Hello, I’m Shelley Tremain and I would like to welcome you to the tenth-anniversary installment of Dialogues on Disability, the series of interviews that I have conducted with disabled philosophers for the past ten years and have posted to BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY (and the now-defunct Discrimination and Disadvantage blog) on the third Wednesday of every month during this time. I designed the series 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.

Several months ago, Robert Chapman suggested that I should be interviewed for the Dialogues on Disability series because (as they put it) readers and listeners of the series, as well as its past interviewees, would be interested to read/listen to my responses to questions posed to me. After initial hesitation, I recently decided to take up Robert’s suggestion and be interviewed for this tenth-anniversary installment of the series, inviting Mich Ciurria to join us in the effort. Mich was happy to come on board and contribute questions to the collaborative interview that follows.

ROBERT AND MICH: Welcome to Dialogues on Disability as an interviewee, Shelley! Shelley, you have conducted so many fascinating interviews with disabled philosophers during the ten-year span in which the Dialogues on Disability series has run. So, we are delighted to have this opportunity to turn the tables and interview you for this tenth-anniversary edition of the series. Let’s begin this anniversary installment with the sort of inquiry with which you yourself initiate the interviews: Tell us about your background and how it led you to a life in philosophy.

SHELLEY: Thank you, Robert, for urging me to take on the role of interviewee for this anniversary installment, and thank you, Mich, for joining Robert and me in the effort. I greatly value our friendships and the collaborations that we undertake.

[Description of image below: An outdated photo of Shelley when she had bleach-blonde short hair. She is wearing large black-framed glasses and speaking into a microphone in response to a question posed to her at a conference in Johannesburg.]

To understand my biographical narrative, readers and listeners of this interview likely need to know that I am older than they may think. I did not get my Ph.D. until I was in my mid-thirties. By the time that I engaged in a concerted job search in philosophy, I had substantial research expertise and experience in the field of disability policy studies, having worked at two policy research institutes, in addition to the situated knowledge of disability and ableism that accrue to me as a disabled person in an ableist world.

I was born and bred in Hamilton, Canada, a city in southern Ontario known for its steel factories and its working-class sensibilities and persona. My father was a unionized shift mechanic at American Can, a factory that produced parts of cans (think Campbell soup), and my mother was a non-unionized cleaner in public schools. Neither of them finished high school, which was commonplace amongst our people. To pay university tuition, I worked for two summers as a unionized machine operator on the production line at American Can.

I was considered a “gifted” student, skipped a grade in elementary school and, for the two years of middle school, was placed in a class with other students who “excelled.” When I got to high school, things changed. My grades slipped and I started to drink. I feel now as if I lived these years of my life in a dream-like state, a state of dissociation. I had low self-esteem and lacked self-confidence and self-worth. I understand now that these characteristicsꟷcharacteristics with which I have struggled at various points in my lifeꟷare effects of trauma, abuse, and intergenerational class oppression. (In an exchange on email yesterday, Nora Berenstain recommended that I read Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s As We Have Always Done and Lee Maracle’s Memory Serves, both of which books, Nora explained, contextualize such characteristics and circumstances as “outgrowth of a deeply toxic, harmful, abusive settler culture as a whole.”) 

I somehow managed to win awards when I graduated from high school, including an award for top grades and other accomplishments in the subject of English. I wrote very good essays. I have a symbiotic relationship with words. As a child, I submerged myself in books, escaped into libraries, and usually won classroom spelling bees. I feel words. I feel the associations and connections between the letters that words comprise, the movement and rhythm between words, and the movement and rhythm of the sentences and paragraphs that they bring together. Words save me. Writing has always saved me.

After high school, I enrolled in sociology at McMaster University, but I was never there even when I was there. I withdrew in my third year and moved to Vancouver. To pay bills and put food on the table, I worked as a salesclerk in a department store, cook at a playground, machine operator in a small factory, and manager of a popular espresso bar in the Granville Island Market. Yet I yearned to return to the place, to the classroom, where I could learn how to more powerfully articulate the feminist beliefs and anti-oppressive values that I began to cultivate in adolescence.

