Ella Whiteley

I am a Fellow in Philosophy at the LSE's Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method.

Since 2019, I have been conducting research for the Invisible Labour Project in Cambridge University. This project aims to discover more about underpaid and undervalued work conducted in universities. In particular, we are interested in which types of academic labour count as invisible, and which demographic groups tend to do more of this labour. We are working on an app to help us both to collect data, and to raise consciousness about this issue. We have a forthcoming publication entitled ‘Invisible Labour in the University: Time and Hermeneutical Injustice’ (in Facer et al., eds., Temporality as Method, Routledge). In this paper, we grapple with the ethics of using a calendar-tracker as our method for capturing invisible labour in the academy. We focus on the impact that temporally recording invisible labour might have on helping academics to understand their invisible work as work.

My PhD, undertaken at Cambridge University, developed the concept of a 'salience perspective'. This refers to the structure and/or presentation of some (linguistic or mental) contents. For instance, we might structure some linguistic contents by talking about one content before another. This is one way of making the first content more salient than the second. In my thesis, I argued that simply changing the pattern of salience in some contents can both cause and constitute harm. For instance, making a person's sexual orientation more salient than their career, such as by mentioning it before their career, might mean harming that person.

Other interests of mine lie in the philosophies of biology and aesthetics.