About
I study democratic theory and am intersted in the relationship between democracy and the question of property redistribution (or, material equality). My dissertation is motivated by an unfulfilled anxiety that was felt by democratic theorists fromPlato and Aristotle to the American founders: that democracy would mean the rule of the poor and the redistribution of property. Though democracy was seen as a threat for thousands of years, this aspect has largely been evacuated from contemporary democratic theory. My research asks what has changed in our understanding of democracy such that it has lost its threatening edge, and what aspects of this older conception of democracy should we try to recover. By engaging with texts from historical and contemporary democratic theory, I argue that we ought to return to understanding the democratic threat as coercive power wielded in the sectional interest of the disempowered many against the empowered few.
My work draws on continental political theory, Marxism, poststructuralism, and history of political thought.
In addition to my scholarship, I am a community activist. I have been an officer in our union (GEO 3550) for five years, am a member of Canada's New Democratic Party, and am actively engaged in Ann Arbor politics. Recently, I helped win a "Right to Renew" for Ann Arbor renters, a first-in-Michigan protection that will give renters security in their homes. I've written articles for Jacobin magazine and the Michigan Daily. In my activism, I do my best to apply the teachings of Political Theory.
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