Current research

Work in progress

These are the projects currently under active work — the draft manuscript first, then manuscripts under review, then working papers. Each one names a working title, the philosophical question it is trying to answer, and the expected output. Together they show where the programme is being extended right now, rather than what it has already produced. Published articles are listed under Publications; other drafts under Research Notes.

Project 01 · Working title

When Institutions Stop Answering Back

The principal manuscript currently in draft. When institutional reasoning is delegated to automated procedures, answerability is not eliminated but silently relocated — and often to a site that cannot in fact bear it. The manuscript identifies that site, gives it a name, and shows why nominal oversight arrangements frequently leave the underlying gap intact.

Central philosophical question

Where in an institution must answerability be borne once parts of its reasoning have been absorbed into automated procedures — and what does it take for that site to remain occupied?

Expected output

Draft manuscript, 2026; companion paper on typologies of answerability failure.

Project 02 · Working title

Standing Is Not an Ordering

The partition thesis distinguishes the question of who counts morally from the question of how those admitted are to be ordered against one another. Ontocentric information ethics is used as the maximal test case: even the most inclusive standing criterion cannot, by itself, supply an internal principle of priority. The manuscript is under review and is being sharpened against objections from moral-status theorists.

Central philosophical question

Under what conditions can criteria of moral standing generate an internal ordering — and when do they leave the ordering problem structurally unresolved?

Expected output

Journal article (under review, 2026); follow-up paper on standing and ordering in AI moral-status debates.

Project 03 · Working title

Comparative Desire and Social Violence

Platform environments do not merely display inequality — they format it as entitlement whose frustration takes a recognisable, and monetisable, affective shape. The paper develops a philosophical account of how comparative entitlements are formed, and of the pathway from platform-mediated comparison, through grievance, to social violence at scale. Now published in Philosophy & Social Criticism.

Central philosophical question

How does infrastructural comparison generate entitlements whose frustration is structurally converted into grievance — and under what conditions does that conversion scale into social violence?

Expected output

Journal article (Philosophy & Social Criticism, 2026); book-length treatment of post-mimetic relationality as a general social configuration.

Project 04 · Working title

Second-Order Provenance

First-order provenance tracks where data came from. Second-order provenance tracks where the normative orderings that make those data matter came from — how a threshold, ranking, or category was authored, licensed, and sustained. The project is developing a framework under which institutions can be audited at that second level rather than only at the level of inputs.

Central philosophical question

What would it take for an institution to own not only the data it uses, but the normative orderings under which those data are taken to matter?

Expected output

Working paper; operational audit framework co-developed with ClaimBuilder.ai; workshop paper on institutional recordkeeping as moral infrastructure.