•  128
    Critical Race Structuralism and Non-Ideal Theory
    In Hilkje Hänel & Johanna Müller (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Non-Ideal Theory, Routledge. forthcoming.
    Ideal theory in social and political philosophy generally works to hide philosophical theories’ complicity in sustaining the structural violence and maintenance of white supremacy that are foundational to settler colonial societies. While non-ideal theory can provide a corrective to some of ideal theory’s intended omissions, it can also work to conceal the same systems of violence that ideal theory does, especially when framed primarily as a response to ideal theory. This article takes a decolo…Read more
  •  272
    Reproductive Violence and Settler Statecraft
    with Elena Ruíz and Nerli Paredes-Ruvalcaba
    In Sanaullah Khan & Elliott Schwebach (eds.), Global Histories of Trauma: Globalization, Displacement and Psychiatry, Routledge. pp. 150-173. 2023.
    Gender-based forms of administrative violence, such as reproductive violence, are the result of systems designed to enact population-level harms through the production and forcible imposition of colonial systems of gender. Settler statecraft has long relied on the strategic promotion of sexual and reproductive violence. Patterns of reproductive violence adapt and change to align with the enduring goals and evolving needs of settler colonial occupation, dispossession, and containment. The U.S. Su…Read more
  •  475
    Cis Feminist Moves to Innocence
    Hypatia 1-9. 2024.
    Cis moves to innocence are rhetorical moves by which cisgender feminists falsely position their failure to engage with structures of transmisogyny as epistemically and morally virtuous. The notion derives from Tuck and Yang’s (2012) concept of settler moves to innocence and Mawhinney’s (1998) concept of white moves to innocence. This piece considers the case study of Manne’s (2017) work, in which she purports to offer a unified account of misogyny while explicitly refusing to consider transmisog…Read more
  •  1252
    Epistemic Oppression, Resistance, and Resurgence
    with Kristie Dotson, Julieta Paredes, Elena Ruíz, and Noenoe K. Silva
    Contemporary Political Theory 21 (2): 283-314. 2022.
    Epistemologies have power. They have the power not only to transform worlds, but to create them. And the worlds that they create can be better or worse. For many people, the worlds they create are predictably and reliably deadly. Epistemologies can turn sacred land into ‘resources’ to be bought, sold, exploited, and exhausted. They can turn people into ‘labor’ in much the same way. They can not only disappear acts of violence but render them unnamable and unrecognizable within their conceptual a…Read more
  •  959
    ‘Civility’ and the Civilizing Project
    Philosophical Papers 49 (2): 305-337. 2020.
    Calls for civility have been on the rise recently, as have presumptions that civility is both an academic virtue and a prerequisite for rational engagement and discussion among those who disagree. One imperative of epistemic decolonization is to unmask the ways that familiar conceptual resources are produced within and function to uphold a settler colonial epistemological framework. I argue that rhetorical deployments of ‘civility’ uphold settler colonialism by obscuring the systematic productio…Read more
  •  441
    Strengthening Weak Emergence
    Erkenntnis 87 (5): 2457-2474. 2020.
    Bedau's influential (1997) account analyzes weak emergence in terms of the non-derivability of a system’s macrostates from its microstates except by simulation. I offer an improved version of Bedau’s account of weak emergence in light of insights from information theory. Non-derivability alone does not guarantee that a system’s macrostates are weakly emergent. Rather, it is non-derivability plus the algorithmic compressibility of the system’s macrostates that makes them weakly emergent. I argue …Read more
  •  645
    Gender-Based Administrative Violence as Colonial Strategy
    Philosophical Topics 46 (2): 209-227. 2018.
    There is a growing trend across North America of women being criminalized for their pregnancy outcomes. Rather than being a series of aberrations resulting from institutional failures, we argue that this trend is part of a colonial strategy of administrative violence aimed at women of color and Native women across Turtle Island. We consider a range of medical and legal practices constituting gender-based administrative violence, and we argue that they are the result of non-accidental and systema…Read more
  •  3986
    White Feminist Gaslighting
    Hypatia 35 (4): 733-758. 2020.
