Shivani Radhakrishnan

8th Year Graduate Student | Ph.D. program in Philosophy

My research program explores how individuals and social subjects come into being, focusing on the conditions under which they flourish or on the other hand, fail. I approach these topics through the framework of normative critical theory. Building on Aristotle and Hegel, who articulate social conditions on self-actualization for individuals, my work integrates social philosophy, especially the Frankfurt school, feminist theory, and the philosophy of race. The underpinnings of my research are based in questions about the ways that agents and their subjectivity are formed in the social world—connecting issues of freedom, ideology, power, identity, and self-realization to psychic questions about the nature of self-consciousness and recognition.

In my dissertation, What’s False about False Consciousness, I reconstruct an account of false consciousness as a deficient relationship to oneself and to one’s social world. In particular, I argue that false consciousness is the result of our repeated attempts to form meaningful attachments to a social and political world that fails to provide us with the necessary conditions for our self-realization.