PhD students

Supervisors: Professor Mónica Brito Vieira and Dr Tim Stuart-Buttle

Project Title: Fiction in the work of Thomas Hobbes: political fictions (the state, the social contract) as an instrument for rationalising society

Abstract: By understanding Hobbes' epistemology and natural philosophy, this project will position his politics as a societal analysis that encompasses his sceptical position on human knowledge and a resulting inherent world-making imaginative process

Supervisors: Alan Thomas

Research Project: Can Artificial Ethical Assistants Enhance Human Decision-Making in Ethics?

Supervisors: Professor Tim Stanton and Dr Tim Stuart-Buttle

Project title: Rethinking the Secular

Abstract: Secularisation is central to the prevalent view of modernity, portrayed as an objective and gradual process in which religion retreated, revealing a distinct and secular sphere of political thought. This project rethinks the secularisation thesis by showing that it was not the necessity of religion that was questioned, but rather its role, which was redefined through ongoing clashes between legal and religious vocabularies and cumulating crises of church and state. In doing so, the project traces the aetiology of heterodox Christian thought, which was finally unleashed in the crisis of language of the English Revolution, and how it paved the way for a new conception and model of the secular state.

Supervisors: Professor Martin O’Neill and Dr Alfred Moore

Project title: Justice in economic production: determining what gets produced in society

Abstract: My research intervenes in the debate concerning the nature of economic domination and how it can be prevented. I argue that to counter forms of economic domination, we must democratise the economy. Workplace democrats have tended to focus on dominating power over workers with respect to how they produce, and thus on the organisation of specific workplaces. My research, however, aims to argue that another significant element of economic domination, under capitalism, is the inability of most individuals in their status as consumers and workers to determine which products get produced. Hence, to prevent such forms of economic domination we must have an equal ability to determine what products are available to us. Ultimately, I wish to develop a novel set of hybrid normative criteria for a democratic economic system which can address the various demands required to tackle an expanded understanding of economic domination.

Supervisors: Prof Matthew Festenstein and Dr Alasia Nuti

Research Project: Rectifying Historical Injustice: Racial Injustice and Political Methodology

Political theory attempts to describe our world while concurrently being a part of that world. In this project, I explore this relationship between a radically unjust world and political theory. I focus on the recent “structural turn” in reparative justice and philosophy more generally. In doing so, I intend to develop an account of structural injustice focusing on racial injustice that can answer the question of what responsibility philosophical and political theory as a discipline and political theorists as political agents have to rectify historical injustice.

Supervisors: Professor Mary Leng

Research Project: Understanding Gender Identity

Supervisor: Dr Tim Stuart-Buttle and Professor Tim Stanton

Research Project: Rethinking Tolerant Locke

The research will stand on a religious perspective to revisit the Lockean concept of religious toleration. It will explore what Locke had implied in his ecclesiological writings about religious toleration in terms of Salvation in another life, other than the civil peace he apparently advocated for.

Supervisors: Dr Alfred Moore and Professor Neil Carter

Research Project: Common ground for a common future? Exploring dynamics of hybridity within environmental democracy

Democracy appears an elusive goal for many in the climate movement, blocked by the vested interests of capitalist hierarchies or side-lined by emergency calls for swift action. I hope to address how two central democratic goods – contestation, as conceptualised by agonistic thinkers, and coherent and steadfast collective action, as prioritised by deliberative theorists, - can be combined in the context of climate governance. My project will develop and empirically investigate 'hybrid' institutional innovations and mechanisms that promise to combine agonistic pluralism and deliberative preference transformation to encourage environmentally sustainable decision-making.

