Kate Petroff

Kate Petroff is a PhD candidate at the University of Chicago. Her research focuses on questions about labor, freedom, and capitalism.

Kate’s dissertation develops a novel account of capitalist exploitation, drawing both from Marx and from contemporary political philosophy to argue that exploitation results in an unnecessary restriction on workers’ time for free activity. She has also written about exploitation, vulnerability, and the “labor approach” to human trafficking law in connection with the Ernst Freund Fellowship in Law and Philosophy. Now, for the Pozen Doctoral Fellowship, she is developing a paper that offers an account of free reproductive activity and discusses the resources necessary for its realization. Underwriting all of these projects is a concern for what it would mean for human beings to produce our lives in a free way, as well as how this goal is inhibited— and, in some ways, furthered— by our contemporary economic system.