RESEARCH OVERVIEW
Though my philosophical interests are broad, my primary research ranges across epistemology, social and feminist philosophy, and especially their intersections. I am particularly interested in the relationship between our social location, e.g., our race, gender, class, etc., and our epistemic position, i.e., what we know or are in a position to know, how confident we should be in certain of our beliefs, whether we count as experts about a matter, etc. Much of my recent work, including my dissertation, aims to explain when we are justified in drawing a connection between social location and epistemic position, and why.
PUBLICATIONS
Resistance Doesn't Happen by Chance (forthcoming). Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy → spells out a necessary condition on resistance to oppression and shows how this condition makes acts of resistance pro tanto morally worthy.
Fit-Related Reasons to Inquire (2025). Australasian Journal of Philosophy. (penultimate version | final version) → argues that moral and practical considerations sometimes constitute fit-related, right-kind reasons for inquiry.
CURRENT PROJECTS
(feel free to email me for drafts!)
[Title Redacted] under review → argues that facts about marginalized people's social location provide higher-order support for certain of their beliefs about the workings of marginalization.
The Epistemic and the Affective → argues that achieving knowledge of certain evaluative facts -- e.g., the fact that some X is disgusting -- requires having the affective response that the objects in question, by virtue of their evaluative properties, in fact merit.
What Standpoints Must Be → argues that if consciousness-raising is to be the means by which we achieve standpoints, then standpoints cannot amount to perspectives from which we have a greater awareness of how knowledge is produced and authorized. Rather, they must be perspectives from which one is better able to recognize oppression as such.
There Might be an Epistemic Advantage to Being Oppressed: Reframing Recent Debates in Standpoint Epistemology → argues that certain recent debates in standpoint epistemology are philosophically trivial because they ultimately concern whether marginalized people are epistemically advantaged with respect to knowledge of facts about the workings of marginalization. It then shows how this debate is distinct from one that concerns whether marginalized people are epistemically advantaged by virtue of being well-suited to perform ideology critique, and suggests that we ought to turn our focus to the latter.
SKETCHIER PROJECTS
A User's Guide to Standpoints → motivates and defends a novel account of a standpoint on which certain groups achieve standpoints by engaging in imaginative perspective sharing.
Practical Reasons for Belief and the Basing Relation → argues that our answer to the question of whether practical reasons can constitute normative reasons for belief should not hinge on whether practical reasons can constitute motivating reasons for belief. Instead, we should take up the former directly.