resEarch
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My scholarship is oriented around identifying and thinking through problems and barriers that show up as neutral, or “just the way things are” within the discipline of philosophy itself. In my research, I use feminist philosophy, critical philosophy of race, queer theory, and epistemic injustice literature to identify and respond to methodological tensions within and beyond the discipline of philosophy. My research program has developed along two overlapping trajectories:
My scholarship is oriented around identifying and thinking through problems and barriers that show up as neutral, or “just the way things are” within the discipline of philosophy itself. In my research, I use feminist philosophy, critical philosophy of race, queer theory, and epistemic injustice literature to identify and respond to methodological tensions within and beyond the discipline of philosophy. My research program has developed along two overlapping trajectories:
- The politics of interpretive charity - Often, philosophers define “interpretive charity” as the practice of reading a text and presenting its contents in the most favorable light. I argue that interpretive charity is not a socially or politically neutral methodological approach; instead, the call for and practice of charitability is an orientation toward texts and toward the discipline that reproduces epistemic and affective injustices and exclusions, such that marginalized philosophers receive insufficient levels of charity while being disproportionately expected to offer it. This “charitability gap”—both in who we grant charity to and who we expect charity from—reproduces oppression within our discipline. Although charitability can be used strategically to highlight thinkers and texts whose work has been underexplored as a result of structural injustices, we need a fuller account of charitability’s histories as a philosophic method; of the epistemic and affective harms we may inflict by demanding charity from one another; and of the social and political structures that orient us toward charitability
- The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning - I am interested, as with my work on charitability, in identifying practices that are assumed to be unproblematic or neutral, but that in fact often establish barriers to students’ learning and flourishing. For example, I have co-authored articles and book chapters in which I apply insights from feminist philosophy and critical philosophy of race to questions about active learning and inclusive pedagogy.