Centre for Social Philosophy members

I'm a Nottingham Research Fellow working on reproductive ethics and philosophy of parenthood.

My research is primarily in social and political philosophy. This includes feminism, critical theory, decolonial and Black radical traditions, queer and trans liberation, and the history of political thought. At the moment I am focusing especially on issues around policing and dissent, and love and intimacy.

I’m interested in the philosophy of games and gamification. I have published work on a range of issues within metametaphysics and the history of analytic philosophy.

My research is primarily in the metaphysics of mind, social ontology and the philosophy of emotion. I am interested in the interplay between metaphysical questions on the ontology of mental states/categories and practical application questions in experimental psychology and artificial intelligence. I am currently working on projects relating to the possibility of robot emotions, the classification of mental states, and the metaphysics of kinds.

My research is in the philosophy of perception, mental health, and psychotherapy.

What is education for? What is teaching? Does the notion of 'meritocracy' really have any meaning in education? I am interested in these and other questions related to the philosophy of education. I am currently thinking about structural discrimination in the classroom, issues to do with silencing in the classroom, the use of AI in the classroom, and the political nature of education. I have taught philosophy to over 600 primary school children in the county. I am co-lead on a research project (Birmingham-Nottingham Education Partnership Fund) looking at how to decolonise the curriculum.

My work explores how the demands of practical life bear on issues in theoretical epistemology, and applies the tools of theoretical epistemology to urgent issues in practical life. In my book, What's the Point of Knowledge? (OUP 2019), I argue that reflecting on the social role of knowledge sheds light on many epistemological issues. The book also explores how our epistemic concepts, norms, and practices contribute to human survival, cooperation, and flourishing. My next book, titled How Politics Makes Us Stupid, will bring insights from many areas of epistemology into contact with political issues like post-truth, fake news, and the epistemic requirements of democracy.

My work focuses on whether public policies and institutions are morally justified. I’ve published several articles about the permissibility of legal punishment, and my current research examines the justification of so-called ‘collateral' restrictions on people with criminal records: legal restrictions on jobs, housing, voting, and other goods that aren’t treated as part of the formal punishment but are often more burdensome than the punishment itself. I contend that these restrictions are justifiable in a far narrower range of cases than we find in current practice.

I explore how recent work in metaphysics allows us to understand the social construction of categories such as gender, race, disability, and class – categories which are key to a number of related contemporary movements for social justice. 

I'm interested in the ways that some of our major social institutions – mainly healthcare and education – promote the oppression of certain groups. At the moment, my main concern is a phenomenon I call pathophobia, which refers to the many ways that ill persons are marginalised and mistreated. Much of this work relies on narratives by ill persons and empirical work in healthcare psychology and sociology – if philosophers aren't in touch with the lives of the oppressed, they won't be able to help them.

I am currently a Teaching Associate in Philosophy. My research focuses on political and applied moral philosophy - in particular democratic theory, business ethics, and political epistemology. I studied for my PhD in Political Theory at University College London (UCL) focusing on the implications of the necessity of open-mindedness for deliberative democracy. I taught at UCL, King's College London, and the University of Hertfordshire before arriving in Nottingham.

I am interested in collective action and the construction of the social world, and in debates about autonomy as connecting the sphere of political philosophy with that of action theory. One of my research aspirations is to produce an account that can robustly link questions of practical political philosophy with an explanation of the underlying nature of social reality. I am also interested in epistemology (particularly on the nature of testimony and collective testifiers), Feminism, Political Philosophy and Ethics.

I am interested in philosophy of language, feminism, and particularly the places where they overlap.

The main focus of my work at the moment is the question of how we come to form and justify various aesthetic judgements (judgements concerning, for example, which objects are beautiful and which are ugly). Historically, many philosophers have argued that these judgements – in contrast to judgements of more mundane matters – can’t (or shouldn’t) be based on social factors but I argue that this influential view is mistaken. I am also interested in a variety of other philosophical issues in areas such as ethics, philosophy of art, and the philosophy of religion.

I have research interests in a number of areas, including the nature of trust. Over the last few years I’ve worked with a range of local businesses and charities exploring the ways in which this research can be deployed for the public good.

My research considers how our understandings of politics shift when we begin from the perspective of social movements and political resistance. This is an approach based on the recognition that we gain unique insights about systems of power by examining attempts to challenge them. I combine ethnographic fieldwork and other qualitative techniques with a range of theoretical frameworks including feminism, queer and postcolonial theory, and anarchism.

I wrote my PhD on the law and politics of immigration detention in the UK, looking at the practices and thinking within grassroots activist groups that attempt to organise alongside people in detention. ‘I am currently working as a senior research fellow on the European Research Council funded project ‘Regulating Criminal Justice Detention’.

I specialise in ethics, philosophy of law, and philosophy of race. My research in the philosophy of race focuses on the nature of racism, in particular everyday subtler cases of racism. My work pays special attention to the lived experiences of those who are targets of racism, including their emotional responses to racism and aims to make intelligible (and justify) different emotional responses to racism.

Most of my work is about the relationship between culture, crime and punishment. I have generally approached these issues through 20th and 21st century Latin American literature and film. My first book is a study of Latin American prison writing which compares texts written by political and 'common' prisoners from Cuba, Peru, Mexico, Costa Rica, Bolivia and Brazil. I am now working on a second book, on the cultural politics of the 'War on Drugs'.

I am currently a Postdoc researcher in philosophy at the University of Florence (Italy). My work is in political philosophy broadly conceived, with a particular emphasis on four areas: i) critical theories of capitalism ii) feminist, anti-racist and decolonial philosophy iii) the relationship between emotions, radical politics and political theory iv) the knowledge-power nexus, especially when it comes to the political use of scientific knowledge. I have published two books in Italian, my mother tongue, and I am currently turning my PhD dissertation - entitled 'A Political Philosophy of Anger' - into a monograph in English. My most recent article in English is 'Foucault's Marx: Subjectivity, History, and the Present', which can be freely accessed through my Academia.edu page.