Refereed Publications
Forthcoming. "'Silence or Secrecy with Her Finger on Her Mouth': Jeremy Bentham's Other Model of Visibility and Power." Political Theory.
Best known for his Panopticon prison designs, Jeremy Bentham has long been associated with surveillance as a tool for social control. To recover Bentham’s sensitivity to power relations in his approach to publicity, I examine a different model of visibility and power in his manuscripts: his designs for the Sotimion, a residence for unmarried, pregnant women. What I call the “soteric model” would have enabled residents to evade social censure while continuing to meet with friends, family, and even lovers. By comparing the Sotimion to eighteenth-century charitable institutions and Bentham’s discussions of panoptic institutions for women, I illuminate the Sotimion’s distinctiveness while acknowledging that it would have had normalizing effects for residents from lower socioeconomic classes. While the Panopticon has come to embody Bentham’s commitment to publicity, applying the soteric model to Bentham’s theory of public opinion enables us to better appreciate his commitment to secrecy for protecting critics of government abuses from retribution.
2020. "Observed without Sympathy: Adam Smith on Inequality and Spectatorship." American Journal of Political Science 64 (4): 1034-1046.
Responding to socioeconomic inequality and the decline of political participation, theorists of “audience democracy” emphasize citizens’ spectatorship of political leaders but neglect how citizens experience being watched themselves. I turn to Adam Smith's arguments about the effects of inequality on spectatorship, highlighting his criticisms of the public's disdain for people living in poverty. By comparing Smith's arguments about misperceptions of people living in poverty to his discussions of an innocent man accused of a crime, I show how mistaken spectators demoralize even morally judicious individuals. I also expand on an example of unjust censure that Smith suggests but does not discuss in detail: the social shame directed at a survivor of rape. I uses Smith's insights to reflect on the social and interpersonal dynamics of surveillance that render contemporary welfare programs degrading for many participants and help transform socioeconomic inequality into political inequality.
A more in-depth summary of this article can be read here.
Best known for his Panopticon prison designs, Jeremy Bentham has long been associated with surveillance as a tool for social control. To recover Bentham’s sensitivity to power relations in his approach to publicity, I examine a different model of visibility and power in his manuscripts: his designs for the Sotimion, a residence for unmarried, pregnant women. What I call the “soteric model” would have enabled residents to evade social censure while continuing to meet with friends, family, and even lovers. By comparing the Sotimion to eighteenth-century charitable institutions and Bentham’s discussions of panoptic institutions for women, I illuminate the Sotimion’s distinctiveness while acknowledging that it would have had normalizing effects for residents from lower socioeconomic classes. While the Panopticon has come to embody Bentham’s commitment to publicity, applying the soteric model to Bentham’s theory of public opinion enables us to better appreciate his commitment to secrecy for protecting critics of government abuses from retribution.
2020. "Observed without Sympathy: Adam Smith on Inequality and Spectatorship." American Journal of Political Science 64 (4): 1034-1046.
Responding to socioeconomic inequality and the decline of political participation, theorists of “audience democracy” emphasize citizens’ spectatorship of political leaders but neglect how citizens experience being watched themselves. I turn to Adam Smith's arguments about the effects of inequality on spectatorship, highlighting his criticisms of the public's disdain for people living in poverty. By comparing Smith's arguments about misperceptions of people living in poverty to his discussions of an innocent man accused of a crime, I show how mistaken spectators demoralize even morally judicious individuals. I also expand on an example of unjust censure that Smith suggests but does not discuss in detail: the social shame directed at a survivor of rape. I uses Smith's insights to reflect on the social and interpersonal dynamics of surveillance that render contemporary welfare programs degrading for many participants and help transform socioeconomic inequality into political inequality.
A more in-depth summary of this article can be read here.
Current Book Project
Seeing and Being Seen: Toward a Liberal Democratic Theory of Spectatorship
In 2018, America learned that the electoral campaign of the first reality-TV star President had microtargeted potential voters with personalized ads using vast troves of data improperly collected from social media. The scandal revealed the hidden infrastructure of today’s digital media environment; using social media, we watch and contribute to democratic politics while simultaneously being subject to surveillance–––from each other, from private companies, and from political actors. In turn, the data collected about us determines what we see. To capture the centrality of spectatorship in our politics, democratic theorists have advanced the notion of “audience democracy”; some even propose that the public can harness the power of their collective gaze to influence political leaders. Can the people exert power over political leaders by watching them, or are spectators subject to the power of those they watch? How does the ubiquity of surveillance affect the people’s experiences as political spectators and participants?
In my book manuscript, I show how these questions, though made newly urgent by contemporary technology, can be answered by examining the philosophical foundations of liberal democracy. By retrieving approaches to the politics of spectatorship in the works of Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, and Jeremy Bentham, I conceptualize spectatorship as a socially embedded, multidirectional process that includes experiences of surveillance. Whereas many theorists of audience democracy emphasize the visual and affective dimensions of spectatorship, engaging with these thinkers draws our attention to the political actors and social factors, like different forms of inequality, that shape experiences of seeing and being seen. The politically and socioeconomically eminent often benefit from a particularly attentive and admiring public audience, while unjust public scrutiny is easily directed toward relatively vulnerable members of the community. Democratic freedom requires not only opportunities of observing, judging, and electing political leadership but also protections of the individual’s ability to control the terms of her own publicity.
In 2018, America learned that the electoral campaign of the first reality-TV star President had microtargeted potential voters with personalized ads using vast troves of data improperly collected from social media. The scandal revealed the hidden infrastructure of today’s digital media environment; using social media, we watch and contribute to democratic politics while simultaneously being subject to surveillance–––from each other, from private companies, and from political actors. In turn, the data collected about us determines what we see. To capture the centrality of spectatorship in our politics, democratic theorists have advanced the notion of “audience democracy”; some even propose that the public can harness the power of their collective gaze to influence political leaders. Can the people exert power over political leaders by watching them, or are spectators subject to the power of those they watch? How does the ubiquity of surveillance affect the people’s experiences as political spectators and participants?
In my book manuscript, I show how these questions, though made newly urgent by contemporary technology, can be answered by examining the philosophical foundations of liberal democracy. By retrieving approaches to the politics of spectatorship in the works of Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, and Jeremy Bentham, I conceptualize spectatorship as a socially embedded, multidirectional process that includes experiences of surveillance. Whereas many theorists of audience democracy emphasize the visual and affective dimensions of spectatorship, engaging with these thinkers draws our attention to the political actors and social factors, like different forms of inequality, that shape experiences of seeing and being seen. The politically and socioeconomically eminent often benefit from a particularly attentive and admiring public audience, while unjust public scrutiny is easily directed toward relatively vulnerable members of the community. Democratic freedom requires not only opportunities of observing, judging, and electing political leadership but also protections of the individual’s ability to control the terms of her own publicity.