agreed that we need to appeal to a mix of individual and structural factors, and the debate has focused on whether or not structural factors are more important than individual factors. In this paper, I argue, against both sides of the debate, that we should take a purely structural approach. First, I suggest that the debate is best framed in terms of explaining oppression. This helps to clearly fix the explanatory target, and elucidates the relevant explanatory demands. In particular, explaining oppression requires explaining persistent patterns of injustice. Second, drawing on the principle that causes should be proportional to their effects, I argue that explanations that appeal to individualistic factors are insufficiently robust to explain persistent patterns of injustice, instead rendering them as apparent coincidences. Third, I propose a positive view on which individual attitudes help explain lower-level phenomena that help constitute oppression, but oppression itself is explained by higher-level, structural phenomena that individuals help constitute and shape. In particular, I suggest that where the literature has traditionally appealed to individuals, we should instead appeal to internalized structural factors, or ideology. Oppression is then explained by a mix of factors— but a mix of different kinds of high-level, structural factors, rather than a mix of individual and structural factors.
"How could you be so oblivious?": Positive epistemic duties and oppressive ignorance
Published in Philosophical Studies (open-access)
Abstract: You’re on the train home after a long day. You exit at your station, still thinking about work. A few minutes later, you stop; something is off. It takes you a moment to realize that you missed a turn and obliviously walked several blocks in the wrong direction. This paper does three things. First, I identify and provide an account of a familiar phenomenon that I term obliviousness. On this account, obliviousness occurs when an agent non-deliberately fails to take a rational route to some belief p that is immediately available to them at t that they ought to have taken. I propose that an agent ought to take such a rational route to belief when this is directly relevant to pursuing an aim that S is or should be actively pursuing at t. Second, I argue that, despite the reference to aims in the account, obliviousness centrally involves an epistemic failure, thereby indicating that we have positive epistemic duties. As part of making this case, I sketch a non-ideal picture of epistemic normativity on which, in light of our human limitations, practical (including moral) factors help determine the scope of our epistemic duties—without thereby instrumentalizing epistemic rationality. Third, I show that obliviousness can function as oppressive ignorance. I highlight how social conditions shape key cognitive dispositions such as to cultivate patterns of ignorance in ways that often escape our deliberate control and awareness. This suggests that we have epistemic as well as moral reasons to ameliorate unjust social conditions.
Rejecting the Group-Based View of Oppression
Published in Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy: Volume 11
Pre-print available here
Abstract: The standard view of oppression is that it is group-based. Groups are standardly taken to be the primary subjects of oppression, and it is thought that individuals are only oppressed by virtue of their membership in an oppressed group. While this view is so standard as to frequently be taken to be definitional of oppression, not much has been said to actually elaborate or defend it. In this paper I consider the group-based view in more detail and argue that we should reject it. My argument is on two main grounds: that the group-based view presents an additive and falsely universalizing picture of oppression, and thereby fails to accommodate important intersectional insights; and that appealing to membership in certain groups does not explain oppressive treatment. I suggest that we should instead opt for a positional view of oppression and give greater attention to the ways in which an individual’s holistic, complex social positioning interfaces with institutional and ideological mechanisms to generate experiences of oppression and privilege.
Intersectionality without Fragmentation
Pre-print available here
You can find an overview of the paper on the New Work in Philosophy substack here.
You can also find a discussion of the paper on the PEA Soup blog here.
Abstract: Feminist philosophers have long worried that intersectionality undermines the viability of the concept and category of woman, thereby undermining feminist theory and politics. Some have responded to this problem by abandoning intersectionality; others have attempted to find some suitably inclusive way of reconceptualizing woman. I provide a novel solution that focuses on conceptualizing oppression in light of intersectionality, rather than trying to provide an account of what it is to be a woman. By enabling us to understand feminism as responding to gender oppression, this account shows that intersectionality does not conceptually undermine and fragment feminism. Feminism should be intersectional.
Abstract: Rick has never witnessed excessive policing; Rebecca has never heard of redlining; Dr. Kritz lacks information about whether the drug tamoxifen will harm her Afro-Latina patient. Each of these characters lacks knowledge about some important matter relating to race or racial inequality. They are each, we might say, white ignorant. But what is white ignorance? In this paper, I identify a theoretical and political role for ‘white ignorance’, present three alternative accounts of white ignorance, and assess how well each fulfils this role. On the Willful Ignorance View, white ignorance refers to white individuals’ willful ignorance about racial injustice. On the Cognitivist View, white ignorance refers to ignorance resulting from social practices that distribute faulty cognitive resources. On the Structuralist View, white ignorance refers to ignorance that (1) results as part of a social process that systematically gives rise to racial injustice, and (2) is an active player in the process. I argue that, because of its greater power and flexibility, the Structuralist View better explains the patterns of ignorance that we observe, better illuminates the connection to white racial domination, and is overall better suited to the project of ameliorating racial injustice. As such, the Structuralist View should be preferred.
