Didier Zuniga

Area:
Political theory

I am a doctoral candidate specializing in political theory. I was born and raised in Mexico City.

My dissertation, which is supervised by Professors Avigail Eisenberg and James Tully, attempts to destabilize conventional theorizing about reasoning, dialogue and cooperation. Through a critical engagement with the latter, I provide the outlines of a picture of dialogue and understanding that fosters the kind of mutual attunement that is needed to address both ecological and social inequalities and injustices. I examine the relationships between care ethics, democratic theory, disability studies, and ecology, and I sketch an ethics that is grounded on the ontological claim of interdependency.

My dissertation project addresses two major gaps in the literature. First, in an attempt to move political theorizing from a humancentric to an ecocentric worldview, I show how thinking about justice and equality in the light of ecosocial concerns can help illuminate issues of inclusion and exclusion, as well as enable us to develop more robust notions of cooperation, solidarity, and reciprocity. Second, as little attention has been paid to ecology and to the concept of sustainability in democratic theory, my work’s ambition is to demonstrate how an ethics of interdependency can help us rethink in transformative ways how we ought to relate to one another and to the environment. Such an exercise is essential to our understanding of the kinds of relationships that have the potential to bring about genuine forms of reconciliation—with each other, in all our diversity, and with the living earth, in all its diversity.