So, I quit the café manager job and enrolled in philosophy courses at Langara College in Vancouver, where I could earn university-transferrable credits without paying university tuition. Given the grades that I got at Langara, I was awarded a scholarship to enter third-year philosophy at the University of British Columbia (UBC). The weekend before UBC classes were to begin, I was involved in a car accident that changed the trajectory of my life. I was unconscious for a few weeksꟷliterally emerging into consciousness with pen in handꟷwas hospitalized for several months, and an out-patient for an additional several months.

I underwent intens(iv)e “rehabilitation” in which I re-learned how to walk, talk, remember, and “appropriately” express emotions, as well as learned anew how to put on a bra and otherwise dress myself with one arm and how to live as an independent but compliant (feminine) female disabled subject. At no point during this time, across three disparate medical institutions, was I taught anything about the oppression and exclusion that I would henceforth confront as a disabled woman. That rehabilitation, that education, would come later from disabled people outside of the institutions and from my own interrogation of the disciplinary constitution of me (by and through mechanisms and practices of the carceral-rehabilitative-industrial complex) as a disabled, gendered, socially subordinated, white subject.

A year after that transformative weekend, I registered at McMaster University as a part-time third-year philosophy student. This return to academiaꟷthat is, my return to academia as a part-time disabled studentꟷwas much different from my return as a full-time nondisabled student. Some of the McMaster philosophy faculty doubted that I belonged in the program, implying that the extra time which I received to complete a couple of tests (an innovation back then) was in some way cheating the system and gave me an unfair advantage over my nondisabled peers. Other McMaster philosophy faculty enabled me to flourish. Many philosophy students avoided me. Some dismissed me. Some mocked me. Others felt sorry for me. One of them sexually assaulted me.

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

When hiring departments in Canada do not consider these circumstances with which many disabled students must contendꟷthat is, when Canadian philosophy departments diminish and discount degrees from Canadian universities (as they uniformly do)ꟷthey actively discriminate against us. Furthermore, when hiring departments expect doctoral degrees to be completed in four years and jobs to be obtained in short order, they actively discriminate against us. Let me underscore that disabled philosophers are almost entirely excluded from employment in Canadian philosophy departments, regardless of our accomplishments. Both (1) the prestige bias according to which hiring departments in Canada venerate degrees taken from American and Oxbridge universities over degrees taken from Canadian universities; and (2) ableist expectations and requirements about time spent as a student and job seeker are (3) instrumental in the reproduction of this exclusion.

After I completed the Ph.D., I spent a year in California where I was the Ed Roberts Postdoctoral Fellow of the Disability Studies Program in the School of Public Health at the University of California at Berkeley and the World Institute on Disability in Oakland. During my year as a postdoc, as I began to apply for jobs in academia, I also began to recognize the ways in which the practices and strategies of the profession of philosophy are intertwined with the ableist and eugenic impetus of Western philosophy itself.

ROBERT: You have been at the forefront of philosophy of disability for a long time now, in fact since before it was a formalized subfield. What do you think about how the field has progressed over this time? Do you have concerns about the field as it becomes increasingly professionalized and institutionalized?

[Description of photo below: Robert on holiday in Lisbon, Portugal. They are standing in front of an old wooden door with peeling paint and iron bars wearing a backpack, shorts, a brimmed cap, and a t-shirt that bears the image of a walking hotdog and bun wearing a top-hat and holding a cane]

SHELLEY: Urged on by my M.A. thesis supervisor, Barry Allen, I began to publish on disability in women’s studies journals a few years before Anita Silvers published on disability and several years before Eva Kittay did. Philosophers generally ignored my early publications, however, as I was a graduate student without an established reputation in philosophy. It was impossible for me to get work published in philosophy journals and bioethics journals.

With Les Green as my supervisor, I wrote my doctoral dissertation on disability and analytic theories of social justice. The research and writing for the dissertation convinced me that analytic philosophers generally hold outdated ideas about power, that is, do not understand the productive operations of contemporary forms of power and therefore fail to capture them. I realized that to write efficaciously about disability and the constitutive operations of power, I needed to return to Michel Foucault from whose work I drew for my M.A. thesis on feminism and pragmatism.

