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Book

Transformative Organizing: Race, Gender, and the American Labor Movement

This monograph examines the innovative ways in which mid-20th century organizers in the American labor movement sought to build solidarity across racial and gender inequity in exclusionary workplaces and unions. Political philosophers and theorists have generally thought that solidarity is built on the basis of pre-existing unity: persons recognize a set of interests that they already share, and commit to struggle for one another in pursuit of these shared interests. Yet many political projects, especially those combatting identity-based forms of oppression, seek to build solidarity among persons whose interests are in conflict with one another. The question I take up in this project is: what does it mean to build solidarity in communities and workplaces fractured by oppression, where the idea of a common cause or interests cannot be taken for granted? I contend that the solution to this puzzle requires a reimagining of the core activity through which solidarity is built: organizing. Whereas organizing is often thought of as a process that appeals to and activates the pre-existing shared interests of persons in order to build solidarity between them, I develop a conception of organizing as activity that transforms persons’ interests, generating novel commonality from which solidarity can be built. Through extensive archival research, I trace this conception of organizing in the political thought of mid-20th century American labor organizers who found ways to build solidarity across racial and gender inequity in exclusionary workplaces and unions. These organizers started from hard-nosed recognition that workers in privileged social positions and identities had something to gain from racial and gender inequities; but these organizers refused to accept these dynamics as unalterable obstacles to organizing the working class. Theirs was a struggle to build solidarity by forging common interest anew.

Articles

An essay on blame and standing (title redacted for review) - I argue that moral dialogue concerning an agent’s standing to blame functions to facilitate moral understanding about the purported wrongdoing that her blame targets. Challenges to an agent’s standing to blame are one variety of challenges to the appropriateness of blame. Such challenges serve a communicative function: they initiate dialogue or reflection meant to align the moral understanding of the blamer and challenger. On standard accounts of the standing to blame, challenges to standing facilitate shared moral understanding about the blamer herself: it matters per se whether the blamer (e.g.) has a stake in the purported wrongdoing at issue or is blaming hypocritically. In contrast, I argue that three widely-recognized conditions on the standing to blame— the business, non-hypocrisy, and non-complicity conditions— serve as epistemically-tractable proxies through which we evaluate the accuracy and proportionality of blame and thereby assess our understanding of the purported wrongdoing that an act of blaming targets.

An essay on republicanism, civic virtue, and Black solidarity in Maria Stewart’s political thought - For OUP edited volume on women and republicanism, edited by Sandrine Berges and Alan Coffee

'Not seeing, but believing:' Clarity and Humility in Locke’s Essay - In this paper, I consider the role of epistemic humility in Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding. An epistemically humble agent recognizes the limits of her capacity for comprehension and the role of such recognition in our epistemic practices. It is tempting to ascribe to Locke a negative conception of epistemic humility, on which on which we ought to “sit down in a quiet Ignorance of those Things, which, upon Examination, are found to be beyond the reach of our Capacities” (I.1.4). This is because Locke seems straightforwardly committed to the clarity thesis, that comprehension consists in gaining a clear view of ideas and their relations. I argue, however, that Locke is not straightforwardly committed to the clarity thesis in the Essay. Instead, Locke tempers the epistemic power of clarity in his critique of the enthusiast, who believes that she has an immediate connection to God. Locke’s critique of the enthusiast suggests a role for a positive conception of epistemic humility in Locke's epistemology: that recognition of the limits of our capacity for comprehension is itself sometimes implicated in the expansion of our comprehension.