PEER-REVIEWED ARTICLES
“The Idea of a Counter-Structure: Rethinking Collective Action against Climate Injustice” [click title for link]
American Political Science Review, October 2026
This article argues that addressing the structural injustices of climate change requires rethinking collective action. Disruptive and prefigurative politics are often treated as separate collective action repertoires, but I argue that a just energy transition requires that they work in tandem. To capture this interaction, I propose the idea of “counter-structural” collective action, in which disruptive protest creates windows of opportunity that prefigurative alternatives can then fill. Through analysis of two UK climate movements, Transition Towns (TTs) and Camps for Climate Action (CCA), I show how activists reconfigure structural elements to build new, carbon-free social and political forms. The theory of counter-structural action provides a framework for assessing the empirical cases. The cases, in turn, illustrate a broader conception of collective action that better reflects the social theory grounding structural injustice. Together, the theory and cases support the dual aims of climate justice: challenging fossil-fuel path dependence and advancing egalitarianism.
“Electoral Democracy and Structural Injustice” [click title for link]
Journal of Social Philosophy, March 2023
Despite the increasing depth and breadth of scholarship on structural injustice, political philosophers have yet to explicitly examine the links between everyday practices of electoral democracy and unjust social structures. This essay argues that three quotidian dimensions of electoral democracy contribute to structural injustice: the competitive party system, norms of compromise, and the dispersion of power. More specifically, I claim that these aspects of electoral democracy contribute to a specific type of structural injustice—the concentration of capital, understood in two ways: as accumulation and as centralization. Capitalist concentration, in turn, facilitates the interpersonal domination that contemporary defenders of electoral democracy seek to minimize.
“White Dominion as Control: On Scientific Management and Racial Capitalism” [click title for link]
Emancipations: A Journal of Critical Social Analysis, May 2022
This essay deepens the analysis of whiteness-as-dominion recently advanced by political theorist Ella Myers. Drawing on W.E.B. Du Bois, Myers focuses on the role that ideas of ownership and possession play in white racial identity. While I am persuaded that ownership and whiteness are cojoined, ownership does not necessarily imply control, although the former may be a prerequisite for the latter. I therefore argue that the idea of white dominion can be enhanced by paying greater attention to practices of racial control. More specifically, I focus on racialized modes of labor control via scientific management, or what recent scholars describe as “whiteness-as-management.” Understanding racial capitalism through the lens of control helps us see the tactics that are used to create and maintain racial identity and dominion.
PUBLIC WRITING
“Trump in Violating the Long-forgotten Guarantee Clause; Minnesotans Should Invoke It” [click title for link]
Minnesota Reformer, Feb. 9, 2026
A republican form of government ties law and liberty together. Arbitrary rule, in contrast, is the very condition that the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence sought to guarantee against. State leaders have good reason to begin invoking that guarantee.
“The Legacy of Mike Davis’s Late Victorian Holocausts” [click title for link]
Jacobin Magazine, Nov. 26, 2022
In Late Victorian Holocausts, Mike Davis showed how late 19th-century state violence and neglect created colonial markets and infrastructures, which, combined with shifting weather patterns, led to astonishingly brutal famines across the Global South. I argue that not only is state violence central to primitive accumulation processes, but so too is state neglect. This is one lesson of Mike Davis's Late Victorian Holocausts.