research projects
My work as a political theorist focuses on the relationship between concrete practices and conceptual structures as the material conditions of the political world, with a particular interest in punishment and citizenship discourses. My current research agenda centers on a broader question of the relationship between action and identity, or put differently, the question of the relation between who we are and what we do.
Punishment and Inclusion: Race, Membership, and the Limits of American Liberalism: This is a book manuscript in progress, a long-term project concerning “felon” as a concept of action, identity, and the specific practices (such as felon disenfranchisement) that constitute the meaning of the term. The book gives a theoretical account of felon disenfranchisement as it has been practiced in the United States, drawing widely on early modern political theory, post-strucuralist french thought, queer theory, disability theory, and critical legal studies. The practice of felon disenfranchisement can only be understood in light of the subterranean work of membership performed by punishment and reciprocally, the punitive side of membership. Disenfranchisement’s pernicious racial history in the United States and its persistence as a widely accepted practice across states reveals the ways in which American liberalism relies upon the internal exclusions of criminalized others. An abstract and chapter summary of this project is available.
Neoliberalism and Punishment: Framed on Michel Foucault’s analysis of the Chicago School of Economics, this is work concerning the development of neo-liberal penality in the United States. While there has been a widespread abandonment of the rehabilitative ideal that characterized much of the 19th and 20th centuries, it is simply not the case that that some newly rational or economic understanding of criminal justice has replaced it, even if contemporary criminology has become dominated by neoliberal assumptions of decision making. Instead, I argue that we find ourselves in a period characterized by overlapping and often contradictory discourses of responsibility and subjectivity, allowing for the deployment of a type of fully responsible monsters. This figure, most visible in the popular perception and legal treatment of sex offenders, characterizes the incoherent, although strategic, milieu of contemporary penality in the United States.
A small part of this project is appears in my piece on Foucault’s 1979 reading of the Chicago School, available on the papers page.
A new book length project based on this research, is a study of Michel Foucault’s thought in relation to neo-liberal economic theories of subjectivity. Drawing on Foucault’s lectures from the late 1970s and his late work on the care of the self, this project traces the quiet but profound debt in Foucault’s thought to the economic theories of the American neo-liberals, and in particular, the theory of human capital developed by Gary Becker and Theodore Schultz. The book offers a nuanced account of Foucault’s account of subjectivization that underscores the centrality of “critique” in his ethics.
The Pardon in Practice and the History of Political Thought: As an outgrowth of the my work on voting rights, I am interested in how executive clemency and the pardon can reveal the limits of re-integration into political membership. An executive pardon is the only method of restoring voting rights across state jurisdictions in the US, and it is also a recurring theme in the foundations of both liberal and republican political theory, from Hobbes and Locke to Kant, Rousseau, and Hegel. I ask what the pardon reveals about the structure of sovereignty in each of these thinkers, and how that understanding of political authority continues to be articulated in the context of American voting-rights.
Criminal Subjectivity and the English Experience with Highway Robbery: An historical project tracing the development of subjectivity and political sovereignty in 17th and 18th century English thought and popular culture, particularly the figures of the “outlaw,” “bandit,” and “highwayman.” It is my contention that in order to understand the foundations of liberal political theory, especially that found in thinkers like Locke or Hobbes, we must attend to the liminal figures of political membership who challenged the emergence of well-articulated property-rights.
Disenfranchisement and Race in 19th Century Maryland: A genealogy of criminal disenfranchisement provisions during the 19th century constitutional conventions in the state of Maryland tied to the production of free black labor as a criminal identity.
Gifts, Subjectivity, and the Will: Research project into the status of the will in giving and receiving gifts. This work is based mostly in Hegel at the moment, but is increasingly connected to my work on Pardons (primarily through Derrida and Rousseau).
Black Youth Project: I worked as a research assistant for Prof. Cathy Cohen’s long term research project into the sexuality, religion, and politics of young African Americans.