Supervisors: Professor Mónica Brito Vieira and Dr Adam Fusco

Project title: Rethinking Abstentionism as an Alternative Democratic Practice of Nationalist Contestation

Abstract: My research explores how nationalist movements, seen as threatening to democracy, can instead enhance democratic politics by challenging entrenched norms and offering alternative political possibilities. Examining Sinn Féin’s abstentionism, traditionally seen as anti-democratic, my project reinterprets this strategy through the lens of adversarial democratic theory. Drawing from feminist and decolonial perspectives, it argues that abstentionism constitutes a radically democratic and transformative expression of nationalist politics. Building on recent critiques of deliberation as the goal of representative democracy, my research explores Sinn Féin’s contestation of the constitutional status quo and the process of constructing and mobilising an alternative national identity. By framing such contestation as democratic, the project offers new perspectives on nationalism’s role in transforming political institutions and a way of engaging resurgent nationalist sentiment constructively.

Supervisor: Professor Matthew Festenstein and Dr Alasia Nuti

Research Project: Reimagining the nation: Towards an alternative theoretical basis for a right to self-determination beyond the traditional nation-state paradigm

The point of departure for this project is the normative problem of group statelessness, a phenomenon whereby large numbers of individuals – on the basis of their group characteristics – do not have citizenship status and are thus without the protections that citizenship affords. I argue that this phenomenon is a manifestation of underlying theoretical assumptions about nationhood, statehood, and grouphood that are entrenched throughout political theory literature; in particular, in the discourse around the rights of peoples and the rights of states. This project therefore interprets the normative problem of group statelessness as a symptom of theoretical inadequacy.

To address this issue, this research project offers a critical examination of traditional assumptions about the role of nations in the international state system, and challenges the apparent relationships between the nation, territory, and the state. The project is working primarily to deconstruct these relationships and reimagine the concept of the nation, its normative significance and its instrumental value, beyond traditional paradigms, with the aim of grounding a right to self-determination for stateless groups. This framework would potentially also extend to diaspora communities, indigenous peoples, and citizens of states whose territories are threatened by climate disaster, for whom the issue of statelessness might be of vital concern.

Supervisors: Dr Gabriele Badano and Dr Kieran Durkin.

Project Title: Temporal Capitalism

Abstract: My research project looks at time as a socially distributed resource, one that is distributed unequally across society, and what this means for democracy in a capitalist society. Unequal distribution of time, primarily in the form of labour-time, can affect political participation and influence in a myriad of ways.

Supervisors: Dr Alasia Nuti and Professor Monica Brito Vieira

Research Project: Representation matters: An intersectional feminist rethinking of descriptive representation

Debates about the value of representative democracy and what it means for a politician to represent citizens have preoccupied political philosophers for a long time. Feminist interventions in this debate have often argued that representation should also include a descriptive component, wherein a representative shares an identity or group membership with those they represent - particularly, gender. However, previous feminist political philosophy concerning representation has largely taken "women" to be a coherent and easily delineated group with reasonably homogenous interests. Women who experience intersecting avenues of oppression are thus at risk of being left behind by descriptive representation, if their representatives share a common gender but lack any further insight into their unique position. This is well illustrated by the rise of women in prominent positions in far-right political parties: Does a shared gender mean that such women must be good representatives for all women, even those who are members of groups that such parties attack? If not, on what basis can feminists defend descriptive representation?

By considering representation at two levels - both the individual, or principal/agent level, and the aggregate level - my research seeks to develop an innovative philosophical framework which can defend the significance of descriptive representation while accounting for the intersecting oppressions that many women face. My project will rethink descriptive representation entirely with an intersectional feminist approach, reconciling it with the rise of women in far-right political movements, and providing a coherent argument in favour of a gender diverse legislature that leaves no-one behind.

 

Supervisors: Dr Alasia Nuti and Dr Mike Stuart

Project Title: Structures, Powers, Ethics: the (re)productive temporal circuits of AI knowledge generation

Abstract: My PhD project examines Large Language Models (LLMs) as infrastructures of knowledge (re)production that embed and reactivate historical power relations. I argue that LLMs are not neutral generators of text but temporal apparatuses that restructure past discursive archives into present outputs, perpetuating injustices while crystallising regimes of truth and subjectivity. Drawing on Foucault’s analysis of power/knowledge, Lorenzini’s reformulation of genealogy, and Nuti’s account of historical injustice, I leverage temporality to critique LLMs as machines of historical reproduction: their outputs encode both domination and the traces of past resistance.