Dr Sylvia D'souza

Research Overview

My research interests primarily lie in ethics, morality, culture, and embodiment, building on insights from philosophy and sociology. My present aim in simple terms is to embed what are generally seen as universal categories (e.g., ethics) into embodied and culturally-specific categories through a practice-based lens.

My interest in practice necessitates taking a complex view of phenomena. It has led me to interrogate how macro-social and meso-organisational aspects interact, shape, modify, and orient individual embodied stances towards choice and action—particularly the ethical dimension—in diverse social worlds. This links to my concern with organisational technologies such as performance management, which have the power to reconfigure local modes of being by rewiring goals, values, interests and so on to an instrumental logic in market-driven economies.

The broader goal of my work is to surface culturally situated modes of being, seeing, knowing, and in that sense, to reclaim these modes from the universalising logic of dominant epistemologies and representations.