Job Market Candidates
Italo Alves, PhD
Email: ialves@luc.edu
Website: italoalves.com/
Research Areas: Critical Theory, Social Philosophy, Continental Aesthetics
Dissertation Director: Dr. Joy Gordon
Dissertation Title: The Social Aesthetics of Recognition
My dissertation elucidates how the aesthetic aspect of social life, particularly self-presentation and style, offers insight into emerging moral and political claims that are not yet discursively articulated. It does so through a critical reading of political philosophy’s history of suspicion toward the aesthetic, which spans from Plato to Rousseau, Benjamin to Schmitt. It argues that the “critique of aestheticization,” according to which aesthetic concerns are ultimately detrimental to political organization and moral articulation, obfuscates the social implications of aesthetic expression. Since we apprehend social reality fundamentally through its aesthetic expressions, an account is needed of how “the aesthetic” must enter social-philosophical discourse. I call this account “social aesthetics.” Chapter 1 dissects the critique of aestheticization, arguing that it presupposes an unwarranted dualism between appearance and reality. Chapter 2 mobilizes alternative readings from late nineteenth and early twentieth-century German sociological thought—particularly Simmel and Kracauer—to argue for theoretical attention to “surface-level phenomena.” Chapter 3 reconstructs Axel Honneth’s philosophy of recognition, exploring its potential to explain how aesthetic expression conveys moral intentions and preferences. Chapter 4 demonstrates this connection through a case study of “mass dandyism,” the practice whereby lower-class groups like the sapeurs of Congo, the pachucos from Los Angeles, and Brazil’s cangaceiros appropriate upper-class style to express claims for recognition when discursive political channels are obstructed.
Miguel Cerón-Becerra, PhD
Email: miguelcbh@gmail.com, mceronbecerra@luc.edu
Website: https://www.linkedin.com/in/miguelcbh/
Research Areas: Critical Theory, Affect Theory, Migration Studies
Dissertation Director: Dr. Johanna Oksala
Dissertation Title: Migrant Domestic Workers as Disposable Kin in Global Capitalism’s Care Economy
This dissertation examines the economic, emotional, and relational harms experienced by migrant domestic workers under global capitalism. These harms are systemic, arising from labor and migration regimes designed to sustain capital accumulation in the care economy. Affluent regions benefit from the labor of migrant domestic workers at the cost of serious damage to their fundamental relationships. The result is the erosion of workers' kinship ties, rendering them "disposable kin" for those who profit economically and emotionally from their labor.
The study is organized into four chapters. The first explores how global care chains (GCCs) are structured through labor and migration regimes that prioritize employers' access to cheap care work. The second shows how undocumented domestic work serves as a fundamental economic foundation for affluent regions of the globe, even as its contribution is officially measured as insignificant by dominant econometric methods. The third investigates the commodification of affect in domestic work, demonstrating how this process produces profound affective alienation and relational losses for undocumented workers across both workplace and family life. The fourth examines how these harms reinforce racial hierarchies, arguing that GCCs function as neocolonial structures that normalize the disposability of workers' constitutive relationships.
In summary, this dissertation offers a structural analysis of how the transnational domestic labor market sustains the prosperity of wealthy regions at the cost of eroding the relationships essential to the well-being of people in the global periphery.
LaChanda Davis, PhD
Email: lachanda.davis@csueastbay.edu
Dissertation Director: Dr. Jacqueline Scott
Dissertation Title: Philosophical Purification as Liberation and Transformation
This study utilizes Plato’s conception of purification as a diagnostic tool to examine contemporary issues of police brutality and political violence. Within this context, I aim to treat the multiple tensions that arise with the question of living a good life. What does it mean to live and what does it mean to live a good life within constraints that magnify fear, anxiety, and despair?
I argue that philosophical purification involves ‘aporia’ (perplexity; difficulty; confusion; loss; or puzzlement) in both a literal and generative sense. Moreover, the multiple aporias that arise cannot be reconciled by merely performing a religious rite of purification or providing an argument about how one should live, die, or commune with the divine. Consequently, I leverage the Greek term ‘aporia’ to illustrate that philosophical purification is an ongoing and edifying practice rather than a closed process that terminates in purity or wisdom.
