Graduate Student; Graduate Student Instructor Mentor
She/her/hers
About
I work primarily in the philosophy of language, social philosophy, feminist philosophy, ethics, and epistemology.
Speech acts—promises, apologies, refusals, orders, threats, compliments—are actions we perform with words. My research challenges us to move away from an individualistic theory of speech acts, where the focus is on the speaker and the moment at which they speak, and towards a more fully social theory of speech acts—a theory of how we perform actions with words with others. I argue that speakers can unintentionally perform certain speech acts (like orders and threats), that audience responses can determine which speech act a speaker performs (in both just and unjust ways), and that performing a speech act (like an apology) is a temporally extended process. More broadly, I'm interested in the ways oppression and power relations shape our agency as language users.
Before coming to Michigan, I received my MA from the University of Melbourne and my BA from Monash University. I grew up near Melbourne in Australia.
For more detail about my research and teaching, see my personal website: www.rebeccaeharrison.com
