Forthcoming talks "(Im)Purity, Bounded Agency, and Self-Destructive Protest: A New Paradigm of Resistance"
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Recent talksSymposium sur Le devoir de résister. Avec Manuel Cervera-Marzal, Emanuela Ceva, Antoine Chollet, Clémence Demay et Raphaëlle Théry. Informations et inscriptions ici.
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Political Obligations, Civil and Uncivil Disobedience
Much of my research until recently has focused on the grounds and limits of political authority, and what living under unjust socio-political conditions entails for citizens' political responsibilities. I have argued in a series of articles and in my first book, A Duty to Resist: When Disobedience Should Be Uncivil (Oxford University Press, 2018), that the grounds commonly used to establish the moral duty to obey the law support the existence of obligations to resist injustice, including through civil and uncivil disobedience. I have also written on the obligations of witnesses to crime and corruption and on the ethics of government whistleblowing.
You can find most of my papers on Academia and on PhilPapers.
Mon premier livre est paru en France en octobre 2022: Le devoir de résister : Apologie de la désobéissance incivile (Éditions Hermann), avec l'excellente traduction de Raphaëlle Théry.
Much of my research until recently has focused on the grounds and limits of political authority, and what living under unjust socio-political conditions entails for citizens' political responsibilities. I have argued in a series of articles and in my first book, A Duty to Resist: When Disobedience Should Be Uncivil (Oxford University Press, 2018), that the grounds commonly used to establish the moral duty to obey the law support the existence of obligations to resist injustice, including through civil and uncivil disobedience. I have also written on the obligations of witnesses to crime and corruption and on the ethics of government whistleblowing.
You can find most of my papers on Academia and on PhilPapers.
Mon premier livre est paru en France en octobre 2022: Le devoir de résister : Apologie de la désobéissance incivile (Éditions Hermann), avec l'excellente traduction de Raphaëlle Théry.
The Only Weapon Left
Incarcerated persons hacking through their own Achilles tendons with razor blades, refusing to wash or starving themselves; refugees sewing their lips shut, digging their own grave and lying in it for days; activists spilling their own blood or immolating themselves. Acts like these, deliberately undertaken to protest injustice, fall under the umbrella of self-destructive resistance: they involve the self-infliction of physical harm to oppose a dominant system of norms, rules, laws, or practices. despite these tactics' ubiquity, especially in carceral sites, self-destructive resistance has not caught philosophers' attention. In The Only Weapon Left, I propose to remedy this neglect by articulating a philosophical account of self-destructive resistance that attends to its self-violent nature in contexts of marginalization and powerlessness where one's body is, as the Moroccan poet and dissident Abdellatif Laâbi wrote about the hunger strike, "the only weapon we've left."
The first part of the project is an account of incarcerated persons' right to hunger strike (at American Political Science Review).
The next parts of the project discuss prisons' failures and why philosophers should attend to self-destructive resistance to grasp the flaws with analytic accounts of resistance.
Email me if you'd like to read drafts!
Incarcerated persons hacking through their own Achilles tendons with razor blades, refusing to wash or starving themselves; refugees sewing their lips shut, digging their own grave and lying in it for days; activists spilling their own blood or immolating themselves. Acts like these, deliberately undertaken to protest injustice, fall under the umbrella of self-destructive resistance: they involve the self-infliction of physical harm to oppose a dominant system of norms, rules, laws, or practices. despite these tactics' ubiquity, especially in carceral sites, self-destructive resistance has not caught philosophers' attention. In The Only Weapon Left, I propose to remedy this neglect by articulating a philosophical account of self-destructive resistance that attends to its self-violent nature in contexts of marginalization and powerlessness where one's body is, as the Moroccan poet and dissident Abdellatif Laâbi wrote about the hunger strike, "the only weapon we've left."
The first part of the project is an account of incarcerated persons' right to hunger strike (at American Political Science Review).
The next parts of the project discuss prisons' failures and why philosophers should attend to self-destructive resistance to grasp the flaws with analytic accounts of resistance.
Email me if you'd like to read drafts!