My interpretation of Plato’s conception of purification departs from traditional readings in five ways. First, I argue that one must shift their orientation towards an affirmation of life rather than a sanitized view of living. Second, purification involves an attempt to remove that which impedes progress towards self-improvement, not a complete uprooting of fear, shame, or ignorance. Third, the practice incorporates a striving to attain that which cannot fully be realized. Fourth, the striving is sustained by critical hope, collective agency, and collective discourse. Lastly, philosophical purification is liberatory and transformative in scope.
Andrew Krema, PhD
Email: rkrema@luc.edu
Website: https://luc.academia.edu/RichardAndrewKrema
Research Areas: Phenomenology, Mind, and Value
Dissertation Director: Dr. Johanna Oksala and Dr. Sebastian Luft (Paderborn University)
Dissertation Title: Valuation. A Hussserlian Account.
Human life is permeated by values: we do not merely have a world of things and facts, but also objects are good or bad, beautiful or ugly, sacred or profane, useful or useless, etc. My dissertation asks why we ascribe value to the sorts of things that we do. It takes a phenomenological approach, meaning that I focus on the way in which we experience valuableness in the world to study values themselves. Phenomenology is a movement in philosophy from the early 20th century, founded by Edmund Husserl, whose theory of value I propose. Although Husserl founded the phenomenological movement, his phenomenology of value was not well known. This dissertation offers a critical restructuring of his theory of value, which sheds novel insights to central questions in value theory. My contention is that Husserl’s first-person phenomenological approach to values challenges many dominant assumptions and theories of the ontology, normativity, and experience of values. I claim that values are primarily a certain sort of object, not qualities; that value experience can under certain circumstances be perceptual but is not per se perceptual; that the normativity of value judgments is traced back to the contents of pre-predicative value intuitions; and that attentive value experience entails affective activity. This dissertation ultimately sheds light on the way in which our affective experience binds us to objects and each other. We can through intuitive feeling and cognition, discover a space of reasons for valuing an object, a space of reasons bound up between myself and the world.
Italo Alves, PhD
Email: ialves@luc.edu
Website: italoalves.com/
Research Areas: Critical Theory, Social Philosophy, Continental Aesthetics
Dissertation Director: Dr. Joy Gordon
Dissertation Title: The Social Aesthetics of Recognition
My dissertation elucidates how the aesthetic aspect of social life, particularly self-presentation and style, offers insight into emerging moral and political claims that are not yet discursively articulated. It does so through a critical reading of political philosophy’s history of suspicion toward the aesthetic, which spans from Plato to Rousseau, Benjamin to Schmitt. It argues that the “critique of aestheticization,” according to which aesthetic concerns are ultimately detrimental to political organization and moral articulation, obfuscates the social implications of aesthetic expression. Since we apprehend social reality fundamentally through its aesthetic expressions, an account is needed of how “the aesthetic” must enter social-philosophical discourse. I call this account “social aesthetics.” Chapter 1 dissects the critique of aestheticization, arguing that it presupposes an unwarranted dualism between appearance and reality. Chapter 2 mobilizes alternative readings from late nineteenth and early twentieth-century German sociological thought—particularly Simmel and Kracauer—to argue for theoretical attention to “surface-level phenomena.” Chapter 3 reconstructs Axel Honneth’s philosophy of recognition, exploring its potential to explain how aesthetic expression conveys moral intentions and preferences. Chapter 4 demonstrates this connection through a case study of “mass dandyism,” the practice whereby lower-class groups like the sapeurs of Congo, the pachucos from Los Angeles, and Brazil’s cangaceiros appropriate upper-class style to express claims for recognition when discursive political channels are obstructed.
Miguel Cerón-Becerra, PhD
Email: miguelcbh@gmail.com, mceronbecerra@luc.edu
Website: https://www.linkedin.com/in/miguelcbh/
Research Areas: Critical Theory, Affect Theory, Migration Studies
Dissertation Director: Dr. Johanna Oksala
Dissertation Title: Migrant Domestic Workers as Disposable Kin in Global Capitalism’s Care Economy
This dissertation examines the economic, emotional, and relational harms experienced by migrant domestic workers under global capitalism. These harms are systemic, arising from labor and migration regimes designed to sustain capital accumulation in the care economy. Affluent regions benefit from the labor of migrant domestic workers at the cost of serious damage to their fundamental relationships. The result is the erosion of workers' kinship ties, rendering them "disposable kin" for those who profit economically and emotionally from their labor.
