Dissertation Project: The Force of Habit

Committee: Simone Chambers (Chair), Ryan Balot, Margaret Kohn

As human beings, much of our interaction with the world and with each other is a matter of habit. Our bodily, perceptual, and cognitive behaviour is more often that not repetitive, unreflective, and unconscious. Habits affect how we share space, how we speak to each other, which possibilities seem like live ones to us, how we treat one another, and how we harm each other. Where our habits are circumspect, they can express the bonds of solidarity, trust and mutual concern that allow us to live together as free and equal citizens. And when our habits are heedless and regardless, they enable varieties of indifference, malice, or thoughtlessness that oppress others and deny them standing as equals. For better or worse, habits make up the stuff of citizenship. My dissertation research investigates what democratic justice can mean for a species that is not only rational, articulate, and deliberative, but also thoughtless, mechanical, and embodied. Contemporary democratic theory has much to say about the first three of these of these qualifiers, but very little to say about the latter three. I argue that this omission results in a systematic misunderstanding of political persuasion in general and of democratic self-rule in particular. Against the notion of habit as passive and thoughtless behaviour I defend a notion of habit as situated creativity drawing on the works of the American pragmatists and their French counterparts, Bergson and Deleuze.   

Other Research Projects

Recent projects include a co-authored study on the history of the concept of respect, and a paper under review on the politics of manipulation and new information technologies.