I despised the ways that mainstream philosophers wrote about disabled people. I believed (and still believe) that we would not effectively subvert their discourses by simply responding to them, using their tools and conceptions of disability, power, subjectivity, and social structures and arrangements to do so. I believed (and still do) that we should develop philosophy of disability that is markedly different from their work and from the sort of work on disability that Silvers, Kittay, Leslie Francis, and David Wasserman (among others) had begun to do.

I want(ed) to instigate a conceptual revolution with respect to disability rather than content myself with a reformist approach that defers to and relies upon the foundational assumptions of bioethics and mainstream political philosophy and ethics. I want(ed) us to redefine philosophical work on disability in ways that disrupt the spectrum of injustices against disabled people to which philosophers and philosophy have contributed, which they create, and which they magnify.

As readers and listeners of this interview may know (or not), I have confronted considerable and blatantly hostile reactions to my efforts, the lion’s share of which has come from feminist philosophers who view(ed) me as a kind of upstart; that is, my critical remarks about their ableism have been treated as annoying and insubordinate complaints rather than informed knowledge-claims and justified objections. For these feminist philosophers wish(ed) to safeguard hierarchies of rank and status in philosophy and preserve the centrality of gender to feminist philosophy, while they disregard(ed) their reproduction of the ableism and classism in philosophy that motivate(d) them to attack a working-class disabled feminist philosopher in the first place.

The theme of the upcoming Feminist Ethics and Social Theory (FEAST) conference is “Accountability and Transformative Justice.” Occasionally I wonder if, one day, the FEAST organization will acknowledge the incredible harm that some of its founding members and former leaders did to me early in my career and if, someday, FEAST will acknowledge the complicity of its general membership who allowed them to do so. Should I point out that FEAST conferences, the inaccessibility of which I have criticized, remain inaccessible to many disabled philosophers, continue to be economically prohibitive, and are environmentally unsustainable?

Indeed, I no longer expect accountability or apologies for ableism inflicted. No one is (held) accountable for their ableism. No one apologizes for their ableism. Many (feminist) philosophers who in the past ridiculed and demeaned me and other disabled philosophers, limiting the opportunities and resources afforded to us, have become critically informed about disability, both from our work and because of it. Hence, some of these philosophers now represent themselves as staunch allies of disabled philosophers and disabled people in general (or now identify as disabled themselves), performing anti-ableist consciousness on social media and treating critical philosophical work on disability as a “new” domain of research and activism that they are eager to advance, while obscuring their contributions to the historical legacy of ableist and sanist oppression in philosophy and beyond.

Audra Simpson’s insights about presentist assumptions of settler colonialism and Kyle Whyte’s insights about epistemologies of crisis in the context of climate change are instructive in this regard. Taken together, they illuminate how settler-colonial characterizations of climate change as “unprecedented and new” cover over European settler land-theft and destruction of ecosystems with which Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island have been interdependent for thousands of years. Simpson’s and Whyte’s insights prompt one to ask: Whose conceptions of the present are given uptake and conceal in ways that ensure the persistence of ableism, capitalism, colonialism, racism, and other apparatuses of power?

Like the structural gaslighting that I describe in the previous paragraphs, successful attempts to co-opt and tame philosophy of disabilityꟷfor example, attempts to incorporate it into a pre-established bioethical framework, with pre-established questions, concerns, concepts, and languageꟷseem to indicate the increasing professionalization and institutionalization of the field. More and more philosophers perceive disability to be an emerging topic of philosophical interest and hence have begun to engage in research on it. Yet a great deal of this work does not benefit the social-political situation of disabled people, nor address ableism and the apparatus of disability, nor bolster disabled philosophers and the field of philosophy of disability; on the contrary, much of this work is medicalizing, individualizing, and pathologizing, reinforcing the status quo with respect to disability in philosophy and society more widely.

We should thus bear in mind that most disabled philosophers of disability remain unemployed or underemployed, precariously employed, which, paradoxically, enhances the increasing professionalization and institutionalization of the field. No job ad has appeared on PhilJobs that specifies philosophy of disability as an exclusive AOS, although critical work on disability is a burgeoning area of study elsewhere across the university.

