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 states, corporations, or digital platforms.
My book, under review at Oxford University Press, develops this approach for the sexual sphere. Liberals have long held that sex is a private matter, subject at most to requirements of consent and toleration. I argue that this is insufficient. The same commitments liberals apply to education, work, and public life apply here too: institutions should provide adequate opportunities, enable people to stand as equals, and exclude no one. The book works out what this means for and intimacy, drawing on feminist theory, sociology, economics, computer science, and on cases ranging from online dating to demographic change.
A second strand examines what happens when tech firms enter social institutions. Dating apps have restructured how people meet partners. Autonomous vehicles will likely transform how we 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. I am a research affiliate at the Machine Intelligence and Normative Theory Lab at Australian National University, and the Ethical Dating Online research network at the University of Leeds’ Center for Sex, Love and Relationships.
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.