Mihaela Popa-Wyatt

I am a Lecturer at the Philosophy Department at the University of Manchester. Previously I was a Marie Curie fellow at the Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (ZAS Berlin), an independent research fellow at the University of Birmingham, and a Beatriu de Pinos Fellow at LOGOS Barcelona.

My main research interests are in Philosophy of Language and Linguistics, Meta-ethics, Social and Political Philosophy, Social Epistemology, Philosophy and Race and Gender. My recent work focuses on how slurs and oppressive speech shift social norms and re-entrench social hierarchies. I’m currently using tools from game-theoretic and social norms theories to make testable predictions about e.g. the spread of oppressive speech use, coalitions formation, and the emergence of discriminatory norms.