ELSA KUGELBERG

I’m a political theorist at the University of Oxford. I hold a Postdoctoral Prize Research Fellowship at Nuffield College.

My research explores what justice requires of the way society is set up in domains that political theory has largely overlooked, including sex, digital life, dating, care work and friendship. I look at how markets and social institutions actually function, identify what people need from them, and ask what those needs demand of the agents who shape them, whether these are states, corporations, or digital platforms.

My book, under review at Oxford University Press, develops this approach for the sexual sphere. Liberals have long argued that sex is a private matter, subject at most to requirements of consent and toleration. I argue this is insufficient. The same commitments liberals apply to education, work, and public life apply here too: institutions and markets should provide adequate opportunities, enable people to stand as equals, and not exclude anyone. The book works out what this means in relation to sex and intimacy, drawing on feminist theory, sociology, economics, computer science, and cases ranging from online dating to demographic change.

A second strand of my research examines what happens when tech firms enter social institutions. Dating apps have restructured how people meet partners. Autonomous vehicles will likely transform how people move through shared public space. AI companions are beginning to replace human participants in friendships, therapy and intimate relationships. In each case, firms acquire forms of power that existing political and regulatory frameworks were not designed to address. I develop the concepts needed to understand and evaluate these new configurations of power.

A third strand concerns how social change affects what we can expect of people and institutions. Social norms shape what options people can see, what choices are costly, and what plans are feasible. When norms shift through technological disruption, public health crises, or cultural transformation, the terms on which people’s situations should be assessed shift as well. This work explores how a commitment to justice should respond to these changes.

My research has been published or is forthcoming in ‘Journal of Business Ethics‘, ‘American Political Science Review’, ‘Politics, Philosophy & Economics‘, ‘European Journal of Political Theory’, and ‘Journal of Medical Ethics’. You can read the abstracts here.

I am a member of Oxford Center for the Study of Social Justice and affiliated with the Machine Intelligence and Normative Theory Lab at Australian National University, and the Ethical Dating Online research network.

I received my DPhil (PhD) in Politics from the University of Oxford in November 2023. My dissertation, Just Sex, was awarded the Oxford DPIR’s 2023–24 prize for the best doctoral thesis in Political Theory. My doctoral research was supervised by Zofia Stemplowska and Jonathan Wolff and generously funded by the United Kingdom Arts and Humanities Research Council. In addition to the University of Oxford, I was trained at Stanford University’s Center for Ethics in Society, London School of Economics’s Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method (MSc Philosophy and Public Policy), and Uppsala Universitet (BSocSci Politics and Law). I spent the year 2025 on parental leave.

I am a contributing writer for Scandinavia’s largest morning paper, Dagens Nyheter, where my columns, editorials, essays, and critique have regularly appeared since 2013. Before I started my DPhil, I was an editor at a publisher focused on popular philosophy and science. I have also worked as a political advisor and speechwriter in the Swedish Parliament, focusing in particular on foreign affairs, defence policy, and the European Union. Before that I was a trainee at the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs.

My CV and academic references can be provided on request. You can contact me at elsa.kugelberg[at]politics.ox.ac.uk.