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Swift, Ewan (2025) A critical philosophy of microaggressions. PhD thesis, University of Nottingham.

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Abstract

This thesis addresses three main questions: (1) ‘what are microaggressions?’; (2) ‘how do they harm marginalised people?’; and (3) ‘how should we deal with them?’.

I begin by offering a brief review of the psychological and philosophical literature on microaggressions, with a particular focus on the critique that the microaggression concept is too ill-defined to offer certainty over what counts as a microaggression. I intervene in this debate by rejecting the claim that we require this level of certainty and defend a structural account of microaggressions which characterises them as a subtly oppressive social practice. Following this, I motivate why microaggressions are oppressive by exploring the ways in which they constitute a form of violence against marginalised people. More specifically, I introduce the concept of existential violence to describe how microaggressions diminish the subjectivity of their targets by denying, homogenising, and inferiorising their identities and experiences, and substantiate this by offering a phenomenological account of microaggressions.

To address how we should deal with microaggressions, I first consider how we might respond to the microaggressor. Starting with anger, I warn against uncritically buying into the argument that anger is a ‘counterproductive’ response to microaggressions by exposing how this critique promotes a masterful form of disciplinary control which reinforces the oppression of marginalised people. Next, I explore the potential for disarming microaggressions through cringe, putting forward my own account of ‘cringeworthiness’ in order to show how microaggressions can be understood as cringeworthy, and outlining some of the benefits and drawbacks of cringing at microaggressors. Finally, I consider what each of us can do to reduce the likelihood that we engage in microaggressions. Moving beyond popular rhetorics around acknowledging our bias and privilege, I argue that we should embrace a politics of disorientation, characterised by an openness to being transformed by those moments of discomfort where our habits of oppression, like microaggressions, become disrupted.

Item Type:	Thesis (University of Nottingham only) (PhD)
Supervisors:	Woodard, Christopher Duff, Koshka
Keywords:	microaggressions, oppression, anger, cringe, phenomenology, marginalisation
Subjects:	B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > B Philosophy (General)
Faculties/Schools:	UK Campuses > Faculty of Arts > School of Humanities
Item ID:	81733
Depositing User:	Swift, Ewan
Date Deposited:	09 Dec 2025 04:40
Last Modified:	09 Dec 2025 04:40
URI:	https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/id/eprint/81733

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