As a philosopher, I am most interested in understanding what a human being is, particularly in regard to our relationship to technology, the environment, and our individual and collective struggles with mental and emotional well-being. My most recent work explores mental illness through the framework of alienation and argues that mental illness is at its core a state of being alienated. This project was heavily informed by my own struggles toward stability after having spent two decades making sense of myself and my experiences as a former foster youth.

Foster youth in the United States do not typically have access to a single stable family, location, or education as a child (or as an adult). On average, despite their aspirations, 2% will earn a two-year degree while just a few thousandths of 1% (roughly, 0.0006% of 500,000) will earn a graduate degree or equivalent. Instead, they are encouraged by their circumstances to rapidly adapt to survive a particularly alien existence only to become part of an extremely under-represented minority in almost every metric for success. Such experience causes one to exist outside of many established norms. It tends to provide an overwhelming awareness of how important structures of meaning and recognition are in the development of a sense of self and how this access is hindered by class, family status, impaired access to education, and even access to one’s own “histories”. My experience as a foster youth deeply influenced my conceptions of identity, self-narrative, self-description, and the intelligibility of the self which play crucial roles in my developing philosophical framework.

It is my hope that with Mellon, I can help to identify barriers to education faced by people of various backgrounds. In particular, I hope to encourage students with difficult backgrounds to harness their experiences as a form of critique and disruption of these barriers.