The ongoing exclusion of disabled philosophers and marginalization of philosophy of disability put into relief the intransigent refusal by philosophers to undertake the broad material and infrastructural changes that a future for disabled philosophers and philosophy of disability demand. Without these structural and institutional changes to the architecture and practice of philosophy, extant measuresꟷsuch as the inclusion of a disabled philosophy student in a diversity institute or the addition of a given disabled philosopher’s article on course syllabiꟷare largely cosmetic and discretionary.

The exclusion of disabled philosophers and the marginalization of critical philosophical work on disability cannot be attributed to department budgets and “scarce” resources. Students are very hungry to take courses in philosophy of disability, that is, they very much want to study the work that disabled philosophers of disability produce. You may recall, Mich, that during the roundtable at the Philosophy, Disability and Social Change 5 conference in December, Stephanie Jenkinsꟷwho, at Oregon State, regularly teaches one of the only philosophy of disability courses currently offered in the United Statesꟷpointed out that the course is so popular with students that her department hired faculty specifically to teach additional sections of it.

MICH: One of your more provocative arguments is that the field of bioethicsꟷwhich you describe as a neoliberal technology of governmentꟷshould be abolished. During your presentation to Philosophy, Disability and Social Change 2 on this topic, you showed a clip of Malcolm X in which he states, “that white person you see calling themselves a liberal is the most dangerous thing in the Western Hemisphere… He’s like a fox, and a fox is always more dangerous in the forest than a wolf.” Please explain how you understand the connections between bioethics, anti-assimilationist politics, and abolition, as well as why Malcolm X’s comments were especially salient in that context.

[Description of image below: A headshot of Mich who is looking directly at the camera lens and is smiling widely. Mich’s dark hair and dark v-neck top blend into the background of the shot. ]

SHELLEY: I want to note two different understandings of the terms liberal and liberalism in contemporary political thinking. On the more common understanding, the terms liberal and liberalism refer to a political approach that esteems the individual, individualism, negative liberty, and the exercise of autonomy and of allegedly inherent personal rights and freedoms. My understanding of liberalism derives from Foucault, who, by contrast, was especially concerned with liberalism as a form of governmental rationalityꟷan “art of government”ꟷa way of thinking about governing that facilitates the consolidation and expansion of capitalism and the normalization of the population that this regime requires and coerces.

For Foucault, that is, the emergence of liberal governmentality evinced a transformation in political and economic thinking and the nature of the relationship between knowledge and government. Beginning in the eighteenth century, a form of power began to emerge that takes “life” as its object. This form of powerꟷbiopowerꟷhas been indispensable to the expansion of liberalism and capitalism; that is, the configuration of power centred on life (biopower) through which life itself becomes the ground for political struggle is a strategy of liberal governmentality. Foucault pointed out that the government of living populations has generated specific problems (such as problems of birthrate, health, sexuality, and race) for liberalism, which he understood as a principle for the rationalization (construed as both applicability and acceptance) and exercise of government.

Liberal governmental strategies of power operate in ways that maximize the efficiency of the state and minimize its political, economic, and social costs, while at the same time guiding, influencing, and limiting people’s actions in ways that seem to enhance their capacity to be self-determining. A homogenous population, a normalized population, serves these aims: is both cost-effective and manageable. In other words, liberal governmentality enables subjects to act in order to constrain them, that is, directs action to achieve certain political ends. Thus, Foucault characterized modern forms of power as “intentional and nonsubjective”: directed toward an end or functioning for a purpose, but not attributable to anyone or anything in particular that can be identified as their point of origin.

Bioethics is quintessentially a liberal/neoliberal discourse and practice. First, bioethics, including feminist bioethics, is liberal in the sense that it gives primacy to individual autonomy and liberty understood as the capacity to choose and be self-determining. Second, bioethics is a liberal art of government insofar as it rationalizes normalization of the population, enabling subjects to act and guiding and constraining these actions, that is, guiding their actions to certain ends.

