Research

My work lies at the intersection of social and political philosophy, feminist philosophy, and philosophy of language and mind. One of my central interests is understanding the oppositional communicative structure that characterizes protests and related forms of symbolic speech. My dissertation identifies a new and distinctive communicative act type — Spectacular Communication  — with symbolic, affective, and imaginative hallmarks. 

Using the framework that I develop in my dissertation, I am now writing a set of papers on communicative acts in contexts of resistance and oppression. I am also interested in 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. 

[link] [penultimate draft]

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.

[link]

Selected works in progress

(* indicates draft available; email me)

A paper on the communicative structure of protest* [R&R]

I argue that in addition to analysing the constituent speech acts in protest, it is important to also pay attention to the distinctive methodology that most protests use. Marching through a street, for example, is a radically different act from criticizing the government in a public letter. We must look to resources beyond speech act theory in understanding this feature of protest, to an account of how protestors speak through spectacle. I argue that paying attention to spectacular communication in protests will improve our understanding of their democratic value.

A paper on communicating with spectacles*

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.

Imagining in the Service of Oppression*

We usually think of oppressive social forces as restricting imagination and creativity. This approach allows us to understand the imaginative battles that activists and reformers need to fight to resist the status quo. It is less frequently acknowledged, however, that oppressive social forces also require acts of imagination and creativity for their maintenance. I study the imaginative mechanisms through which oppression sustains itself.

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. When the object of a civilly disobedient protest is an enforcement agency, punishing protestors takes away from its important epistemic value.