RESEARCH STATEMENT

I research the ethics of conversation. While I am the first to name this area of study, other theorists within feminist philosophy, critical race, and philosophy of disability have paved the way for thinking about the negative and positive impacts of how we talk to and about each other. Conversation shapes our autonomous capacities, and our conversational duties include both avoiding coercion and providing support. Beyond platitudes like “be polite,” I argue that we should disrupt a conversational status quo that privileges the voices and perspectives of the powerful by silencing those of the oppressed.

In my published work, I explore the spectrum of conversational aggression—focusing on the most covert type of aggression, microaggressions. In “Theorizing a Spectrum of Aggression: Microaggressions, Creepiness, and Sexual Assault” (2019), I connect gender microaggressions like “Smile, beautiful” to Bonnie Mann’s theory of creepiness. Like the creeper, the microaggressor may not intend to subordinate their target, but they nevertheless make use of the same dominating narratives that are employed by sexual harassers and rapists. I pursue a similar project in “Escalating Linguistic Violence: From Microaggressions to Hate Speech” (2020), where I specify the similarities and differences between racial microaggressions and racist hate speech by building upon the work of legal critical race theorists  Richard Delgado and Mari Matsuda. I argue that these earlier discussions of hate speech can guide microaggression researchers as we answer the skeptical challenges: what’s aggressive—and what’s micro—about microaggression? Finally in my Philosophy Compass article co-authored with Regina Rini, “Microaggression: Conceptual and Scientific Issues” (2020), we provide a much-needed accessible introduction to the microaggression research of both philosophers and psychologists. We identify metaphysical and epistemological disagreements and suggest fruitful directions for future research.

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Future Work

My next four publications will be drawn from the remaining unpublished chapters of my dissertation. You can read about them in my dissertation abstract.) Outside of my work on microaggressions, I have four other projects I plan to pursue, all of which fall broadly within the ethics of conversation:

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The first project is already in progress. One of the major questions that my dissertation (and the extant microaggression literature) leaves unanswered is: what makes some members of marginalized groups able to brush off microaggressions while others are deeply affected by them? In “Microaffirmations, Privilege, and a Duty to Redistribute,” I propose that psychologists and philosophers should devote more attention to the unequal distribution of microaffirmations. Microaffirmations are the mirror of microaggressions—seemingly small supports that accumulate into large positive impacts. Privileged people constantly receive the benefit of the doubt and charitable interpretations. When marginalized people are given similar supports, they are protected from the harmful effects of microaggressions. Thus, we have an imperfect moral duty to redistribute microaffirmations by supporting marginalized people and challenging privileged people’s assumed superiority. (I’ve presented an early version of this project while I was a Doctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto Centre for Ethics; recording available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GV36McLzesY)

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In the second project, tentatively titled “When Punching Down Looks Like Punching Up,” I turn to online conversations and internet ethics. Kate Norlock, Kate Manne, and Regina Rini have recently published on online shaming and mobbing. I’m interested in exploring the tangled ethical nuances of a particular subset of so-called “cancel culture”: the critiques of marginalized individuals who have engaged in behavior that harmed other, differently marginalized individuals. At some level, these critiques are often apt: Chimamanda Adichie (a Black ciswomen from the Global South) made transphobic comments; Hillary Clinton (a white, rich woman) demonstrated hawkish tendencies that threatened the well-being of (mostly POC) citizens of developing nations; Ihlan Omar (a Muslim woman of color and naturalized US citizen) made antisemitic remarks. But these critiques can also easily degenerate into misogyny or other oppression—by calling for punishment out of proportion with the offense, by uniquely singling out prominent women while letting equally guilty men escape critique, or by demonstrating stereotypical assumptions about women’s “natural” empathy or virtue. These misogynistic tendencies are particularly likely to be masked during online pile-ons that begin with legitimate critique and righteous anger, especially when privileged people can pose themselves as heroic defenders of the marginalized.

My third area of interest was inspired by my recent Fibromyalgia diagnosis. Very little philosophy has been written on chronic pain, and almost nothing from a feminist perspective. But my recent experiences have shown me that we need intersectional theorizing about chronic pain, especially as patients shift from diagnosis to symptom management. During the years-long diagnostic process, women must resist gaslighting denials of our pain in order to receive the tests and referrals we need to understand our chronic pain conditions. Yet if we do manage to achieve an official diagnosis, many pain management techniques recommend ignoring our pain and reframing it as an emotional reaction that can and should be overcome. The key problem here is that since the majority of chronic pain sufferers are women, these supposedly value-neutral pain management techniques risk triggering internalized stereotypes of hysteria and hypochondria—especially if the patient has previously experienced medical gaslighting. In addition to diagnosing this problem, I hope to find ways to ameliorate it, and to share those recommendations with bioethicists, medical professionals, and the general public.

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My final project developed out of the Prisons and Policing reading group that I started this summer. After reading Angela Davis’ Are Prisons Obsolete?, I’ve become convinced that certain crimes, which I’ll call “crimes of precarity,” result primarily from social forces rather than individual choices, and so we should shift our focus from punishment to prevention: invest in schools and communities, divest (and ultimately abolish) the prison-industrial complex. However, I argue that another category of crimes, which I’ll call “crimes of power,” are more aptly attributed to individual choices. Domestic violence and white collar financial crimes are fundamentally unlike crimes of precarity, in that these crimes of power are based on a sense of entitlement—a feeling of being above the law—that need not be present in crimes motivated by material need. Furthermore, I’ll show that drawing this distinction between the two types of crime will enable us to adjudicate the fraught disagreement between domestic violence survivors and prison abolitionists. These two groups have traditionally been placed in opposition, but I’ll show that even if survivors accept Davis’ argument for abolishing prison for crimes of precarity, we can continue to demand greater punishment for crimes of power.

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Discovering the ethics of conversation is a life-long, communal project. I look forward to refining these ideas and developing new directions through conversations with colleagues—in person and in print.