In Preparation
Mutual Constitution and Social Categories: An Account of Intersectionality at the Structural Level
Under Review
Abstract: This paper develops a new account of mutual constitution in intersectionality theory. While intersectionality theorists generally agree that race, class, gender, and other social categories are mutually constituting, persistent disagreement remains over how this claim should be understood. Critics have argued that mutual constitution either entails a contradiction—requiring categories to be both separable and inseparable—or threatens to dissolve social categories altogether. I argue that these worries arise from widespread assumptions about social categories that we need not be committed to, as well as a failure to distinguish metaphysical categories (real categories that exist in the world) from analytical categories (conceptual tools used to describe reality). To address these concerns, my account understands the mutual constitution claim as positing the existence of fused categories of differentiation. These are metaphysical categories produced by structural mechanisms that differentiate individuals along, e.g., the lines of race-and-gender, in contradiction to a traditional analytic picture that takes race, class, gender, etc. to be independent axes of social differentiation. Because these categories cannot be adequately captured within a traditional social ontology, describing them requires “fusing” traditional analytical categories. This framework clarifies the sense in which social categories are mutually constituting while avoiding contradiction or undermining the reality of social categories.
Against the Kind Model of Race: Race as a System of Roles, Statuses, and Positions
Under Review
Abstract: This paper critically examines what I call the social kind model of race (SKM), and defends an alternative, the Roles-Statuses-and-Positions (RSP) view. On the SKM, race has a particular structure and theoretical function: race takes the form of a set of stable and discrete social kinds (races) that support explanations and predictions about systematic injustice. In contrast, on the RSP view, race takes the form of a system of roles, statuses, and racialized social positions. One’s position determines one’s likelihood of occupying different racial roles; one’s racial status designates the roles one “ought” to occupy. I use cases of racial passing and intersectional racial injustice to argue that the RSP view better fulfills the explanatory purposes that many social constructionists invoke to defend the reality of race. Social constructionists should thus favor the RSP view over the dominant SKM. More broadly, the RSP view opens up under-explored space in the metaphysics of race by raising questions about the form that race takes. In particular, if races are understood as social kinds that play the roles proposed by the SKM, then the RSP view highlights the possibility of adopting a realist, non-eliminativist stance about race while denying the existence of races.
Abstract: Intersectionality theorists have challenged traditional forms of identity politics by arguing that they often rely on universalizing essentialism: the assumption that there is a universal experience of oppression that members of a racial group share. Universalizing essentialism obscures important intragroup differences and marginalizes those situated at the intersections of multiple forms of oppression. In response, theorists such as Kimberlé Crenshaw propose reconceptualizing identity groups as heterogeneous coalitions. Yet this coalitional approach raises an important question: if there is no common experience of oppression, what grounds political cohesion and motivates collective organizing? This paper develops a metaphysical account of coalitional racial identity that addresses this challenge. Building on a distinction between objective and subjective identity, I argue that traditional approaches to objective racial identity encourage universalizing essentialism, and that objective racial identity is instead best understood through a Roles-Statuses-and-Positions (RSP) framework. On the RSP model, individuals with a shared racial status have distinctive but overlapping experiences of oppression. This heterogeneous commonality provides a non-arbitrary basis for coalition building, while collective acts of identification and political solidarity transform potential coalitions into actual subjective, coalitional identities.
How is Oppression Structural? Let Me Count the Ways
In preparation
Abstract: The idea that oppression is a structural phenomenon is now widely accepted. It has become common to hear references to structural injustice and structural inequality, and to hear claims that racism, sexism, classism, and other such "-ism"s are structural. But what exactly does the claim that oppression is structural amount to? In this paper I distinguish between four main senses in which oppression can and has been thought to be structural, and suggest that each captures an important dimension of the nature of oppression. Identifying these distinct senses of structuralism allows us to clarify claims and arguments surrounding the structural nature of oppression, and also enables a better understanding of the phenomenon. In particular, I identify four main kinds of structuralism about oppression: (1) causal structuralism, which concerns the causal explanation oppression; (2) normative source structuralism, which is about where we locate the source of the harm or injustice done by oppression; (3) effects structuralism, which concerns structures that are brought about by oppressive processes; and (4) constitutive structuralism, which is about the conditions that make something oppressive, or make it such that some group counts as oppressed.