    Structural gaslighting arises when conceptual work functions to obscure the non-accidental connections between structures of oppression and the patterns of harm they produce and license. This paper examines the role that structural gaslighting plays in white feminist methodology and epistemology using Fricker’s (2007) discussion of hermeneutical injustice as an illustration. Fricker’s work produces structural gaslighting through several methods: i) the outright denial of the role that structural…Read more
  •  735
    Privileged-Perspective Realism in the Quantum Multiverse
    In David Glick, George Darby & Anna Marmodoro (eds.), The Foundation of Reality: Fundamentality, Space, and Time, Oxford University Press. 2020.
    Privileged-perspective realism (PPR) is a version of metaphysical realism that takes certain irreducibly perspectival facts to be partly constitutive of reality. PPR asserts that there is a single metaphysically privileged standpoint from which these perspectival facts obtain. This chapter discusses several views that fall under the category of privileged-perspective realism. These include presentism, which is PPR about tensed facts, and non-multiverse interpretations of quantum mechanics, which…Read more
  •  3045
    Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, by Kate Manne (review)
    Mind 128 (512): 1360-1371. 2019.
    Kate Manne’s Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny combines traditional conceptual analysis and feminist conceptual engineering with critical exploration of cases drawn from popular culture and current events in order to produce an ameliorative account of misogyny, i.e., one that will help address the problems of misogyny in the actual world. A feminist account of misogyny that is both intersectional and ameliorative must provide theoretical tools for recognizing misogyny in its many-dimensional form…Read more
  •  1060
    Implicit Bias and the Idealized Rational Self
    Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 5 445-485. 2018.
    The underrepresentation of women, people of color, and especially women of color—and the corresponding overrepresentation of white men—is more pronounced in philosophy than in many of the sciences. I suggest that part of the explanation for this lies in the role played by the idealized rational self, a concept that is relatively influential in philosophy but rarely employed in the sciences. The idealized rational self models the mind as consistent, unified, rationally transcendent, and introspec…Read more
  •  1457
    There is good reason to believe that scientific realism requires a commitment to the objective modal structure of the physical world. Causality, equilibrium, laws of nature, and probability all feature prominently in scientific theory and explanation, and each one is a modal notion. If we are committed to the content of our best scientific theories, we must accept the modal nature of the physical world. But what does the scientific realist’s commitment to physical modality require? We consider w…Read more
  •  537
    What a Structuralist Theory of Properties Could Not Be
    In Anna & David Marmodoro & Yates (ed.), The Metaphysics of Relations. OUP., Oxford University Press. 2016.
    Causal structuralism is the view that, for each natural, non-mathematical, non-Cambridge property, there is a causal profile that exhausts its individual essence. On this view, having a property’s causal profile is both necessary and sufficient for being that property. It is generally contrasted with the Humean or quidditistic view of properties, which states that having a property’s causal profile is neither necessary nor sufficient for being that property, and with the double-aspect view, whic…Read more
  •  1722
    The Applicability of Mathematics to Physical Modality
    Synthese 194 (9): 3361-3377. 2017.
    This paper argues that scientific realism commits us to a metaphysical determination relation between the mathematical entities that are indispensible to scientific explanation and the modal structure of the empirical phenomena those entities explain. The argument presupposes that scientific realism commits us to the indispensability argument. The viewpresented here is that the indispensability of mathematics commits us not only to the existence of mathematical structures and entities but to a m…Read more
  •  8359
    Epistemic Exploitation
    Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 3 569-590. 2016.
    Epistemic exploitation occurs when privileged persons compel marginalized persons to educate them about the nature of their oppression. I argue that epistemic exploitation is marked by unrecognized, uncompensated, emotionally taxing, coerced epistemic labor. The coercive and exploitative aspects of the phenomenon are exemplified by the unpaid nature of the educational labor and its associated opportunity costs, the double bind that marginalized persons must navigate when faced with the demand to…Read more
  •  688
    Necessary Laws and Chemical Kinds
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 92 (4): 631-647. 2014.
    Contingentism, generally contrasted with law necessitarianism, is the view that the laws of nature are contingent. It is often coupled with the claim that their contingency is knowable a priori. This paper considers Bird's (2001, 2002, 2005, 2007) arguments for the thesis that, necessarily, salt dissolves in water; and it defends his view against Beebee's (2001) and Psillos's (2002) contingentist objections. A new contingentist objection is offered and several reasons for scepticism about its su…Read more