From Black Lives Matter’s efforts to defund the police to the pro-democracy protests in Tahrir Square, these social movements have appeared to spark significant change. But after a few years, many worry that we have simply returned to the status quo. What unites my three projects is an attempt to explore the mechanisms of enduring social change from different methodological frameworks than is often used in political philosophy.

Decolonial Feminism

Saba Mahmood’s work has been hailed as a strong pushback to any feminist theory that denies agency to oppressed people in order to justify paternalism and interventions. Despite this, her work is taken as purely critical, as merely a warning or worse as a philosophical dead end for feminism. My work on Mahmood has been firstly, in my article in Hypatia, “From Opposition to Creativity: Saba Mahmood’s Decolonial Critique of Teleological Futures”, to defend her work as a positive feminist theory. But secondly to think with Mahmood but move beyond her initial framework to think through decolonial social change. I show this in my under review article “Rethinking Saba Mahmood’s Account of ‘Inhabiting a Norm’”. These projects stem from my dissertation and is an attempt to think about Islamic feminist social change.

My earlier work entitled “Change Your Look, Change Your Luck: Religious Self-Transformation and Brute Luck Egalitarianism” in the journal Res Philosophica begins this exploration by arguing that Mahmood’s ethnographic subjects, the Muslim women’s dawa group, force us to rethink not only luck egalitarianism but religious exemptions by the government. I show that this kind of religious self-transformation through changes in habit is located neither solely within the agent nor totally caused by their automatic actions and which makes it impossible to judge exemptions relying on the rule that we only exempt that which is unchosen.

In my Hypatia article I make two claims. The first is that feminists studying women in the Global South only look to practices that register as acts of resistance. Mahmood argues that this focus on resistance both obfuscates and misses out on practices and agency that could build different, but not resistant new norms. Secondly, Mahmood shows us that merely resisting oppressive norms as a tactic is a trap that yields no enduring norms. For enduring social change to happen, not only must we get rid of old norms, but also create new ones. Feminists often worry about trying new norms out because they may end up being oppressive too. Mahmood gives us a “reparative” reading of norms, that we must risk this danger if we are to create norms different than the way we are now.

In my under review article, I argue that Mahmood finds herself in a theoretical dilemma. The first horn is the Orthodox Muslim who argues that any change in Islamic practice toward gender equality as inauthentic. The second is a colonial kind of feminism that sees tradition as antithetical to feminism and Muslim women as essentially oppressed. But using Talal Asad’s work, Mahmood shows Islam to be a capacious, vibrant, heterogenous and internally variable tradition. Mahmood uses ancient Islamic virtue ethics and contemporary Muslim women’s practice to show that the average person can become an expert in piety with embodied practices and training. In both trying to answer the Orthodox Muslim but also push back on the colonial feminist, Mahmood shows the incredible agency women can assert, not when they resist norms, but train in a community called dawa groups in order to “inhabit a norm”. For Mahmood, these women prescriptively and descriptively inhabit frozen, unchanging norms. Feminists such as Serene Khader have criticized this idea of inhabiting a norm as unnecessarily surrendering to conservatism. I argue that Mahmood misses that resistance is not the only way to change a norm. I use Mahmood’s own ethnography to show how social change can happen while not resisting but inhabiting a norm. This work is not merely a solution to a scholarly puzzle. The importance of this work, in going beyond Mahmood, shows how Muslim women can enact liberatory social change. When done through self-transformation and inhabiting the norm by becoming a virtuosic at a norm, other Muslims will see this social change as endogenous to Islam rather than inauthentic.

The Meso-Level of the Political

Since the death of Iris Marion Young and Pierre Bourdieu, phenomena that fall below the structural but above the interpersonal, what I call the meso-level of political life, has receded from philosophy. The torch has been kept lit by a few like, critical phenomenologists such as Lisa Guenther and Alia Al-Saji and political theorists behind the ethnographic turn such as Bernardo Zacka and Lisa Herzog. But no one has more formally and methodologically explored this level nor have they explicitly connected it to social change. I have two papers exploring the concepts that make up this meso-level and show the interesting philosophical work one can do with them. Much empirical and conceptual work has gone into showing how structural power works and therefore also what tools and tactics we can use to fight or change this power. Whether through changing the law, protesting, changing the composition of the supreme court or even revolution, we understand how to make structural change. But the phenomena in the meso-level present us with a different kind of problem. The tactics we use to fight structural problems are mismatched and therefore not effective against meso-level powers. So a larger point of this work is to give us the tools to even “see” phenomena in the meso-level that impact us so that we may begin to construct tactics and tools to tackle these problems