The study is organized into four chapters. The first explores how global care chains (GCCs) are structured through labor and migration regimes that prioritize employers' access to cheap care work. The second shows how undocumented domestic work serves as a fundamental economic foundation for affluent regions of the globe, even as its contribution is officially measured as insignificant by dominant econometric methods. The third investigates the commodification of affect in domestic work, demonstrating how this process produces profound affective alienation and relational losses for undocumented workers across both workplace and family life. The fourth examines how these harms reinforce racial hierarchies, arguing that GCCs function as neocolonial structures that normalize the disposability of workers' constitutive relationships.
In summary, this dissertation offers a structural analysis of how the transnational domestic labor market sustains the prosperity of wealthy regions at the cost of eroding the relationships essential to the well-being of people in the global periphery.
LaChanda Davis, PhD
Email: lachanda.davis@csueastbay.edu
Dissertation Director: Dr. Jacqueline Scott
Dissertation Title: Philosophical Purification as Liberation and Transformation
This study utilizes Plato’s conception of purification as a diagnostic tool to examine contemporary issues of police brutality and political violence. Within this context, I aim to treat the multiple tensions that arise with the question of living a good life. What does it mean to live and what does it mean to live a good life within constraints that magnify fear, anxiety, and despair?
I argue that philosophical purification involves ‘aporia’ (perplexity; difficulty; confusion; loss; or puzzlement) in both a literal and generative sense. Moreover, the multiple aporias that arise cannot be reconciled by merely performing a religious rite of purification or providing an argument about how one should live, die, or commune with the divine. Consequently, I leverage the Greek term ‘aporia’ to illustrate that philosophical purification is an ongoing and edifying practice rather than a closed process that terminates in purity or wisdom.
My interpretation of Plato’s conception of purification departs from traditional readings in five ways. First, I argue that one must shift their orientation towards an affirmation of life rather than a sanitized view of living. Second, purification involves an attempt to remove that which impedes progress towards self-improvement, not a complete uprooting of fear, shame, or ignorance. Third, the practice incorporates a striving to attain that which cannot fully be realized. Fourth, the striving is sustained by critical hope, collective agency, and collective discourse. Lastly, philosophical purification is liberatory and transformative in scope.
Andrew Krema, PhD
Email: rkrema@luc.edu
Website: https://luc.academia.edu/RichardAndrewKrema
Research Areas: Phenomenology, Mind, and Value
Dissertation Director: Dr. Johanna Oksala and Dr. Sebastian Luft (Paderborn University)
Dissertation Title: Valuation. A Hussserlian Account.
Human life is permeated by values: we do not merely have a world of things and facts, but also objects are good or bad, beautiful or ugly, sacred or profane, useful or useless, etc. My dissertation asks why we ascribe value to the sorts of things that we do. It takes a phenomenological approach, meaning that I focus on the way in which we experience valuableness in the world to study values themselves. Phenomenology is a movement in philosophy from the early 20th century, founded by Edmund Husserl, whose theory of value I propose. Although Husserl founded the phenomenological movement, his phenomenology of value was not well known. This dissertation offers a critical restructuring of his theory of value, which sheds novel insights to central questions in value theory. My contention is that Husserl’s first-person phenomenological approach to values challenges many dominant assumptions and theories of the ontology, normativity, and experience of values. I claim that values are primarily a certain sort of object, not qualities; that value experience can under certain circumstances be perceptual but is not per se perceptual; that the normativity of value judgments is traced back to the contents of pre-predicative value intuitions; and that attentive value experience entails affective activity. This dissertation ultimately sheds light on the way in which our affective experience binds us to objects and each other. We can through intuitive feeling and cognition, discover a space of reasons for valuing an object, a space of reasons bound up between myself and the world.