Research
Research
My research is currently bifurcated into two separate streams related by an interest in theorizing critically about structural oppression.
My dissertation, "Evolutionary Models of Kings and Queens", works at the intersection of evolutionary game theory and political philosophy to extend existing how-possibly minimal accounts of unfairness. Earlier research in the field discovered, for example, that the numerical majority of one demographic over another can be sufficient for making it very likely that the majority will establish a convention of treating the minority unfairly. This happens even if nobody in the population "intends" for this kind of unfairness to occur.
In my dissertation, I uncover further apparently-benign etiologies for unfairness, such as the fact that under certain conditions, demographics that choose to keep more to themselves are more likely to become the beneficiaries of oppression than demographics that like to reach widely in their communities.
In addition, I'm interested in the recent wave of scholarship at the crossroads of analytic philosophy and transgender studies. I want to know: what ought to be the political target for the future of transness, in spite of renewed and global trans-antagonism? How can we clarify our theoretical understanding of "gender" in light of the existing discursive standoffs? What, structurally, explains trans-antagonism, and what therefore must be the path to ridding ourselves of it? The decade has already been ripe with novel theoretical work, and there is still much to be done.
"Evolutionary Models of Kings and Queens." Dissertation Draft
How can the division of resources be systematically unfair even if it is not intended to be so? Existing models have found conditionally majority- or minority-favoring phenomena that are called the cultural Red King and Red Queen effects respectively, named after analogous effects in evolutionary biology. These effects surface even if agents do not “mean” for them to, as emergent properties of how the dynamics of the system develop. I first consider interventions that might contravene or magnify these effects, such as what happens if just a fraction of one group behaves with unconditional aggression?
Then, I make an addition to the models that has not been deeply explored in the literature: I embed the agents in a world, i.e. I allow them to have spatial relationships with one another. This immediately changes the dynamics of the model, and allows novel minimal conditions of unfairness to surface. Once the agents have a networked world to live in, it’s natural to wonder what happens when they are granted the ability to move within that world. With this mobility, further seemingly benign asymmetries turn out to have unexpected effects.
In the final chapter I consider how segregation develops (or fails to develop) within these models. The surprising result is that inequity in resource division facilitates greater-than-random levels of integration in these models. Even the group that receives the metaphorical short end of the stick prefers to interact with the outgroup that is mistreating them, because this mistreatment is reliable where the behavior of their in-group is not.
"If a Baby is Born in the Woods with Nobody to Teach it Gender, Can it be Trans?" (undergoing revision)
Social constructionism and nativism have long constituted opposing camps in discussions of gender, and a significant area of contention between the two is the etiology of trans experience. This causes the two camps to give negative and affirmative answers respectively to the title question. The epistemic situation makes this border war difficult to adjudicate: transhistorical and transcultural variations in regimes of gender provide good evidence for the social constructionist; authoritative first-person narratives, meanwhile, give the nativist their own sturdy ground. I argue that the contradiction in views is caused by the equivocation of trans and dysphoria, which functions as a Trojan Horse to smuggle in the conclusions of both parties. Once this is unraveled, it becomes clear that trans carries different senses for a social constructionist versus a nativist, and it is possible to reconcile these. The baby born in the genderless woods may not grow up to be trans qua relationship to hegemonic regime of gender, but it may easily be trans qua having dispositions and behaviors that read, to us, as trans.