About Me
I hold a temporary position as an Associate Professor in Philosophy at the University of Oslo.
My research and teaching covers a range of topics at the intersection of the philosophy of language and philosophical methodology. This includes examining related areas in the philosophy of mind, social philosophy, critical race and feminist theory, social psychology, and metaphysics. Of particular interest to me are conceptual engineering and ethics, as well as exploring the ethical and political dimensions of language, generic judgments, plausible deniability, pragmatic communication, debunking in metaethics, pejoratives, direct reference, and singular thought. Recently, I have expanded my interests into social psychology, where I am particularly intrigued by subjects such as implicit bias, dogwhistles, racial figleaves, and social epistemology in the context of conceptual engineering and peer disagreement.
I completed a Joint Ph.D. Program in philosophy at the University of Oslo and The St Andrews and Stirling Graduate Programme in Philosophy (SASP), where I was affiliated with Arché (Philosophical research centre for Logic, Language, Metaphysics and Epistemology, St Andrews) and ConceptLab (Research centre on Conceptual Engineering, Oslo). I was supervised by Herman Cappelen (primary, Oslo), Joanna Pollock (co-supervisor, Oslo), Patrick Greenough (primary, St Andrews), Kevin Scharp (secondary, St Andrews).
My dissertation titled: Assert This: “Philosophers Are Engineers” (A Study of Philosophical Engineering and Generic Judgments) contributes to recent debates on conceptual engineering and social group generics. The overarching research question of my dissertation is the following: Can the pernicious effects of generic statements such as “Blacks are violent,” “Women are submissive,” or “Muslims are terrorists” be ameliorated by applying the method of engineering in philosophy? I investigated the sources of the morally, socially and politically pernicious effects of social group generic statements (especially those that carry information about their ethnic or gender background) that can lead to widespread systematic patterns of violence, discrimination, (negative) stereotyping, hate speech, implicit biases, structural oppression, social injustice, etc. I developed a general methodological framework of engineering in philosophy I dub ‘philosophical engineering’, which I argued to be congenial with other, non-philosophical branches of engineering. I proposed implementation of a pragmatic species of philosophical engineering in order to ameliorate the pernicious speaker's attitudes about social group generics in everyday communication.
I received a double BA and a double MA degrees in Philosophy, and Croatian language and literature from the University of Rijeka (Croatia). I completed my second MA in Philosophy at the Central European University (Budapest). I have spent considerable time conducting research as a visiting fellow at several universities. In addition to my studies, I worked for numerous years as an editorial assistant for the European Journal of Analytic Philosophy. I served as a team member of the Culture of Critical Thinking, a Croatian student initiative that promotes critical thinking through short educational videos.
I am also a mom who, in her spare time, enjoys climbing, running, photographing, and writing poetry.