My research is focused on the critical analysis of conceptual boundaries between family, society, and state in political philosophy.

Dissertation Research

My dissertation “The Commune Doctrine: Socialist Feminist Criticism Against the Family” studies how feminist and socialist theory reconsiders the modern capitalist distinction between family and state through the idea of commune. By analyzing socialist programs of Fourier, Proudhon, Marx, Engels, Krupskaya, and Kollontai, I trace how the concept of commune evolved across three political movements: the French Revolution, the Paris Commune, and the October Revolution. In early socialist manifestos, speeches, and historical analysis, I identify a tension in the commune theory between two forms of oppression criticism: feminist criticism of family coercion and democratic criticism of state domination. The October Revolution connects these critiques in its political theory of commune.

While feminist theorists today envision a commune as a democratized version of the nuclear family – the commune family, democratic theorists understand it as the commune state, a political ideal stemming from the struggle for the Paris Commune in 1871. Against such depictions of commune in contemporary thinking, I propose a socialist feminist account of the commune that underscores the concept’s systemic critique of capitalism as an institutionalized social order. The dissertation argues that the commune conception moves beyond calling for democracy within separated domains of social reproduction and politics and suggests a political vision for the democratic communalization of private households at the societal level. The research expands an autonomous notion of commune into a political demand for family communalization within society.