Hello, I’m Shelley Tremain and I would like to welcome you to the one hundred and fifteenth 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 about a range of topics, including their philosophical work on disability; the place of philosophy of disability vis-à-vis the discipline and profession; their experiences of institutional discrimination and exclusion, as well as personal and structural gaslighting in philosophy in particular and in academia more generally; resistance to ableism, racism, sexism, and other apparatuses of power; accessibility; and anti-oppressive pedagogy.

The land on which I sit to conduct these interviews is the traditional ancestral territory of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabeg nations. The territory was the subject of the Dish with One Spoon Wampum Belt Covenant, an agreement between the Iroquois Confederacy and the Ojibwe and allied nations around the Great Lakes. As a settler, I offer these interviews with respect for and in solidarity with Indigenous peoples of so-called Canada and other settler states who, for thousands of years, have held sacred the land, water, air, and sky, as well as their inhabitants, and who, for centuries, have struggled to protect them from the ravages and degradation of colonization and expropriation.

My guest today is Megan Dean. Megan is assistant professor of philosophy at Michigan State University (MSU) and works in feminist bioethics, with a focus on the ethics of eating. Megan’s work has been published in philosophy, bioethics, and food studies journals including Gastronomica, The Hastings Center Report, Feminist Philosophy Quarterly, and the Kennedy Institute for Ethics Journal. She enjoys gardening, going for walks with her partner and their cat Mr. P, practicing her French, and playing trivia with friends.

Welcome back to Dialogues on Disability, Megan! You were previously interviewed for the series in January 2018. Please tell us about the significant events that have taken place in your career in the interim.

Thank you, Shelley! I am honoured to participate. It has been an eventful six years. I defended my dissertation and graduated from the Philosophy Department at Georgetown University in Spring 2019. That fall I took up a postdoc position at Hamilton College in central New York. At Hamilton, I did research and taught a few courses, including one on Bioethics and Disability. I did the final interviews for my current position at Michigan State University (MSU) in Spring 2020 and was offered the job that April, a few weeks after everything shut down due to the pandemic. It was some very good news in an otherwise frightening and uncertain time.

[Description of photo below: Close-up selfie of Megan, a white woman who has short dark hair and is wearing plastic glasses, a small nose ring, a shirt with collar and buttons, and a sweater. Megan’s left hand is at her cheek and left eyebrow is raised, creating a questioning or challenging expression. Institutional buildings can be seen in the background of the shot.]

Now, I am here at Michigan State, which occupies the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary Lands of the Anishinaabeg – Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi peoples. I have a tenure-track position that is 40% research, 40% teaching, and 20% service work. I teach health-care ethics for undergrads every semester, as well as courses in philosophy of food and feminist philosophy. Occasionally, I have taught graduate seminars; so far, I have done one on feminist bioethics and another on the ethics of food and eating.  

My dissertation offered a critique of healthism about eating, which is roughly the idea that good eating is eating aimed at health above all other considerations. It won the 2020 Harold N. Glassman Distinguished Dissertation Award in the Humanities from Georgetown, of which I am quite proud. I have continued my research on eating since then, expanding to new topics, such as the ethics of hospitality, issues relating to eating with dietary restrictions, and eating with family. My research engages with an array of philosophical traditions, including phenomenology and philosophy of science, as well as interdisciplinary fields like Disability Studies, Fat Studies, and Food Studies. The department where I work is quite pluralist and encourages what it calls “engaged philosophy,” as well as interdisciplinary work; so, it’s a good fit for the research that I like to do.

Megan, you are currently the North American Coordinator of Culinary Mind: Center for the Philosophy of Food. What does Culinary Mind do and what does your role in the organization entail? To what extent, and how, are disability and ableism incorporated into the activities of Culinary Mind?

I started working with Culinary Mind in 2019, when the director Andrea Borghini invited me to collaborate in planning a workshop on the philosophy of food. The group was founded in 2017 at University of Milan and most of my fellow coordinators are based in Europe. The majority of our events are virtual, that is, take place online.

The aims of the group are to promote philosophical thinking about food and to bring together philosophers and philosophy-curious researchers on the topic. The group is quite international and also very pluralist: there are members who, like me, work on ethics, but also members who work on metaphysics, aesthetics, political philosophy, and epistemology, as well in cognitive science and other more empirical fields.

As the North American coordinator, I organize in-person events here in the United States. My main task for the past few years has been to organize panels for the annual joint meeting of the Association for the Study of Food and Society (ASFS) and the Agriculture, Food and Human Values Society (AFHVS). Our goal is to share some of what is going on in philosophy of food with that very interdisciplinary audience and to demonstrate some of the ways philosophy can be useful for debates happening in other disciplines. It has also been a good community-building exercise, since many people working on food here in the United States do not necessarily know one another. People can be quite isolated within their subdisciplines. I have really enjoyed attending this conference; however, in case any readers/listeners of this interview wish to check it out, I do want to note that this conference has higher registration fees than most philosophy conferences, albeit with sliding scale options for graduate students and non-academic participants.

