My research is in the areas of political philosophy, environmental philosophy, and the history of philosophy. In particular, my work aims to evaluate theories of justice from an ecological perspective and to bring historical debates to bear on normative questions related to markets.
Since completing my Ph.D., I have published an article in the Canadian Journal of Philosophy and a chapter in the edited volume Rethinking Kant. Both texts respond to attempts by contemporary scholars to revive republicanism for the purpose of criticizing economic forms of domination. While sympathetic to this move, I argue that the republican conception of freedom is compatible with conflicting views of the capitalist market. On the one hand, the republican critique may be extended from political to economic forms of domination. On the other hand, it may be used to bolster individualist and proprietarian accounts that naturalize capitalist markets. These articles thus develop a new interpretation of the typologies of republicanism to better evaluate the republican approach to economic justice.
My current work is a positive project examining the benefits of common property institutions (i.e., “the commons”) to economic and environmental justice. My interest in this topic is influenced by the rise of contemporary political struggles that resist the concession of land and natural resources to the state and private market actors, including food sovereignty, indigenous “land back” movements, and urban anti-gentrification movements.
I am currently writing two articles that serve as preliminary research for a book project on the topic. The first article recovers and defends a little-known case for common property ownership in the republican tradition. Republicans typically defended private property ownership on the grounds that it increases independence for producers (i.e., republican freedom). However, in their criticisms of enclosures, Richard Price and other eighteenth-century agrarian republican thinkers identified conditions of independence with common right to the land, and associated private property, conversely, with dependency and unfreedom. My new article, “Recovering the Case for Common Property and Republican Freedom,” retrieves this historical debate to reconstruct a systematic republican argument in defense of common property.
The connection eighteenth-century thinkers made between property ownership and independence is also reproduced in contemporary approaches to economic justice. In the wake of new studies that establish wealth, or lack thereof, as the main driver of economic inequality, some scholars propose a greater diffusion of wealth as a solution to inequality and domination. On these accounts, however, property ownership is not associated with common property rights or direct access to productive property, but rather with the ownership of corporate shares and other claims on income streams. In an unpublished article that I recently presented at the Philosophy, Politics, and Economics conference, I argue that this form of ownership ultimately fails to address arbitrary governance (i.e., republican domination) in employee-employer relations and the socialization of the market. The focus on financial forms of wealth can even exacerbate environmental harms associated with the treatment of land as a financial asset. In response to these shortcomings, I point toward the social and environmental benefits of common property institutions as an alternative remedy to economic injustice.
In addition to the comparison between common property and corporate share ownership, the book will also compare the idea of the commons to socialist conceptions of cooperative ownership. The remaining chapters will consider, firstly, common ownership in global land reform struggles and, secondly, the applicability of the commons to the post- industrialized global north. In the latter case, the development of community land trusts for residential housing is one example of how this idea can be beneficial in urban contexts. In the former case, the book will draw from contributions made by eco-feminists toward theorizing alternative economies and the practice of the commons. Since women currently constitute the bulk of the world’s agrarian and peasant producers, land reform also plays a key component in emancipatory projects for women of the global south.
