Research

Our social world is unjust, and figuring it out how to make it better is no easy matter. Moreover, most of us frequently act in ways that perpetuate injustice. Sometimes we do this unknowingly. We buy products from companies of whose unjust labor practices we are unaware; we unreflectively comply with gender norms that reproduce unjust gender hierarchies; we devalue certain character traits without knowing that doing so reinforces racist stereotypes. Other times we do so knowingly because doing so is in our prudential interest or because we see no alternative. Moving towards social justice thus requires surmounting two epistemic challenges: first, the challenge of recognizing unjust practices and norms as unjust, and second, the challenge of figuring out how to resist or at least not to reinforce those practices and norms.

         Much of my recent research, including my dissertation, explores ways of meeting these challenges. To address the former, I investigate questions at the intersection of epistemology and feminist philosophy (and particularly standpoint epistemology) about what we must achieve epistemically to recognize injustice as such, and about how our social identities affect the epistemic status of our beliefs about injustice. To address the latter, I investigate questions in feminist philosophy more broadly about what resistance requires and about whether protesting is valuable even when ineffective in producing change. 

*= refereed, ⍭= invited