Shaunna Rodrigues

I am a political theorist whose work bridges anticolonial thought, constitutionalism, and the ethics of emerging technologies. I study how political communities justify authority, democratic self-rule, and the computational architectures of technological systems in the wake of empire. My research interrogates the philosophical foundations of political legitimacy across liberal, anticolonial, and postcolonial traditions, bringing ethical questions of power, recognition, and legitimacy into conversation with contemporary crises in plural democracies, law, and artificial intelligence.

My first major research project, Justification After Empire, explores how anticolonial thinkers reconstructed languages of intelligibility, progress, and self-respect in the wake of empires. In doing so, they articulated new forms of legitimacy grounded in ethical action and human dignity. My current work extends these questions to the domain of AI ethics, where I introduce the Knowledge of Structures Problem, a framework for understanding how AI systems inherit and restructure colonial grammars of classification, intelligibility, and moral agency.

Across my writing and teaching, I am committed to questions of ethical reconstruction. I draw from traditions long excluded from canonical political theory, including Ambedkarite thought, which centers dignity and anti-caste ethics, Gandhian ethics, and feminist involvements to ask: What comes after the collapse of liberal universals? How can we reclaim human dignity and self-respect in a world shaped by empire and the epistemic undertow of computational systems? My work invites reflection on what it means to think, act, and build with care and clarity in a time of political and technological transformation.