Current & Recent Funded Research Projects
Current Projects
Name | Funder | Description | Principal Investigator |
---|---|---|---|
The Communicative Mind |
UKRI (Future Leaders Fellowship) |
The project will use the tools of philosophy, linguistics, and psychology to develop a new account of the developmental relationship between 'mindreading' and communication. | Richard Moore |
Empowering Young Voices: performing poetry as a practice of social justice | British Academy/ Leverhulme |
Young people (14–24-year-olds) across the UK are increasingly turning to performance poetry as a mode of expression, inspired by poets such as Kae Tempest, George the Poet, and Amanda Gorman. While there is evidence of performance poetry playing a role in improving literacy, creativity and expression, there is little or no discussion of the power of performance poetry to enable marginalized young people to discover their voices in matters of social justice. In collaboration with leading performance poets and youth organisation, Coventry Boys and Girls Club, our research focuses on the power of performance poetry in empowering young people who struggle to have their voices heard. |
Karen Simecek Andrew Cooper (Co-I) |
Rethinking the Philosophy of Terrorism |
AHRC (Research Network Grant) |
This project brings together philosophers, terrorism researchers and non-academic stakeholders in a joint research network. The main objectives of this network are to initiate a cross-disciplinary dialogue between theoretical philosophy and terrorism studies, establish the metaphysics and epistemology of terrorism and counterterrorism as new and valuable fields of research, and influence official thinking about terrorism and counterterrorism. This is the first research network of its kind. |
Quassim Cassam Richard English (Co-I, QUB) |
The London Post-Kantian Seminar |
AHRC (Research Network Grant) |
The LPKS exists to promote and celebrate research in Post-Kantian philosophy across the United Kingdom, with a special focus on London as a centre of international collaboration. Our goal is to provide a hub for experienced scholars, early career researchers and post-graduate students to share conversation and work together on world-leading research. The LPKS hosts a regular workshop series that rotates through philosophy departments across London, a work-in-progress session for graduate students, and an annual public talk at Senate House. Participating institutions include Birkbeck, UCL, Kingston, Roehampton, KCL, Royal Holloway and Warwick. |
Andrew Cooper (Co-I) |
Exploitation and Procedural Justice: An Experimental Assessment |
British Academy/ Leverhulme |
When is a transaction fair? Some philosophers and economists defend substantive accounts of transactional fairness, which claim transactions are fair when the benefits they provide conform to a particular distributive criterion. Others defend procedural accounts which do not define transactional fairness with reference to any particular distribution of benefits. Instead, they argue that transactions are unfair when the distribution is affected by some kind of procedural flaw. When is a transaction exploitative? Some accounts of exploitation characterise it as tantamount to unfair transaction, so that transactions are exploitative if and only if they are unfair. Other accounts argue that exploitation involves something more than mere unfairness, such as domination, the exercise of power, or some form of intentionality. Philosophers and economists have provided numerous normative and theoretical arguments defending both sides of these two debates. However, their arguments have mostly been made from the armchair. Little attention has been paid to the normative views actually held by individuals in the economy. We aim to fill this lacuna by empirically examining subjects’ attitudes towards (a) transactional fairness and (b) exploitation, in an experimental setting. |
Ben Ferguson |
AHRC |
In less than two decades social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and YouTube have fundamentally changed how societies discuss ideas of political and social importance. Much political debate is now taking place online and even traditional forums of political debate – such as the news media and parliament – are shaped by the social media. Because this new digital public sphere offers both benefits and challenges for democracy, it has become clear that social media regulation plays an important role in the future of democracy. But what should regulation aim at? Our collaborative research project on Norms for the New Public Sphere examines the philosophical foundations of a healthy democratic public sphere for the digital age. |
Fabienne Peter |
Recent Projects
Name | Funder | Description | Principal Investigator |
---|---|---|---|
Time: Between Metaphysics and Psychology | AHRC | An Interdisciplinary three-year project lead by Christoph Hoerl (Philosophy, Warwick) and Teresa McCormack (Psychology, Queen's University Belfast). The overarching aim of this project is to provide an empirically informed critical examination of the relationship between our everyday understanding of time, and time as typically understood within modern science. | Christoph Hoerl |
Investigating the Ethics and Politics of Sociability | Leverhulme | The Sociability Project will explore the ethics and politics of sociability, including 1) key notions such as loneliness and the need to belong, which are well-established, but little-analysed ideas in psychology; 2) the duties we have to provide decent social contact to each other; 3) the interpersonal, social rights we may assert; 4) the virtues in being sociable; and 5) the value in being socially included. The Project will analyse the boundaries between social duty and virtue, and will apply an analysis of social rights, duties, and virtues to three specific areas of moral and political concern: 1) sociability and disability; 2) interspecies sociability; and 3) globalized sociability. | Kimberley Brownlee |
Epistemological Pluralism |
Leverhulme (Early Career Fellowship) |
Epistemological Pluralism aims to explain both the commonalities and the differences between the various species of propositional knowledge (including practical and psychological self-knowledge, knowledge of other minds, testimonial, inferential and perceptual knowledge), and to do so in a way which is more in keeping with the workings of our common-sense epistemic concepts than the standard accounts of knowledge currently on offer in the literature. Again, the idea that knowledge should be understood in a forwards-looking way is crucial to this project. | Lucy Campbell |
The Road Not Taken: Kant and Organised Systems |
Leverhulme (Early Career Fellowship) |
This project traces the conceptual origins of biology in eighteenth century natural history, which includes the work of Du Châtelet, Buffon, Haller, Kant, Kielmeyer, Goethe and Schelling. | Andrew Cooper |
Social Human Rights |
AHRC (Network Grant) |
This network aims to bring together leading philosophers of human rights and rising stars to present frontier work on themes related to social rights, including the conceptual terrain, the place of social rights within the standard dichotomy between so-called ‘liberty rights’ and ‘welfare rights’, the defensibility of social rights as human rights, their relevance to distributive justice issues such as equality of opportunity, and their bearing on other branches of political philosophy such as democratic theory. The conference aims both to expand human rights theory and to set an agenda for further research. | Kimberley Brownlee |