My other main task as coordinator is to help plan our annual virtual speaker series. We started the series in Fall 2020, when many groups were shifting to online events. We have continued to run it online with about eight speakers per academic year. The Fall 2024 schedule can be found here: https://www.culinarymind.org/colloquia-series-2024

As I said, the events are held virtually on Zoom. They are open to all, though we do require registration to reduce the risk of Zoom bombing. We use a few different formats in the series—for example, the “Half-baked” format is a formal presentation followed by Q&A and is recorded and posted on YouTube. Our newest format is called “Conversation,” where we invite a researcher to do an open Q&A about their research program, methodology, disciplinary norms, and so on. That format is a favourite of mine.

In my opinion, one of the major reasons that the virtual speaker series continues so successfully is because of its accessibility. There is no cost to attend or participate; it’s safe for those who are COVID-cautious or immunocompromised; there’s no travel time commitment; and people with chronic pain or mobility concerns can participate from whatever chair or in whatever position that they feel is best for them. Some people turn cameras on, some leave them off. We organize the schedule based on what works best for each speaker; so there is quite a bit of flexibility built-in to the series. Although Zoom has its downsides, the auto-captions and the chat function are extremely valuable for access reasons. These features also benefit us as a very international group: most of our events are in English (with a few in Italian), but many participants live or work in languages other than English, we all have different accents, and the captions and chat function are very useful for facilitating our discussions.

We have had a few speakers discuss disability and food-related topics, such as Danya Glabau, a medical anthropologist who presented her excellent work on food allergy activism. I would love to include more specialists on disability in the series. In general, I think the intersections of food, eating, and disability are underexplored in the humanities. A few notable exceptions include a special issue of Disability Studies Quarterly on the topic back in 2007, Kim Q. Hall’s work on a “queer crip feminist politics of food,” Jane Dryden’s work on gut issues, and Michael Gill’s new book Allergic Intimacies. If any readers are doing work in this area—philosophical or otherwise—and would like to participate in Culinary Mind, please get in touch!

Megan, your current research focuses on what you refer to as “the interpersonal aspects of eating.” Please explain why you identify your research on food in this way and the research implications and considerations more generally.

Many philosophers work on the ethics of food, asking: How should we produce food? How should we prepare food? How should we distribute food? How should we dispose of food? In contrast, my work focuses on the ethics of eating, asking: What is good eating? What makes a good eater? How can we help ourselves and others eat well?

My dissertation work focused on how eating shapes the self. By that, I do not mean how eating shapes the body—which it can to some extent, though the role of eating in determining body size is greatly overexaggerated. Rather, I mean that the activity of eating and how others treat someone based on their real or presumed eating shapes the eater’s agency, their affects and emotions, their capacities, and their values. So, when we ask, “What is good eating?” or “How can I eat well?” we need to consider how eating shapes the self.

Eating that shapes selves in ways that significantly constrain agency, that produce overwhelmingly negative affects, and that significantly limit our capacities is probably not good eating, even if it has other valuable characteristics (is nutritious, “healthy,” etc.) Certainly, effects on the self are not the only consideration here: How eating affects the environment, non-human animals, food workers, our communities, and so on are crucial to determining what good eating is. My point is that effects on the self do need to be a part of this discussion.   

Even though I use a relational view of the self in this work, it is still relatively individualistic in focus. Lately, I have shifted to thinking about eating in interpersonal contexts: What does it mean to eat well with others? How can we support each other to eat well when we eat together?

Eating with others can add layers of normative expectations that are not present when we eat on our own. These expectations can change what it means to eat well. And those we eat with can help or hinder our ability to eat well in many different ways—something Jane Dryden’s work on gut issues demonstrates so nicely.

My work on the interpersonal ethics of eating is currently focused on two contexts: (1) eating with family; and (2) eating in non-restaurant hospitality settings, such as at-home dinner parties or potluck gatherings.

My work on family began with a collaborative project with Laura Guidry-Grimes. Some of Laura’s clinical-ethics experiences inspired us to write about the challenges that arise when family members or loved ones bring food to people who are in-patients at a hospital. When clinicians consider the food to be unsafe or inappropriate vis-à-vis the care plan, a lot of tension and distrust can develop between the family and the care team. We draw on Hilde Lindemann’s work in family ethics both to argue for the ethical importance that feeding a family member can have, especially when that person is in hospital, and to advocate for shared decision-making around diet.

