Research

One way or another, most of my work attends to the particular ethical dimensions of close personal relationships while acknowledging how these are impacted by, and play a role in, sweeping systems of oppression. I've spent time thinking about how we can grapple with this when it comes to forgiving, morally improving, loving, caring, and believing one another - and how it affects our ability to act in general.

discussions of forgiveness, moral development, love, agency, and care can grapple with this. One sort of relationship that continues to interest me is the one between a testifier and her audience, so my research sometimes intersects with social epistemology.

I've organized this page in terms of what I take to be the major strands of my research program. But see my CV for a good, old-fashioned list of publications and projects.

Care and dependency

A major strand of my research concerns the nature and value of dependency relations; i.e., the sort of relationship we refer to when we say things like "I'm depending on you". Dependency, and how it relates to loving, caring, and helping relationships, was topic of my dissertation [which you can read here]. Related projects include:

"Depending on Others" [under review] defends my account of dependence itself over the received view in care ethics and philosophy of disability
"Love, Fairness, and Sharing a Life" [under review]
"Rethinking Dependence and Care" [under review]
A paper on the relationship between care and needs [currently on the back burner]

Agency and oppression

I am interested in the idea that oppressive systems disadvantage members of social groups qua agents -- not just materially and epistemically. This is an extremely common idea in feminist (and broadly anti-oppressive) theorizing, but it raises a number of philosophically and politically pressing questions: What are the mechanisms through which oppressive environments undermine agency? What can agential injustice tell us about the nature and value of agency more generally? And what are the most promising avenues for resistance? I take up these questions in the following projects:

In "The Patriarchy is Boring" [under review] I argue that aesthetically critiquing manifestations of oppression can help us recover agency in response to agency-restricting double binds.
"How does oppression twist our agency?" [under review] lays out a mechanism through which oppression affects agency.
In a paper about agential injustice and the nature of agency [under construction; abstract here], I argue that understanding the phenomenon of agential injustice sheds light on discussions of constitutivism about agency.

Testimony

An important part of how we manage and do right by our relationships concerns how we respond to one another's testimony. I'm interested in how we can understand the significance of testimony for relational harmony and growth while preserving the idea that boring old evidence is the proper currency for belief.

In "Believing on Say-So and Aretaic Epistemic Evaluation" [draft available here], I argue we can explain how believing others can transform our relationships with them by appealing to a distinctive form of epistemic evaluation.
In "Authority, Inquiry, and Gender Avowals" [on the back burner]