The nature of oppression.

I have felt concern for oppressed groups for as long as I remember. My early studies in social and political philosophy demonstrated how important it is to have a healthy polis and society if we’re going to end oppression. For this reason, my work focuses on the nature and practice of oppression as well as the development of tools to combat it.

This immediately raises a challenge, as oppression is not a simple phenomenon. It works on multiple levels, through numerous mediums, and in ways that often go unrecognized. To understand and challenge oppression, we have to eschew the notion that oppression is carried out by “bad” people at the expense of the “good.” I argue that oppression is multilayered, de-centered, nonlocalizable, and adapts to different contexts. Pursuing this line of inquiry has led me to incorporate ideas from the study of systems, especially those that are complex and adaptive. In my book and other works, I have put this idea in dialogue with numerous other thinkers and movements in philosophy, including Marxism, phenomenology, postmodernism, Arendt, speculative realism, new materialism, and psychoanalysis. I have applied ideas from systems theory to topics like the environment, racism, orientalism, and sexism. I avoid reductive accounts of social and political problems since they rarely lead to effective diagnoses of problems.

Revolution.

The problem studied by my first book and dissertation is the question of how to separate theories of the state from theories of revolution. Concepts of revolution have often been developed using concepts of the state, and attempts to understand the state traditionally precede attempts to comprehend revolution. I argue that using descriptions of the state to define revolution renders the concept of revolution a product of the state, restricting what it can accomplish.

I begin this work by showing how social contract theory’s separating of reason from sovereignty necessitates that it contend with the question of revolution. Although social contract theorists have a positive role for revolution, they claim that citizens are both authors and subjects of the state and that revolution can be entirely outside and entirely inside their political orders. Marxism gives revolution the role of overturning social or political orders so as to bring about the next stage of human development. Although revolution is effective at reorganizing the material, Marxism maintains it cannot alter certain basic facts about politics.

Using contemporary theorists of revolution mainly from the continental tradition, I emphasize that there is an incommensurability between what appears before and after an event, that states are irreducible inasmuch as knowledge or any sort of order is impossible without them, and that events are creative and productive. I show how it is necessary to see states as dynamic systems, or moving networks capable of altering both the things within them and the mechanisms that change them. When systems are highly interconnected and complex, they demonstrate the ability to transform themselves radically in unpredictable ways.

My project concludes by exploring the implications of my theory for radical praxis by discussing its view on a diverse array of revolutionary tactics.

Future projects.

Going forward, I intend to continue my studies of theories of revolution. As new ontologies, epistemologies, and metaphysics are always being developed, it is important to evaluate them in terms of their ability to explain the phenomenon of revolution. Second, I will continue exploring how systems theory provides useful insights into politics and society. Numerous well-documented phenomena in systems theory bear similarities to phenomena observed in these areas, but the implications of those similarities have not been explored in any depth. To the extent they are comparable, we should understand how phenomena in systems theory can help us make predictions and ensure our societies are healthy.

The value of this work.

My work has been recognized in many outlets and won several awards. In addition to my book and journal publications, I occasionally write articles for public outlets and present at conferences. I also have an interest in humanities advocacy, and have published several pieces on that topic.

Through this research I hope to show why revolutions have fallen into pitfalls in the past such that we can avoid them in the future. I aspire to aid society in developing strategies for liberation from its many forms of oppression, as part of our world’s larger project of creating a healthy and virtuous existence.