The ways in which bioethicists, including feminist bioethicists, have framed the eugenic discourse and practices of the MAiD regime exemplify liberal rationalization of governmentality, as Foucault urged us to understand it. In short, autonomy is a trap. Indeed, the so-called autonomy that animates bioethical arguments (and arguments about MAiD in particular) is a strategic mechanism, typifying the polymorphism of a liberal regime to mold the subjectivities of individuals in particular ways, for particular purposes. The MAiD regime (and the bioethical arguments about autonomy that it comprises and that consolidate it) is projected to save the Canadian federal government an estimated $34.7 million to $136.8 million annually in health-care spending.

Philosophers err insofar as they regard the shibboleths of bioethics and liberalismꟷnamely, autonomy and choiceꟷas signifiers of freedom and liberation rather than as governmental strategies of power that enable subjects to act while putting in place the limits of their possible action, that is, governmental strategies that put in place the limits of possible conduct from which subjects may “autonomously choose.” Furthermore, the ascendancy and expansion of bioethical discourse in philosophy has been intertwined with the exclusion of disabled philosophers and the marginalization of critical philosophical work on disability. That bioethicists, especially feminist bioethicists, increasingly incorporate critical claims about disability into their work exemplifies what Foucault regarded as a defining feature of liberalism as an art of government, namely, its capacity to continuously engage in a practice of auto-critique, thereby effectively neutralizing opposition to it.

I introduced these ideas and arguments in Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability, especially chapter 5 of the book. In “Disaster Ableism, Epistemologies of Crisis, and the Mystique of Bioethics,” my chapter in The Bloomsbury Guide to Philosophy of Disability, I further the overall argument according to which bioethics is a modern technology of government and call for the abolition of this subfield. A fuller account of this call is forthcoming in “Disabling Bioethics: Notes Toward an Abolitionist Genealogy,” my chapter in Genealogy: A Genealogy (edited by Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson and Daniele Lorenzini), which draws on the arguments that Angela Davis, Gina Dent, Erica Meiners, and Beth Richie powerfully articulate in Abolition. Feminism. Now.

I ended my presentation to Philosophy, Disability and Social Change 2 with the clip of Malcolm X because his remarks about “the liberal” encapsulate my conviction that liberalism is surreptitious and stealthy, an understanding that Foucault conveyed. Indeed, I would not be surprised to learn that Foucault’s remarks about liberalism and liberal subjects were formatively influenced by Malcolm X’s thought. Brady Thomas Heiner has argued that important “theoretical shifts” in Foucault’s thinking were “fundamentally motivated” by his encounter with racism and classism in the United States, as well as his engagement with the political philosophies and struggles of the Black Panther Party whose members were themselves influenced by Malcolm X.

ROBERT: Another one of the interventions for which you are known is your critique of naturalized, essentialized, and ahistorical conceptions of impairment. Despite the pushback that you’ve received, this innovation has influenced many of us. In my circles at least, it seems evident that we should conceive of impairment roughly in line with your analysis. Tell us about this decades-long campaign to denaturalize and historicize impairment.

SHELLEY: In 2001, I published my article “On the Government of Disability,” which undermined the impairment/disability distinction that disabled activists in the United Kingdom instated when they adopted a structuralist nature/culture distinction for the purposes of disability research and politics. At the time that my article was published, the former distinction–commonly known as “the social model”–had (as you know, Robert) dominated disability studies and activism internationally for thirty years. On the British social model or BSM (as I variously refer to the model), impairments are prediscursive, natural, and hence, politically neutral, bodily characteristics of individuals on whom disability–construed as a form of social disadvantage–is imposed.

The BSM was lauded by disabled activists internationally because it appeared to both divorce disability from the notion of “natural disadvantage” and redefine disability as an entirely contingent set of social circumstances. Michael Oliver and other proponents of the BSM were adamant that their model severed the causal connection between impairment and disability that the medical model of disability deemed inevitable; moreover, proponents of the BSM claimed that it circumvented how the medical model collapsed any distinction whatsoever between so-called natural disadvantage and recognizably social circumstances. In contrast to the “personal tragedy theory of disability” (as Oliver referred to this medicalized conception of disability), the BSM, Oliver argued, has “nothing to do with the body.”

