Research profile

Institutional legitimacy, representation, and human agency.

People's bodies, communities, and experiences shape how they understand the world, so protecting their freedom takes more than rights on paper. Legitimate institutions must create practical conditions in which people can understand rules, contest classifications, give testimony, participate in collective reasoning, and retain authorship over their own lives.

Working question

Under what conditions may a person, institution, or technical system rightfully claim authority over another person's freedom, identity, knowledge, property, labor, data, or conduct?

AI governance

Technological citizenship

Access, explanation, privacy, human oversight, education, and meaningful participation in an AI-mediated society.

Explore the questions
  1. Who benefits when algorithms help set the price of a home?
  2. What evidence should be required before automated monitoring is called “safety”?
  3. How can a resident challenge a decision made about them by a system they cannot inspect?

Art and authorship

Truthful representation

Disclosure, provenance, attribution, audience autonomy, and the ethics of representing creative labor.

Explore the questions
  1. How should artists tell audiences when they used AI?
  2. Who deserves credit when human intention and machine output meet?
  3. How can audiences assess provenance without losing wonder?

Political economy

Labor, data, and reciprocity

What institutions owe artists, testers, users, and communities whose participation creates value.

Explore the questions
  1. Who should own the data we create in daily life?
  2. When companies profit from our data or creative work, what do they owe us?
  3. Should we be able to say no when a company wants to collect or use our data?

Institutions and evidence

Whose account counts?

How institutions record people's experiences, make decisions, and respond when someone disputes the record.

Explore the questions
  1. When an official record and a person's account differ, who gets believed?
  2. How can someone correct a record that gets the facts wrong?
  3. How do we know whether an institution actually fixed a problem?

Research in practice

Housing, records, and the right to question power.

My ongoing housing work brings these questions into a place where decisions about rules, data, and remedies affect people's homes.

Read about the housing inquiry →