On April 6, I will give a keynote address (via Zoom) entitled “Philosophy of Disability: The Difference That It Makes” to the Dimensions of Difference Conference at Beacon College, in Leesburg, Florida. The organizer of the conference is Zachary Isrow and the other keynote speaker at the conference will be Robert Chapman.

Next month’s interview for Dialogues on Disability will be the tenth-anniversary instalment of the series. An important event. Indeed, many of us regard the series as the indisputable engine of philosophy of disability. To mark the occasion, therefore, the upcoming anniversary instalment of the series will depart from the formula of previous anniversary instalments in which past interviewees have collaborated with me to highlight especially provocative and insightful moments from the interviews that I conducted throughout the relevant year. For the upcoming anniversary instalment, I will be interviewed by two past interviewees of the series: Robert Chapman and Mich Ciurria. We are very excited!

In November, I will give the keynote address to the Feminist Foucauldianisms Conference in Paris, France. The organizers of the conference are Lucile Richard and Léa Antonicielli and its sponsor is the Center for Political Studies at Sciences Po (Paris). I will almost certainly give the keynote via Zoom and the conference organizers have indicated that my request that the conference be in a hybrid format will be met.

November seems like a long way off, though April does not. My keynote address for the Dimensions of Difference Conference is complete and I am at work on my responses for the questions that Robert and Mich pose in the anniversary interview with me. To give you a glimpse of what to expect in the upcoming anniversary instalment, here is an excerpt from my interview with Robert and Mich:

I got through the B.A. as a disabled philosophy student with little institutional support. I stayed at McMaster for my M.A., in turn entering the Ph.D. program in philosophy at York University. No one had taken the time to explain anything to me about the Ph.D. application process. For, as a disabled student, I was not expected to continue my studies, nor expected to succeed at them. In any case, it would have been very difficult for me to attend university somewhere beyond southern Ontario. As a disabled student, I needed my support network of family and friends to live and thrive in an ableist society.

Let me underscore that when hiring departments in Canada (and elsewhere) do not consider these circumstancesꟷcircumstances with which many disabled students must contendꟷthat is, when Canadian philosophy departments diminish and discount degrees from Canadian universities (as they uniformly do), they are actively discriminating against us; furthermore, when these hiring departments expect doctoral degrees to be completed in four years and jobs to be obtained in short order, they are actively discriminating against us. Indeed, let me point out in this context (in case anyone needs a reminder) that disabled philosophers are almost entirely excluded from Canadian philosophy departments. Both (1) the prestige bias according to which Canadian philosophy departments venerate degrees taken from American and Oxbridge universities over degrees taken from Canadian universities and (2) ableist expectations about time spent as a Ph.D. student and job seeker play instrumental roles in the reproduction of this exclusion.