The 15th annual philoSOPHIA conference “Entangled Ecologies: The Climate of Justice,” gets going online and in person at George Mason University tomorrow, Thursday, June 2, and runs until Saturday, June 4. You can still register for the conference. Information about registration and the full conference program are here.

The program committee for this year’s philoSOPHIA conference has put together an amazing event, with an array of fascinating presentations on philosophy of disability, climate justice, racial justice, philosophy of race, trans philosophy, disability justice, migration, and so on.

In this post, I want to highlight the sessions of the conference that will especially interest philosophers of disability.

The conference officially opens tomorrow virtually and at George Mason University with a keynote address by the fabulous Andrea Pitts whose Dialogues on Disability interview last month can be found here.

The title of Andrea’s presentation is “The Apparatus of Addiction: Substance Use at the Crossroads of Colonial Ableism and Migration”. The presentation is derived from Andrea’s contribution to The Bloomsbury Guide to Philosophy of Disability (Spring 2023) that I am editing.

On Friday morning, I will join Melinda Hall and Isaac Jiang in a virtual panel whose theme is “Philosophy of the Limit: Risk, Disaster, and Infrastructure.”

Melinda’s presentation for the panel is entitled “Is Risk Political ‘All the Way Down’?”; my presentation is titled “Disaster Ableism, Assisted Suicide, and Bioethics”; and Isaac’s presentation is titled “Intraspecting the Everyday: Infrastructural Entanglements and Ableist Durabilities.”

In a parallel, concurrent session on Friday morning, Billie Waller will give a presentation entitled “Decentering Dysphoria: Towards Refuting Pathological Trans Identity.”

On Saturday morning, Sonakshi Srivastava will give a virtual presentation entitled “Sub/Versions: Speculating Justice in the Dis/Abling Anthropocene.”

In a concurrent session on Saturday morning, Jane Dryden will make a virtual presentation entitled “The Gut Microbiome, Autism, and the Imperative of Normalcy.”

At mid-day on Saturday, Tristana Martin Rubio will present “Ageism and Racism in the “Adultification’ of Children of Color.”

As you can infer from this snapshot of the 15th Annual philoSOPHIA conference program, the conference program committee has made a very commendable effort to ensure that the conference is accessible, representative, diverse, inclusive, and provocative.