Two methodological frameworks have emerged trying to describe the engine of social change. One position argues that we must concentrate on individuals and moral change, while a second position argues that we should focus on political and structural change. Alex Madva, for example, diagnoses the problem as one of individual implicit bias, and so his solution becomes moral education; Zoë Johnson King argues that social change would involve people subjecting their own beliefs to critical scrutiny; and Robin Zheng argues that change happens when we morally criticize people and hold them accountable. On the other side, Sally Haslanger and Amia Srinivasan argue that this concentration on individualism is wrongheaded and that any real social change must focus on social and structural injustice.

My first paper on this meso-level has been published in the journal Inquiry and is entitled “Proposing an Islamic Virtue Ethics Beyond the Situationist Debates”. It has been shown in psychological experiments that moods induced by our external situations, such as smelling cinnamon buns, have more effect on our behaviour than what is “inside” of us, our character. In this paper in particular, I focus on the worry that our actions can be manipulated by the situational mood. On one level this paper is about using ethnography of the Muslim women’s dawa groups to show how they are able to tackle this problem of the situation’s influence on them. On a secondary level, this paper shows off how these women use meso-level phenomena to help do this work. In this paper I concentrate on three concepts within the meso-level, embodiment, habit, skill and affect. I show how these women train to control their moods by retraining their habits and how they break and create new habits using ritual spaces such as mosques. More interestingly I argue these women counter the manipulation of their moods originating in the environment by scaffolding their own, more virtuous, affects into the environment. Though seemingly mundane, the effect is powerful. These women use others to regulate mood, use what’s called the “Islamic soundscape” in Egypt to anchor their mood, and finally, use their hijabs (veils) as a portable mood-altering technology.

            This second paper on the meso-level is under review and is entitled “The Affordance Account of Relational Autonomy”. Affordances are the necessary connection between a person’s skills/capacities, their material environment and their Wittgensteinian way of life. Over twenty years, the relational autonomy literature has had two entrenched positions, internalism and externalism. Internalism claims that psychological factors, skills and capacity are sufficient as the standard for autonomy while externalists argue that an enabling social structure is also necessary. On one level, this paper uses affordances as a tool that connects the internal, skills and capacities, with the external, the material environment and ways of life, to argue that inside and outside are necessarily connected and therefore the external is necessary for autonomy. But I also criticize externalists for assuming that the political structure exhausts what is “external” in order to draw attention to phenomena in the meso-level and their effect on autonomy. On a second level, this paper shows the schema of concepts that make up the meso-level which center around affordances: embodiment, practices, skills, capacities, habits, moods, ways of life, ontogenesis (early development) and ecology. The variety of work these concepts can do include connecting the meso-level to the structural to give a finer grade explanation of phenomena that often get easily glossed over. Iris Marion Young shows us how something mundane as the difference between men and women’s throwing ability is actually connected to larger structures like patriarchy but also habits, skills and capacities learned in differential developmental environment for girls. This can lead to showing how women’s entire perception of personal space and actionability in that space is different than men’s. Another example is the problem of the social reproduction of unequal domestic labour. This problem is partially answered by the fact that men, again through their early development, do not have the affordances to even perceive domestic tasks nor often have the skill and habits to act on this perception (Spurrett and Brancazio 2023). Importantly the meso-level can also shine a light on phenomena that a focus only on structure misses. This includes a level of resources that might allow people to be autonomous even when structurally oppressed. Another is to point out that even when there are structural enablements such as the ADA and subways are built accessibly, that our ableist habits might shrink affordances and autonomy for disabled people (Dokumaci 2023).

New Book Project

I was teaching a new unit on prison abolition for my philosophy of race class in 2020. Initially I used work showing the vast structural and historical scale of policing and mass incarceration. While my students were enthusiastic, a normative fatigue seemed to set in. They felt paralyzed as individuals when comparing themselves to the scale of the problem. The next week I concentrated on activist work on Transformative Justice (TJ) aimed at a general audience. I explained this kind of work through the framework of habit, skill and affect. The students were very receptive to this connection to praxis and this work has profoundly influenced my research since.

