PhD students

Supervisors: Dr Martin O’Neill and Dr Gabriele Badano

Research Project: Natural Resources Justice and Capabilities

This project investigates how rights to natural resources should be redistributed among individuals at the global level. Access to natural resources is vital for the satisfaction of basic human needs, starting from survival purposes. Every individual, in order to survive and to flourish, must have access to different natural resources throughout her life (i.e. water, air, land, sunshine). Therefore, since natural resources are necessary drivers for survival as well as for a flourishing existence, a theory of justice ought to regulate rights to their redistribution among individuals and communities.

The main aim of the research is to ground and defend a new theoretical framework to address this issue, and to solve existing shortcomings in current theories of natural resources justice (both global theories of justice and territorial rights theories). It does so by relying on the concept of capabilities, theorised by Sen, as what a theory of redistributive justice should strive to equalise. This approach has not yet been applied to the natural resources debate in a comprehensive way. By applying the concept of capabilities to this debate, issues such as the intrinsic value of the environment, can be addressed from a different perspective, rather than the one adopted by current theories of natural resources justice.

Supervisors: Alan Thomas

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

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.

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 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.