Welcome to BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

Welcome to BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY! BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY aims to provide the philosophical community with a forum for critical analysis of biopolitical asymmetries and other mechanisms and effects of power in philosophy and beyond. The BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY insignia in the banner depicts a dandelion, suggesting life, networks, systems, and change (photo credit: James Niland). BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY will […]

Academic Gatekeeping Is Killing Me

“In graduate school the classroom became a place I hated, yet a place where I struggled to claim and maintain the right to be an independent thinker. The university and the classroom began to feel more like a prison, a place of punishment and confinement rather than a place of promise and possibility” (bell hooks, Teaching […]

On This International Holocaust Remembrance Day

The sterilization and extermination of disabled people by the Nazis during the Second World War are often overlooked in remembrances of the Holocaust. Indeed, although many disabled people died in Auschwitz and other camps, thousands of disabled people were sterilized and murdered before the establishment of the camps, as disabled author Kenny Fries, among others, […]

Philosophy of Disability at the CPA

It occurred to me that readers and listeners of BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, especially readers and listeners of the blog who are members of the Canadian Philosophical Association (CPA), might be interested in knowing what is planned for “Disabling Philosophy in the Canadian Context,” the symposium that I have organized for the upcoming meeting of the CPA […]

Why Have (Feminist) Philosophers Ignored Nursing Home Incarceration?

My article “Philosophy of Disability, Conceptual Engineering, and the Nursing Home-Industrial-Complex” appears in the recently published special issue of International Journal of Critical Diversity Studies that I guest edited. The article is in partictular the culmination of research that I conducted on nursing homes and other so-called long-term care institutions from early 2000 to mid […]

Special Issue on Indigeneity and Disability

The current issue (vol. 41, no. 4, 2021) of the interdisciplinary journal Disability Studies Quarterly is devoted to the theme “Indigeneity and Disability.” The TOC for the issue and links to its contents are below. Vol. 41, No. 4 (2021) Fall 2021 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.18061/dsq.v41i4 Table of Contents Prefatory Matter Indigeneity & Disability: Kinship, Place, and Knowledge-MakingJuliet […]

Dialogues on Disability: Shelley Tremain Interviews Adrian Ekizian Barton

Hello, I’m Shelley Tremain and I’d like to welcome you to the eighty-second installment of Dialogues on Disability, the series of interviews that I am conducting with disabled philosophers and post to BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY on the third Wednesday of each month. The series is designed to provide a public venue for discussion with disabled philosophers […]

Help Fund the Dialogues on Disability Series

From April 2015 to May 2021, I coordinated, edited, and produced the Dialogues on Disability series without any institutional or other financial support. A Patreon account now funds the series, enabling me to continue to create it. You can contribute your support for these vital interviews with disabled philosophers at the Dialogues on Disability Patreon […]

On Moderation

Something my late friend, the philosopher Maite Ezcurdia used to always stress was that extreme positions are always the most stable, while moderate positions are always more attractive, but unstable. What I take this to mean is that extreme positions are more internally coherent, but have contra-intuitive consequences. This means that they show more abstract […]