This claim and the masculinist demeanor of many early proponents of the BSM led to a host of criticisms, including criticisms from disabled feminists, Black disabled people, and disabled authors who used phenomenology to advance their theoretical and empirical claims. Among the criticisms were: the BSM obscures the ways that disabled people are racialized and gendered in collusion with the ways that they are disabled; that insofar as the BSM focuses exclusively on social oppression that disabled people confront, it does not account for their lived experiences of impairment; and that the model reinforces a division between the public and the private spheres which is especially oppressive to certain disabled people and effectually (re)privatizes contexts in which many disabled people are subjected to violence, abuse, and neglect.

In the 2001 article, I aimed to point out what proponents and critics of the BSM alike misunderstood, namely, that although proponents of the BSM explicitly argue that disablement is not a necessary consequence of impairment and that impairment is not a sufficient condition for disability, an unstated premise of the model is that impairment is a necessary condition for disability, that is, impairment is the natural, i.e., prediscursive, foundation of disability. For on the terms of the BSM, only people who have or are presumed to have an impairment get to count as disabled.

Thus, I showed that the strict division between the categories of impairment and disability, which proponents of the BSM claimed to institute, was in fact an illusion, an illusion that the apparatus of disability generates. In other words, impairment has been disability all along; that is, I reversed the relation of entailment that both the medical model and the BSM presupposed. Readers/listeners of Foucault, Judith Butler, Ladelle McWhorter, and other Foucault scholars should recognize this theoretical move as the shift from a juridical understanding of power as wholly repressive, centralized, and unidirectional to an understanding of power relations as chiefly productive, performative, coercive, and diffuse, operating primarily from the ground up.

The publication of the article constituted a defining moment in the genealogy of critical disability theory and disability studies internationally. Nevertheless, although the article has been reprinted two or three times in philosophy journals and edited collections, the significance of its argumentꟷwhich complicates taken-for-granted assumptions about how disability is produced and how it functionsꟷhas not been widely appreciated in the discipline. Within philosophy, that is, disability has been conceived simplistically; has been simplified; taken for granted as self-evident, uninteresting, and unproblematic; and, thus, has not been considered worthy of critical examination. Even feminist and other oppositional philosophers have consistently refused to acknowledge the ways in which disabled people continue to be constituted as the present absence of philosophy: that is, we are excluded from philosophical discourse–including from jobs, conferences, publication, and editorial boards–and, simultaneously, our very existence is at the core of subfields such as bioethics and cognitive science.

Though the 2001 article has not received the attention in philosophical circles that it warrants, I have subsequently used its methodology and conceptual frame to advance arguments about: the biopolitical character of prenatal testing and genetic counselling discourse; feminist discourses on embryonic stem-cell research; feminist critiques of Foucault; the nursing home-industrial complex; the mystique of bioethics; and disaster ableism, neoliberalism, and MAiD. Furthermore, I have extended this project, that is, the project to denaturalize, de-essentialize, and historicize disability, by introducing and developing the argument that disability is an apparatus, a complex and complicated matrix of power rather than a personal attribute or trait, an identity, or a biological difference.

The claim that disability is an apparatus of productive power moves philosophical discussion of disability toward a more flexible conceptualization of it than other conceptions of disability provide, toward a conception of disability that is historically and culturally sensitive in ways that other conceptions of disability are not, toward a conception of disability as historically and culturally specific and contingent. When disability is located within the domain of force relations in this way, that is, when disability is construed as an apparatus of power rather than as a personal characteristic or attribute, its collaboration with other apparatuses of force relationsꟷsuch as speciesism, settler colonialism, racism, ageism, and sexismꟷcan be more readily identified and more thoroughly investigated than has been done thus far.

MICH: In addition to the Dialogues on Disability series, you mentor disabled students and colleagues, including through this blog, as well as do other unpaid service work for philosophy and philosophers and actively engage in research and publication. How would you describe your relationship to philosophy now?

SHELLEY: This question is difficult to answer. I suppose that I think of myself as an insider outside, but I might be more aptly described as outsider inside. Perhaps I am both. As you mention, I have, over many years, done an enormous amount of “service” work that benefits philosophers and philosophy but that has not been institutionally supported or funded. Indeed, I continue to do an enormous amount of work for philosophers and philosophy that is not compensated monetarily: organizing, editing, writing, emailing, advising, mentoring, negotiating, networking, and more editing.

