Research
My current work focuses on how developments in reproductive medicine and the growth of markets in associated services are changing the face of kinship. Pre-existing forms of legal recognition of filiation are increasingly contradicted by new family forms and the multiplication of those involved in the production of children. I am investigating how kinship is being transformed and attempting to elucidate the resulting legal, cultural, and political pressure points produced. Surrogacy is a focal point for this analysis as it occupies a specific and particularly fraught place in contemporary transformations of kinship. Surrogacy breaks the assumed continuum of genetics, gestation and care wrapped up in parenthood, and contradicts the common legal principle and cultural presumption that a woman who gives birth to a child is its mother. Surrogacy and its commodification are therefore in tension with established legal and cultural assumptions, and while it is growing as a practice there is little agreement about its implications for the future of filiation.
From 2014 until 2023, I was a member of the interdisciplinary Guilt Working Group that met at Birkbeck College, University of London. Across this decade, I also worked extensively with Andreas Hess (University College Dublin) on manuscripts in the Harvard Archives, bringing to light the lectures on political obligation produced by the Harvard political theorist Judith Shklar. This work was published with Yale University Press in 2019.
Ph.D. supervision
I currently co-supervise 3 postgraduate research students jointly with colleagues at Birkbeck College, Univeristy of London:
Kanika Gauba, ‘Partition’s Constitution: law, violence, nation’, begun January 2022 (Birkbeck studentship)
Joy Brooks-Gilzeane, ‘A historical analysis of the mobilisation and resistance of black women against racial, gender, and class-based oppression in the UK and France’, commenced October 2022 (ESRC studentship)
Daniel Gibbons, 'Prosthetic or Supervisor?: AI and the Remaking of the British State’, commenced October 2023 (ESRC studentship)
Previous Ph.D. students include:
James Driver, ‘Wittgenstein and Habermas on the philosophy of language’, awarded 2005.
Peter Harvie, ‘Multi-Agency Working in Domestic Violence’, awarded 2008.
Dave Broomhall, ‘Foucault’s ethics’, awarded 2010.
Jessica Daggers, ‘Solving’ Social Problems with Markets and Measurement: a Critical Study of Social Impact Investing’, awarded March 2019.
Sreenanti Banerjee, ‘The Governmentality of Population Debates in Postcolonial India’, begun October 2015, awarded July 2020.