Works in Progress
The Nature of Displacement
The philosophical literature on displacement has developed along two parallel tracks: a categories conversation concerned with who counts as a refugee and what protections are owed, and a harm conversation concerned with what is lost when people are forced to leave their homes. Both conversations presuppose an answer to a more fundamental question that neither has asked: what displacement itself consists in as a phenomenon? Drawing on philosophy of action, phenomenology, and recent work in inhabited environments, I argue that displacement is the disruption of spatial agency: the constitutive relationship between an agent and the environment that simultaneously enables and constrains how agency can be realized. Spatial agency comprises three mutually reinforcing components—temporal coordination, legibility, and fluency—whose mutual weakening produces a shift from fluent to cognitively loaded agency. This account is descriptively neutral: displacement marks a genuine and significant disruption, but is not intrinsically wrongful. The normative weight attaching to particular instances of displacement derives not from the phenomenon itself but from the causal story that generated it and the conditions under which reconstitution must occur. I apply the account to three cases, showing that all three involve the same underlying structural disruption, differing in degree rather than kind. This unifying account provides the descriptive foundation that both conversations have always presupposed, explains why existing accounts are limited to their paradigm cases, and enables recognition of displacement across new cases without requiring that each be argued for independently.
Homemaking and Political Agency
Political philosophy has long treated the home as a private refuge from politics, making it a site of economic reproduction or distributive concern, but not a locus of political life. Feminist political philosophy has challenged this picture by exposing the home as a site of domination and contested privacy. Yet even the feminist tradition has tended to undervalue what happens inside the home, focusing on housework as a burden rather than homemaking as a practice. This paper argues that homemaking, the activity of cultivating, maintaining, and caring for one's own space, is not merely a form of preservation or political resistance, but a constitutive condition of political agency itself. Drawing on Iris Marion Young's distinction between housework and homemaking, bell hooks's account of the home as political refuge, and a positive account of homemaking as world-building practice, I argue that the home is not merely the backdrop against which political agency is exercised, but one of the primary sites through which it is sustained. This has significant implications for how we understand political marginalization. Those denied stable, adequate homes are not simply materially disadvantaged, but are denied the conditions under which political agency can be cultivated and maintained.