My research examines the politics and aesthetics of protest. My book Unruly Acts, summarized below, draws from resources in ordinary language philosophy, theories of performativity, and democratic thought to develop a performative theory of protest that accounts for its normative and political conditions of possibility. My other work at the moment considers the role of visual media such as photographs and videos in galvanizing social change. I am also interested in rhetoric, the politics of language, and spatial politics.
My work has also been published in Political Theory, Theory & Event, European Journal of Political Theory, Perspectives on Politics, Space & Polity, and the Oxford Handbook on Rhetoric and Political Theory (eds., Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar and Keith Topper).
Unruly Acts: Protest, Riot, and the Politics of Interpretation (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming)
What counts as a protest? As it is popularly understood, protest is a legitimate means of expressing political grievances. Riots, by contrast, are senseless, violent acts. In this book, I argue that these common understandings of protest and riot overlook the role public audiences play in making sense of street gatherings and, as a result, misunderstand the politics of interpretation central to protest.
Based on original, multimedia archival research about the 1992 Los Angeles Riots / Uprising and the city's 1994 march against Proposition 187, I show that there is nothing essential in a public gathering that makes it a protest. Instead, what we call a protest is simply a gathering which is legible within historically specific ideas of it. The book reconstructs these conventions, explaining that they operate not only physically but also in terms of unity, purpose, and emotional control. Within these terms, protests seem to be gatherings connected to a purposeful group agitating for political change. Public audiences interpreting these gatherings can and often do come to different conclusions about their political legibility, revealing the extent to which protestors and publics share ideas of protest and political agency - and hold a world in common.