Since then, I have expanded my scope to think about eating with family more broadly. Family meals are often overromanticized and the idea of what counts as family is often extremely narrow and heteronormative. I do not want to play into that. But I do think there can be something ethically important and unique about feeding family and eating with family insofar as families have special moral responsibilities to their members. Feeding family and eating with family can be central ways to discharge these responsibilities, or at least that is what I will argue in the paper I am currently revising for publication!

Regarding hospitality, I have been focused on the challenges of being a “good guest” when one eats differently from others, whether due to ethical, religious, or health-related reasons. I was inspired in part by a blog post which characterized people with restricted diets as the “worst dinner guest[s] ever” (read/listen to more on the topic in my Gastronomica article here) and by conversations with friends and colleagues about their experiences when they have tried to manage dietary restrictions at shared meals. I think there are common expectations for “good guest behaviour” that clash with what people with restricted diets need to do in order to have safe, appropriate food. Some people do not care to participate in shared meals or be “good guests,” which is fine! But for those who do find value in them, and who want to include those who eat differently, we should ask: How can we, as host and guests, manage this clash to ensure that everyone can eat well and enjoy the benefits of a shared meal?

More recently I have been thinking about the ethical complications of appetite suppression. How can we participate in shared meals when we cannot eat much, or at all? How can we include those who are not able to eat in gatherings and events? These questions become increasingly relevant with the widespread use of diabetes and weight-loss medications which severely suppress appetite. There are plenty of ethical concerns about these drugs, but their effects on the ability to eat well with others are ethically important too. Food is at the center of many social and professional gatherings and to be excluded from these gatherings or unable to participate in them can be a significant loss. So that is something that I hope to explore more closely in the near future.

You have told me that there is little formal academic support at Michigan State University for critical study of disability. Tell us what actions you are taking and have taken to counter this exclusion.

I will start my response with a caveat: MSU is by far the largest institution at which I have worked. One of the downsides of it size is that it can be quite siloed. It is possible that there are things going on that I am not aware of. But yes, to my knowledge, there is no formal academic support for the critical study of disability—such as a program or a center—and there are very few courses offered in disability studies in any discipline. The courses with which I am familiar are focused on accommodations and accessibility in teaching. At least one of these courses is taught from a critical disability perspective, the course developed by my colleague Caitlin Cornell. But the course is not offered regularly.

I became aware of this gap in coursework thanks to a grad student in the MSU Social Work Ph.D. program, Jen Hirsch. Jen took my graduate seminar on feminist bioethics and was interested in doing further research on disability. Although I incorporate disability into all of my courses, I have not yet taught a course at MSU that is solely focused on disability. Both Jen and I searched and could not find any relevant upper-year undergraduate or graduate coursework on campus at that time. We did find a very cool graduate student-led disability initiative but it seems to have gone on hiatus.

To support Jen’s interests and build some community around disability, Jen and I started a disability studies reading group. Initially, the group met once a month over the summer of 2023 to read about and discuss critical disability theory and activism. We met once a semester during the subsequent school term and continued to follow this pattern through 2024. We plan to keep it going for the foreseeable future. Our group includes faculty, staff, and graduate students from around campus with a wide variety of backgrounds and interests. If any MSU folks who listen to/read this interview want to join us, please get in touch!

There are some signs that the institution is beginning to acknowledge the importance of centering disability, such as a recent “Disability in Higher-Ed Summit” held on campus. Although I could not attend it, I know that it focused on improving accessibility and accommodations in teaching. That’s important; it’s just not the whole story. In addition, one of my Associate Deans has been collecting information on disability-related work done in our college, though I am not sure what the outcome of this investigation will be. I hope that it will mean more resources and support are made available to develop courses and programming in this area, and I will advocate for that. As an untenured junior scholar who is maxed out in terms of service work, I am limited in what else I can do right now. In the meantime, I will keep pitching a graduate seminar on bioethics and disability and hopefully there will be sufficient support and interest to run it soon.

In February 2023, a mass shooting took place on the MSU campus. You have indicated to me that this event has significantly influenced your work and personal situation. Would you like to describe the impact that the shooting has had on you personally and campus life at MSU more generally?

Yes, thank you. I wanted to publicly discuss this with you because when it first happened, I found it helpful to read about others who had been through something similar. Shootings are a regular occurrence on campuses here in the United States. Academics are also targeted with violence due to their identities or the subject matter on which they work or teach, such as with the recent stabbing at University of Waterloo. My hope is that this response to your questions might be useful to any readers or listeners who have gone through something like this or will go through something like this. If that’s you reader or listener—let me first say that I am very, very sorry. Things do not need to be this way. It is outrageous and unfair.

I also want to say that I am very conscious that I am speaking from a perspective where violence is an out-of-the-ordinary event, whereas some academics are subjected to constant threats and repeated violence because of who they are or where they live and work. So, I write these remarks with acknowledgement of my relative privilege in this regard.

