Sift Room
A Future Teacher Asks Whether She Can Afford a Life
An aspiring teacher asks how she could afford a home. What would a useful answer need to offer—and what can the evidence tell us?
Christopher Knorr
Working Papers
The System Model of Art: A Relational Threshold Theory of Art-Entry
A theory of art-entry that separates art-status from interpretation, quality, legitimacy, ownership, and access. The paper asks what expressive framing, form, and encounter make possible—and what they do not authorize.
Guides
The American Tax Plan: Public Companion
A public brief, glossary, evaluation tool, worked example, and scenario card for understanding the American Tax Plan and testing other tax provisions against its standards.
Working Papers
Shoreline Framework: Status, Stewardship, and Refusal in Information Movement
Information being visible, stored, or preserved does not settle whether it may be used. Shoreline examines how information moves through changing conditions of authority, stewardship, refusal, and repair.
Guides
SIFT: A Media Sorting Guide
Pause before you share. This civic media guide asks about a story’s source, its effects, the function it serves, and the evidence behind it—then asks what action reduces harm and protects people.
Working Papers
The Audit: From Coherence to Answerability
A coherent claim can still exceed its evidence or borrow authority it does not have. The Audit develops a method for making consequential claims answerable to evidence, standing, scope, and correction.
Working Papers
When Harm Becomes Evidence: Recursive Cascade, Institutional Records, and Repair
An institutional wrong can shape a record that later returns as evidence against the person already harmed. This paper examines that recursive cascade and the obligations of provenance, correction, and repair.
Working Papers
Canonical Freedom Architecture
A layered account of freedom as the real possibility of meaningful action for persons and peoples. The framework considers individual, collective, institutional, infrastructural, and narrative conditions.
Working Papers
Agency First: Bodily Non-Conscription and Temporal Recognition
A framework for abortion ethics that distinguishes moral concern for developing life from institutional authority over a living person’s body. It examines meaningful refusal, responsibility, and bodily non-conscription.
Essays
Who Gets to Hear One Another? Gatekeeping in Indian Country
How do the systems organizing what we see affect our ability to communicate with one another, in Indian Country and beyond? An essay about visibility, mutual discovery, and public knowledge.
Guides
Agency First Field Manual
An earlier companion to Agency First, retained as its own v1.2.1 edition. It introduces moral concern, meaningful refusal, bodily non-conscription, and support without coercion.
Working Papers
Standing and Sustaining: What Property Institutions Sever
Formal property rights do not exhaust the relationships built through a place, thing, or resource. This circulation draft asks what institutions must understand about what their decisions will sever.