My project is to write an academic book called Mundane Yet Powerful: The Meso-Level of the Political, Transformative Justice and Rethinking Social Change. The book has two objectives: The first is a methodological intervention where I argue that focusing solely on the structural or on the individual level for social change misses out on the contribution of the meso-level of political action. The conceptual vocabulary for the meso-level are habits, skills, affordances, affect, niche construction and self-transformation. My central claim is that structural social change is not possible without people changing their habits, increasing their skills, and participating in practices of freedom and self-transformation. My second objective for the book is to argue for this central methodological claim through a concrete case study of a social movement that operates at what I call the meso-level of the political. This is the Black feminist TJ movement.

My work innovates on the meso-level by using empirical work in the philosophy of mind and biology such as the concept of affordances and niche construction as well as new work in psychology on expertise. Pierre Bourdieu was a pioneer in showing that structural ideology did not just magically show up in individuals, and that habit and skill were the medium through which this happened. While his work is helpful, I argue that it concentrates almost exclusively on social reproduction rather than on social change. I lean methodologically more on Foucault’s account of the way creative individual practices connect structural power with virtue ethics. I also rely on work in critical phenomenology that highlights the habitual and affective dimensions of racism. Another major source I rely on are American pragmatists John Dewey and Hans Joas who connected habit, creativity and political change. While this is the firmament of my thinking on the meso-level, the theoretical motor of my project is the collective practice of TJ. Miriam Kaba, Ejeris Dixon and the group Incite! Women of Color Against Violence as well as other Black feminist thinkers will be centred in this project

The Six Central Claims of my Book Project

My first claim is that the meso-level of politics, particularly habit, is a necessary part of enduring social change. John Dewey accuses those who appeal only to structural changes as short-cut revolutionaries. What they don’t understand is that in merely overturning institutions, this leaves the habits of the previous way of life intact. Racist habits are deeply engrained within us, and no single act can turn this historical and developmental momentum around. Social change is often descriptively conceived as a single moment of rupture, as Frédéric Lordon puts it: “the apocalyptic showdown followed by the sudden miraculous irruption of a totally different kind of human and social relations”. But if we focus on the meso-level of politics, we see that social change requires ongoing, everyday, small but iterative acts. Social change happens not as a simple rupture with the past but instead as creative habituation and what Michel Foucault calls “practices of freedom”. If we want enduring social change, we must take the time to change habits: to obtain and retain skills of living differently.

My second claim is that these practices of freedom show that TJ is not just oppositional, a reaction to police brutality, but also a positive project. Miriam Kaba, echoing Kwame Ture argues that we should be suspicious about movements that only talk about destroying but not creating or building. As I argue in a forthcoming paper, From Opposition to Creativity: Saba Mahmood’s Decolonial Critique of Teleological Feminist Futures in the journal Hypatia, part of the problem is that it is normatively hard to create by only opposing. I call this the “Hegelian trap.” If we gather our normative bearings by opposition to something bad in our society, rather than building toward something truly different, we tend to preserve the same frameworks we should be breaking out of. Many TJ advocates argue that if at this moment, all the prison doors were opened, it would be a disaster. This is because we as a society do not yet have the habits and skills to support structural abolition.

More controversially, my third claim is that this positive project is an affective one of moving from the feeling of individual security to the feeling of community safety. As Mariame Kaba explains, for one group to feel secure, another vulnerable group must be ‘thrown under the bus’ by being targeted by the state for violence. This is because the in-group is afraid of the vulnerable group. By contrast, the feeling of safety manifests the principle that no one is fungible, and that we must deal with social problems within communities. The question becomes: why are so many, even those who are targeted by this violence, so loyal to the feeling of security?