My situation has at various times been both confusing and upsetting to me; for even philosophers who analyse exploitation and oppression and articulate arguments to expose and unravel them do not seem concerned that I am repeatedly put in, and frequently put myself in, contexts in which I will be exploited, including contexts in which they, in effect, will exploit me by, for instance, extracting unpaid labour from me. I am extremely grateful to my faithful Patreon supporters who generously give back to me for what they perceive themselves to derive from this series. I am also extremely appreciative of the philosophers and non-philosophers who, for various reasons and in a variety of ways, have provided me with additional financial assistance and other tangible support.

Organizing for social change, for social justice, and for a better world is usually not compensated monetarily. Although monetary compensation should not be regarded as the primary end of this work, it is a means that makes the work possible, enabling one to keep doing it. Yes, I have consistently sought a permanent position in philosophy. But the strategies of domination by and through which the profession of philosophy and the academy more generally operate conspire against someone who is socially and politically positioned as I am vis-à-vis the institution. Yes, I have periodically sought work outside of academia. But ableist discrimination against disabled people is (infra)structural and systemic, is especially pervasive in the realm of employment, and is particularly egregious in Canada, where most disabled people are unemployed, endure grinding poverty, and are otherwise excluded from the social realm. The Accessible Canada Act (ACA), enacted by the Trudeau government in 2019 with a commitment to make Canada “barrier free” by 2040, evinces a top-down policy approach to disability that lacks the mechanisms for implementation and enforcement required to mitigate the dismal circumstances in which most disabled people in Canada live.

I should pause and underline that work on social justice done in academia and work done on and for the achievement of social justice in academia, that is, work that aims to reorganize the material conditions of academia, including its demographic composition, are not trivial pursuits, as some philosophers seem to think. Universities and colleges have increasingly become central pillars of a growing number of societies worldwide. Hence, millions of people throughout the world are detrimentally affectedꟷe.g., experience food insecurity, confront homelessness, are culturally ostracized, lack health care, contend with poverty, are deportedꟷby the injustices that sustain the neoliberal academy, including the injustices that pertain to: the kinds of people that it comprises, the types of research and knowledge that these people (are permitted to) produce, the kinds of people that this research engenders, and the types of social institutions and structures whose emergence and entrenchment that these people and their research compel.

In short, academia has become one of the crucial institutional and cultural sites at which we must fight for the future that we want. As recent and past events vividly demonstrate, universities and colleges are central targets of fascists and other racists who recognize the vital role that academia serves in the production of social knowledge and ideological narratives; the rationalization of economic agendas and arrangements; and the establishment of cultural and political alliances, including both affiliations of conservatism and enclaves of dissent. I should underscore that while institutionally privileged philosophers have only now started to wonder about how they can package their research and teaching in order to survive rising fascist and other right-wing attacks on anything that resembles “DEI,” it is only recently that I and other disabled philosophers who produce critical work on disability have not been required to camouflage our research and teaching in some way. Indeed, more often than not, the former philosophers themselves have in effect been the gatekeepers and wardens who disciplined us, compelling us to do so.

I suppose that I keep doing the work that I do because I feel compelled to do so. In the past, I was quite involved in more local community organizing and activism, did programming for a radical community radio station, curated multidisciplinary exhibitions of disabled women artists, and participated in protests and rallies. I continue to participate in some protests and rallies; but the longer that I have been “in” philosophy, the more clearly have I realized that my writing and my editing of other people’s writing are the most effective and gratifying means through which I can intervene and combat ableism and other oppressions and injustices of the world, including the subjugation and exclusion of disabled people from philosophy and academia in general. I suppose that I cannot imagine a future for myself without the writing, without the community building, and without the philosophy. Hence, this series.

MICH AND ROBERT: Shelley, we will close this tenth-anniversary edition of Dialogues on Disability with the questions that you often use to conclude your interviews: 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 should explore for more information about the issues that you have addressed?

SHELLEY: I think that I have said enough to this point. However, I will provide additional references and recommendations, both to some of my own work and to the work of other philosophers.

First and foremost, I want to sing the praises of the Dialogues on Disability series and emphasize the indispensable role that the interviewsