I primarily work on the metaphysics and epistemology of oppression and related social categories from an intersectional and critical theoretical perspective.
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. The social ontology branch of my work develops a systematic account of oppression, intersectionality, race, and gender.
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
"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
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.
Intersecting What? Intersecting How? An Intersectional Social Ontology at the Structural and Experiential Levels
Draft available upon request
Abstract: While intersectionality has gained prominence, the idea that race, class, gender, ability, sexuality, and other social divisions intersect has remained relatively undertheorized. For instance, exactly what kind of phenomena should be understood intersectionally— identities, groups, oppressions, or structures? And what does it mean to say that these phenomena intersect? My paper helps address this gap by developing a social ontology that provides a concrete picture of intersectionality at the levels of individual experience and social structure. On my account, intersectionality manifests at the level of social structure through structural mechanisms that represent a “fusion” of, e.g., race and class in the form of what I call complex sub-Sorts, as well as fused institutional roles. Then, because social structures causally explain experiences of injustice, distinctive experiences emerge at the intersections of traditional categories of analysis as a product of (1) the causal effects of “fused” structural mechanisms and (2) interactions between structural mechanisms. This account highlights different ways that social categories appear in discussions of intersectionality, and offers concrete ways of understanding the idea that social categories intersect.
Visions of Gender Abolition: Against the Total Elimination of Gender
Draft available upon request
Abstract: The oppressive nature of gender has led many feminists to see gender abolition as the proper aim of gender liberation movements. When we look more closely at what different theorists take gender abolition to amount to, however, we see vastly different images— including, for instance, material redistribution, the elimination of gender hierarchies, reproductive technologies, androgynous personalities, the proliferation of gender categories, or the elimination of gender categories. While all of these visions involve a radical transformation of our social relations that brings forth a world free of gender oppression, there are vastly different visions of what exactly must be eliminated or transformed to get there. In this paper I focus on a particularly extreme version of gender abolition that involves not just material redistribution or the elimination of gender hierarchies and unjustly restrictive gender norms, but a total elimination of gender terms, categories, and identities. I consider such a total elimination view from multiple angles: (1)As a view about justice that says that a just society will have eliminated gender terms, categories, and identities (2)As a belief that someone might currently hold about what justice ultimately requires (3)As an aim that we might set for our activist movements There are, I note, significant moral arguments against (2) and (3): believing that justice requires a total elimination approach casts individuals with closely held gender identities as impediments to justice, thereby impairing how we relate to such individuals (including ourselves); and, in the context of widespread transphobia, this endangers the lives and well-being of trans people in particular. Individuals committed to gender liberation might think that these moral costs are unfortunate, but that we should ultimately believe the truth and set our aims toward justice, which means accepting the total elimination view and setting total elimination as the ultimate aim of our gender liberation movements. I argue, however, that this is far too quick Arguments in support of gender abolition more generally do not provide support for total elimination in particular, and there is good reason to think that eliminating gender oppression does not require total elimination. To show this, I argue that proposals from trans theorists and activists calling for gender self-determination, if taken seriously, plausibly point to a way of radically transforming social relations that would eliminate the oppressive aspects of gender that feminists have been concerned about, while allowing for the preservation of gender terms, categories, and identities. This, at the very least, gives us good reason to doubt the total elimination view as a view of justice. In conjunction with the pragmatic considerations, this is in turn reason not to accept the total elimination view or to set total elimination as an aim for our gender liberation movements. We can work toward a world that is free of gender oppression without casting gender terms, categories, and identities— and the people for whom these are of central importance— as impediments to justice.
Race Without Races? Overcoming the Explanatory Challenge for Social Constructionism
Draft available upon request
Abstract: Social constructionists argue that we need to appeal to race to explain our social world; anti-realists deny this. In this paper, I consider race’s explanatory role more closely and argue that we should embrace a social constructionist view of race that is not centrally committed to races. To motivate this, I consider a recent argument that uses misperception discrimination cases to show that race cannot explain racial discrimination. I show that, in fact, this argument only targets a specific, dominant social constructionist paradigm that I call the social kind model. The social kind model of race combines an ontological picture with an explanatory picture— race consists of a relatively stable and mostly discrete division of humans into social kinds called races; membership in a race explains why an individual is racially oppressed or privileged, while also determining the truth about what one “really is,” racially speaking. I develop an alternative view, the systems view, and show that it can explain misperception discrimination cases, while also addressing new explanatory challenges that consider racial injustice more holistically and intersectionally. On the systems view, race is a robust social system that differentially and systematically impacts individuals in relation to a combination of factors that shape how individuals are racially (and, more broadly, socially) positioned. The systems view offers a picture of race that is not centrally committed to races, opening new space in social constructionism that highlights the erroneous tendency to equate the question “is race real?” with “do races exist?”
Explaining Oppression: An Argument Against Individualism
Under Review
Draft available upon request
Abstract: The recent, widespread focus on implicit bias has sparked a debate about the role of bias in causal explanations of persistent, systematic injustice. “Structural prioritizers” argue that structural causes are more important than individual causes, while “equal prioritizers” insist on the equal importance of individualistic and structural factors. In this paper, I make two interventions on this debate. First, I suggest that the debate is better framed in terms of explaining oppression. This is because there are multiple phenomena that are closely related to the forms of persistent, systematic injustice at the core of this debate. Using the language of oppression helps to clearly fix the explanatory target, distinguish it from closely related phenomena, and elucidate the explanatory demands that are relevant in the context of this debate. Second, I argue that both sides are mistaken in accepting that both individualistic and structural factors are necessary for explaining oppression. Explaining oppression, I argue, requires accounting for the various ways in which oppression is persistent and systematic, and explanations that appeal to individualistic factors fail to do this. As such, I argue that we should go in for a form of pure explanatory structuralism about oppression.
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.