It seems clear to those who focus solely on structural explanations that the fear underpinning the feeling of security is stoked by the media who benefit from sensationalizing crime. But Ami Harbin argues that this is not the complete picture. She argues that those closest to us also impact the magnitude of our fears; using Freudian psychoanalysis, she argues that we tend to displace our biggest personal fears onto smaller pseudo-threats such as crime. I argue that while both the appeal to the structural and individual tell us parts of this story, we do not get the full picture without looking at the meso-level. I claim that the reliance on 911 has trained and habituated us to seeing it as a ‘one stop shop’ to outsource all our problems, even those where common-sensically, police should not be the solution. Our reliance on calling the police also enervates our community-building muscle and the skills we once had to solve these problems ourselves. For example, we no longer know our neighbours well enough, nor do we have the skills of intervention and de-escalation to stop domestic violence without police intervention. The central claim of my book is echoed in Ejeris Dixon’s phrase that “we must practice community safety as we would practice an instrument or a sport”.

Here, focusing on the meso-level allows us to see my fourth claim, which is about the centrality of mutual-aid and the connection between self-transformation and social transformation. A single act is infinitesimal and insufficient. But if practiced reiteratively, like a skill, one can, over the time of one’s life in concert with others, help one’s community to rely less on outsourcing its help. As people in the community build long term relationships with each other and transform themselves, this moves the community from the affect of security to safety. This has material impacts on how city budgets allocate funds to the police.

One of the largest obstacles for the TJ movement is that prison abolition is not a single, general problem, but is multiple, particular and very local. The withering of the welfare state makes it easier for the police to make themselves indispensable as band-aid covers rather than meaningful solutions; for example, rather than dealing with the problems of housing in cities like San Francisco, the police are seen as vital in dealing with the burgeoning unhoused population. What makes mutual aid so powerful for solving this problem is that there is no a priori form that mutual aid takes. It instead looks at the gaps in care and organizes small groups locally to ween the community off habitual police intervention by providing skills of community self-sufficiency. As a virtuous side effect, mutual-aid connects communities, gives people skills to not rely on the police by both learning new habits and unlearning bad ones. This begins to show the community what accountability could look like without prisons.

My fifth claim is that TJ is mundane in a normatively good way and works on a timescale that allows people to see the results of their actions in the world. In trying to push for structural change, people often feel like the task is too large in scale and that political interventions can only be effective if the “objective conditions” are ripe. What was attractive for my students was that a mutual aid group with some close friends can be started now. A second problem with focusing only on structural change is the time scale. Instead of making tangible change here and now, we are often asked to act now for changes that only future generations will see. One of the motivational advantages of seeing social change through the framework of skill, habits and self-transformation is that while it may famously take ten thousand hours of practice, tangible change can be seen within one’s lifetime.

Work at the meso-level does not replace the work needed for structural change. But I argue that without the conceptual tools to think about the meso-level of the political, we often treat these types of practices such as mutual aid as if they operated at a structural level. One of the main strengths of TJ movements is that they are mundane, local movements; we erode this strength by insisting that the goal of these movements is to “scale up” to the institutional level of politics. The work of mutual aid is not to replace institutions but to enervate our reliance on police and prisons and to skill up and change habits so that structural change will endure. So while mutual aid groups may end or split, this is only a failure if the goal is the intergenerational permanence of structural institutions. Sometimes the end of a mutual aid group can be positive in that it has trained people and also materially achieved its modest goal. Although a split in a group can be acrimonious, two mutual aid groups could fill different niches.

This last point leads to my concluding claim, that the different goals of groups in the meso-level leads to a different view of failure for political movements. As a backlash to the protests against the police in 2020, we have seen police budgets rise rather than get defunded. This is failure if we concentrate solely on tangible goals expressed in budgets and changes in policy: the framework of structural politics. But if we look at this within the framework of the meso-level of politics, success is not an upward line but reiterative and cyclical. In 2020, groups were formed, community was made, new skills and habits were learned and old ones unlearned, and after the initial political energy dissipated, the people involved were transformed. They continue to carry those skills with them as embodied know-how. Through communities of practice, skills that were considered very hard or impossible, such as the double somersault was in 1908 in diving, is considered standard for novices today. This is not to say there is never clear failure such as the dissolution of a mutual aid group due to personal conflict or burn-out. Instead, success means making sure elders are involved in skill transmission so that one does not continually reinvent the wheel but instead pushes one’s habits and skills to new creative and virtuosic performances, such that what was considered impossible in the past becomes routine.