Cogut Institute for the Humanities

Max Foley-Keene is a sixth-year doctoral candidate in the Department of Political Science, specializing in political theory. His project investigates the habits, dispositions, and forms of activity that might animate a project wherein human beings freely and democratically decide how they should live with the non-human world. It asks how existing accounts of civic virtue might change in the light of our ecological challenges. It also considers the ecological virtues that ought to guide human interaction with the more-than-human. Ultimately, he aims to develop an account of an “eco-socialist civic virtue,” a form of activity, constituted by collective habits of self-government and abiding ecological dispositions, that might guide a genuinely emancipatory environmental politics. At Brown University, he has received the P. Terrence Hopmann Award for Excellence in Teaching. His academic work has been published in Philosophy & Social Criticism, and he writes frequently for Commonweal magazine. He holds a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Maryland.