On February 13, 2023, there was a mass shooting on my campus. Three students were murdered and five students were seriously injured physically. The shooting started in one of the buildings in which I had been teaching several hours earlier. I was at my home, several blocks off campus at the time that the shooting took place. We were locked down for several hours until we were informed that the shooter had died. The details about that are readily available if people want to find them, but I do not want to talk more about that in this interview.

There is a lot that I could say about the American culture of gun violence or the way in which the institution and the community responded—some of it was helpful and heartening, some of it was wholly inadequate and frankly insulting. Instead, I would like to make just two relatively small observations based on my experiences of the shooting and the aftermath of it.

The first might seem like a trite point about community and connection. After the shooting, some people reached out to me to offer support or to express their sadness or anger about it. I really appreciated that. It was good to have others acknowledge it as a significant event. I also really valued having friends here in East Lansing with whom I could talk and with whom I could process things. Reflecting on this support really underscored for me that if the shooting had happened a couple years prior, I would not have had anyone here with whom I could talk about it. It took me several years to build community here. And it also has taken a lot of deliberate and consistent effort to maintain my relationships with people back home or in other places.

Academia is quite hostile to community in many ways. To get work, we may have to move somewhere that we have never been before, where we know no one, where we have no ties at all. The demands of the job can make it difficult to maintain ties with loved ones living elsewhere, academic friends may be moving all over hell and creation for work, and they are likely incredibly busy themselves. I am well aware of many problems with academia and how it is structured, but this one did not really crystallize for me until after the shooting.

The other thing that I wanted to share is some rage about the lack of resources available for managing trauma and the ways that it can compound the impacts of disability and chronic illness. I have lived with chronic pain for years; more recently, I have developed a few other chronic health issues. All of these are exacerbated by stress. They were already challenging to manage and the stress of the shooting pushed them to a point where it became extremely difficult to do my job. My usual coping strategies and work-arounds just didn’t cut it.

I can very easily imagine this degree of stress and this lack of support pushing me out of the profession. What enabled me to stay was the fact that I have decent health insurance, enough money for deductibles and co-pays, and that I was able to take time to address my health issues due to a pre-planned research leave the semester after the shooting. This is obvious, but access to necessary health care and support for dealing with trauma should not be reserved for people with disposable income or research leaves! This is absurd. There are very few options for medical leave in the United States and they vary widely state by state. Often, the only available option is entirely unpaid. This is infuriating. People need medical leave! We also need money to live! It does not need to be like this.

Megan, how would you like to end this interview? Are there topics or concerns that we have not discussed that you would like to address? Would you like to recommend some books, articles, blogs, or videos that readers and listeners can seek out for more information about the issues that you have addressed?

I would like to thank you, Shelley! I have said this before: I learn so much from these interviews and I really appreciate all your work.

I will also reiterate my invitations to anyone interested in philosophy of food: check out https://www.culinarymind.org/ and join the mailing list if you would like invites to our upcoming events. If you are a junior scholar working on food or you are working on disability and food, please feel free to get in touch—I would love to learn about your work. If anyone would like to get involved and has questions or concerns about accessibility, please do not hesitate to contact me.

And everyone is invited to our panel on “Eating Politics” at the upcoming Philosophy, Disability, and Social Change 5 conference organized by Shelley and Jonathan Wolff! This online conference will take place December 11-13, 2024. Our panel will be held on the 13th. Video recordings of the panel and the conference in its entirety will be available on YouTube after it has taken place.  

Megan, thank you so much for taking the time to do this wonderful interview with me. The interview is an important addition to the series archive. Thanks, too, for mentioning the Philosophy, Disability and Social Change 5 conference in December. Anyone who wants to attend the conference may do so: the conference is free and open to everyone who registers for it here: Philosophy, Disability and Social Change 5 (#PhiDisSocCh5) | Blavatnik School of Government (ox.ac.uk).

Readers/listeners are invited to use the Comments section below to respond to Megan Dean’s remarks, ask questions, and so on. Comments will be moderated. As always, although signed comments are preferred, anonymous comments may be permitted.

The entire Dialogues on Disability series is archived on BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY here.

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 supports the series, enabling me to continue to create it. You can add your support for these vital interviews with disabled philosophers at the Dialogues on Disability Patreon account page here.

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Please join me here again on Wednesday, November 20, 2024, for the 116th installment of the Dialogues on Disability series and, indeed, on every third Wednesday of the months ahead. I have a fabulous line-up of interviews planned. If you would like to nominate someone to be interviewed (self-nominations are welcomed), please feel free to write me at s.tremain@yahoo.ca. I prioritize diversity with respect to disability, class, race, gender, institutional status, nationality, culture, age, and sexuality in my selection of interviewees and my scheduling of interviews.