Research

My research interests lie primarily in the ethical and political dimensions of epistemology, cognitive science, and language. A key focus of mine that unites these areas is the philosophy of salience. For me, salience is not about (mental, linguistic, etc.,) content, but rather the structuring and presentation of content, so that some is more prominent than others. I focus on the significance for normative moral and political philosophy of how salience is distributed across persons and their features, and the social and cognitive mechanisms by which it is allocated. My research is grounded in the conviction that mere patterns of salience can cause or constitute discrimination, a harm or an epistemic flaw. For instance, one can, I suggest, mislead someone about a topic by making the wrong thing salient in language, or harm a social group by having the wrong thing about them salient in one’s attention. My work thus draws out particularly insidious forms of epistemic, moral, and political bias. This is one reason that salience is a fascinating area; it intersects with a range of topics, from political philosophy to epistemology.

Another core research interest is the philosophy of work. I am particularly interested in the topic of ‘invisible labour’. Questions I examine include: which of our activities don’t get counted or valued as ‘work’?; which ideological narratives function to obscure how those activities count as ‘labour”?; do certain of these narratives affect particular social groups more than others?

Publications

Whenever we communicate, we inevitably have to say one thing before another. This means introducing particularly subtle patterns of salience into our language. In this paper, I introduce ‘order-based salience patterns’, referring to the ordering of syntactic contents where that ordering, pretheoretically, does not appear to be of consequence. For instance, if one is to describe a colourful scarf, it wouldn’t seem to matter if one were to say it is ‘orange and blue’ or ‘blue and orange’. Despite their apparent triviality, I argue that order-based salience patterns tend to make the content positioned first more salient – in the sense of attention-grabbing – in a way that can have surprising normative implications. Giving relative salience to gender differences over similarities, for instance, can result in the activation of cognitively accessible beliefs about gender differences. Where those beliefs are epistemically and/or ethically flawed, we can critique the salience pattern that led to them, providing an instrumental way of evaluating those patterns. I suggest that order-based salience patterns can also be evaluated on constitutive grounds; talking about gender differences before similarities might constitute a subtle form of bias. Finally, I reflect on how the apparent triviality of order-based salience patterns in language gives them an insidious strength.  

Sometimes, a form of discrimination is hard to register, understand, and articulate. A rich precedent demonstrates how victim testimonies have been key in uncovering such ‘hidden’ forms of discrimination, from sexual harassment to microaggressions. I reflect on how this plausibly goes too for a new hypothesised form of ‘attentional discrimination’, referring to cases where the more meaningful attributes of one social group are made salient in attention in contrast to the less meaningful attributes of another. Victim testimonies understandably dominate the ‘context-of-discovery’ stage of research into these initially opaque forms of discrimination; a victim’s encounter with the gap between their experience and dominant conceptual frameworks for understanding it is what provides an initial foothold for analysis to begin. Some object, however, to this methodology continuing to dominate the later ‘context-of-justification’ stage, where the hypothesis is rigorously challenged. I argue that this objection underestimates not just how other methodologies are more likely to inherit the various mechanisms of invisibility hiding the discrimination in question, but also how victim testimonies are distinctively well-suited to recognise and challenge those mechanisms. Victim testimonies, then, ought to continue playing a dominant role into these later stages of research into hidden forms of discrimination.

One theme in complaints from those with marginalized social identities is that they are seen primarily in terms of that identity. Some Black artists, for instance, complain about being seen as Black first and artists second. These individuals can be understood as objecting to a particularly subtle form of morally problematic attention: “relative attentional surplus on the wrong property.” This attentional surplus can coexist with another type of common problematic attention affecting these groups, including attentional deficits; marginalized individuals and groups themselves are routinely insufficiently attended to in virtue of the surplus attention given to their social identity properties.

This paper was chosen to be the focus of the Summer 2023 PEASoup Blog, affiliated with the Ethics journal.

Consider a terrible situation that too many women find themselves in: 85,000 women are raped in England and Wales alone every year. Many of these women do not bring their case to trial. There are multiple reasons that they might not want to testify in the courts. The incredibly low conviction rate is one. Another reason, however, might be that these women do not want the fact that they were raped to become the most salient thing about them. More specifically, they do not want it to be the thing that others attend to the most—that others find most noticeable and memorable. In this paper, I introduce the notion of ‘harmful salience perspectives’ to help to explain this and related phenomena. This refers either to attention on things that should not be salient, or not enough attention on things that deserve to be made salient. Following ideas within the feminist literature on objectification, I argue that we can be harmed when aspects of our identity that do not reflect our personhood – our agency, rationality, personality, and so on – are more prominent in the minds of others than aspects that do reflect our personhood. Crucially, these ways of attending do not need to implicate false beliefs and harmful ideologies to be harmful, but can be harmful in their own right. 

We argue that using a calendar-tracker to capture invisible labour in the academy comes with conceptual and ethical limitations, which might affect how successfully our tracker can provide academics with conceptual resources to understand their invisible work as work.

  • Book Review of J. Tabery’s ‘Beyond Versus: The Struggle to Understand the Interaction of Nature and Nurture, published in International Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 2015, 29(3).

Work Under Review and in Progress

  • A paper suggesting that the salience-based goals of socially progressive initiatives deserve more consideration (title redacted, as soon to be under review)

    This paper suggests that socially progressive initiatives, like ‘Women in Philosophy’, have different salience-based goals. One for instance is to make women more salient, in the sense of cognitively-accessible, when one thinks of ‘philosophy’ and ‘philosophers’. Another is to make womanness less salient, in the sense of striking; often, philosophers who are women complain that their gender receives too much attention, in comparison to their philosophical passions and interests. Some progressive strategies, when seeking to further the first goal, can inadvertently frustrate the second goal, I argue. I reflect on how best to avoid this.

  • A paper bringing precision to the idea that we can objectify people simply in virtue of how we attend to them (title redacted, as currently under review)

    This paper clarifies a pervasive but under-theorised way in which objectification can occur: through attentional patterns alone. Further, it introduces and motivates particularly subtle forms of this attention-based objectification. These capture cases where aspects of one’s personhood are not ignored, nor are one’s object-like features fixated upon. Instead, the attentional pattern’s problems are revealed in its comparative nature. For instance, a person might listen to a trans woman’s conversational contributions, and so not ignore something meaningful about her, and yet find her figure comparatively more noticeable. Alternatively, a person might not fixate on the bodies of black men, and yet find their bodies comparatively more salient than the bodies of white men. Recognising these particularly elusive forms of objectification requires acknowledging that, in contrast with influential interpretations of objectification, one needn’t be reduced to a body or appearance, or to have one’s autonomy and subjectivity denied, to count as being objectified. One can be treated like an object in less extreme ways. While less extreme, these forms of objectification are not trivial. Their subtlety grants them an insidious immunity from criticism, which results in distinctive harms for the victim.

  • Harmful attention as a microaggression (work in progress)
  • Ideological distortions of work as ‘work’ (work in progress)

Blog Posts

PhD

My PhD, completed at the University of Cambridge, developed the concept of a ‘salience perspective’. This refers to the structure and/or presentation of some (linguistic or mental) contents, to make some contents more prominent than others. For instance, we might structure some linguistic contents by talking about one content before another. We might structure some mental contents by better noticing and remembering certain contents over others. I argued that certain patterns of salience can both cause and constitute harm. For instance, a woman’s appearance might be made more salient than her talents: I argue that this salience pattern might causally activate harmful sexually objectifying beliefs about women, but also constitute a subtle and insidious form of objectification.