Research

My work sits at the intersection of political theory, anticolonial thought, and the ethics of emerging technologies. Across my research, I pursue a central question: how is political and epistemic authority justified in a world shaped by the afterlives of empire and the intensifying logics of algorithmic classification? I am interested not simply in critique, but in the possibility of intellectual and ethical reinvention. Drawing from anticolonial, feminist, and non-Western political traditions, I aim to think beyond dominant paradigms of legitimacy and toward more expansive, situated, and historically conscious accounts of what it means to be human.

My first major research project, Justification After Empire: Anticolonial Ethics, Self-Respect, and the Reinvention of Political Thought, examines how twentieth-century anticolonial thinkers redefined the normative languages through which political authority is justified. Engaging figures such as M.K. Gandhi, B.R. Ambedkar, and Abul Kalam Azad, I show how anticolonial action was not only a resistance to colonial rule but a philosophical intervention into the modern West's justificatory grammar. These thinkers revealed the complicity of modern concepts like progress, universal reason, and legal neutrality with imperial domination. More importantly, they articulated alternative foundations for political legitimacy grounded in ethical action, self-respect, and civilizational plurality.

This project reframes anticolonial thought as a site of normative reinvention. It argues that the formal end of empire intensified the crisis of legitimacy rather than resolving it. By turning to practices of justification rooted in relational conceptions of the self, the social, and the political, anticolonial ethics shifted the terms of political judgment. The book contends that these resources remain vital today, It interrogates how we must confront legitimacy in a global context marked by inequality, technological transformation, and majoritarian rule.

Building on this foundation, my second research project develops a framework I call the Knowledge of Structures Problem. This concept names a growing crisis in the conditions under which human beings appear as intelligible agents, as Artificial Intelligence increasingly shapes collaborative life. The Knowledge of Structures problem demonstrates how AI infrastructures replicate a form of Kantian cognition, where categories precede experience and mediate the conditions under which subjects appear as knowable. Just as colonial rule once demanded that the colonized cognize themselves through alien epistemic norms, AI systems now recode those norms into how they make the world legible. Postcolonial questions of intelligibility and agency reemerge in this terrain to identify and question how and why AI systems foreclose alternative grounds of intelligibility. The Knowledge of Structures Problem, thus, foregrounds the epistemic and ontological stakes of AI systems.

Across all my work, I return to a set of enduring questions: how is authority justified in the absence of shared foundations? What comes after the collapse of liberal universals? How do we construct ethical and political frameworks that do not rely on domination, exclusion, or epistemic erasure? We are living in a time when the very grounds of the human are being reconfigured—by planetary computation, by climate collapse, and by the erosion of democratic institutions. My work seeks to meet this moment not with despair, but with a commitment to ethical reinvention grounded in histories of struggle and practices of collective worldmaking.