"Conversion" Therapy
I first touched upon the neuroethics of sexual re-orientation in a short commentary, “Three Harms of ‘Conversion’ Therapy.” I delved deeper into this topic with my co-author Sean Aas. We published “The Ethics of Sexual Reorientation: What should Physicians and Researchers Do?” at the Journal of Medical Ethics and “Sexual Re-orientation in Ideal and Non-Ideal Theory” at Journal of Political Philosophy. We recently co-wrote an article on "The Ethics of 'Conversion' Therapy" for The Routledge Handbook to the Philosophy of Sex (eds. Clare Chambers, Brian Earp, and Lori Watson).
In a nutshell, we think that under current heterosexist conditions, it is better if high-tech, effective sexual re-orientation never becomes available.
I first touched upon the neuroethics of sexual re-orientation in a short commentary, “Three Harms of ‘Conversion’ Therapy.” I delved deeper into this topic with my co-author Sean Aas. We published “The Ethics of Sexual Reorientation: What should Physicians and Researchers Do?” at the Journal of Medical Ethics and “Sexual Re-orientation in Ideal and Non-Ideal Theory” at Journal of Political Philosophy. We recently co-wrote an article on "The Ethics of 'Conversion' Therapy" for The Routledge Handbook to the Philosophy of Sex (eds. Clare Chambers, Brian Earp, and Lori Watson).
In a nutshell, we think that under current heterosexist conditions, it is better if high-tech, effective sexual re-orientation never becomes available.
News and recent publications
Cécile Degiovanni a écrit une recension de mon livre, Le devoir de résister, pour La vie des idées (novembre 2023).
My article "The Right to Hunger Strike" is available on FirstView (open access) at the American Political Science Review (May 2023).
I reviewed Avia Pasternak's fabulous new book, Responsible Citizens, Irresponsible States: Should Citizens Pay for their State's Wrongdoing? for Ethics (April 2023).
I reviewed Avia Pasternak's fabulous new book, Responsible Citizens, Irresponsible States: Should Citizens Pay for their State's Wrongdoing? for Ethics (April 2023).
Avia Pasternak and I are co-editing a volume on The Ethics of Uncivil Protest and Resistance which is now under contract at Oxford University Press (March 2023). The volume should go to press next summer.
I contributed a chapter "In Defense of Uncivil Disobedience" to this volume on Uncivil Disobedience: Theological Perspectives edited by David Gides (Fortress Academic Press, January 2023). Find it here.
The French translation of my first book, A Duty to Resist, is now out in France : Le devoir de résister : Apologie de la désobéissance incivile came out in October 2022 with Éditions Hermann, collection L'avocat du diable. Raphaëlle Théry translated the text.
Sean Aas and I co-authored the chapter "Homophobia and 'Conversion' Therapies" in The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Sex and Sexuality, edited by Clare Chambers, Brian Earp and Lori Watson. Find it here.
The Cambridge Companion to Civil Disobedience edited by William Scheuerman is now available (July 2021). It includes 16 chapters on the state of the field, including mine which is on "(In)Civility." Click here to buy the paperback from an independent bookstore near you. |
I co-authored with Kimberley Brownlee the substantive revision to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry on "Civil Disobedience" (June 2021).
I co-authored with Kimberley Brownlee the substantive revision to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry on "Civil Disobedience" (June 2021).
I reviewed Lida Maxwell's excellent new book, Insurgent Truth: Chelsea Manning and the Politics of Outsider Truth-Telling for Perspectives on Politics (September 2020).
William Scheuerman, Erin Pineda, Robin Celikates, Alex Livingston, and I contributed to this fabulous Critical Exchange brought together by Çiğdem Çıdam for Contemporary Political Theory, Theorizing the Politics of Protest: Contemporary Debates on Civil Disobedience. I reply to some of the critiques of A Duty to Resist in my own contribution, "From Resistance to Protest: The Paradigm Shift in Theories of Civil Disobedience" (April 2020).
My first French article appears in Quebec-based journal éthique publique. In it I argue that we shouldn't confuse government whistleblowing and civil disobedience (April 2019).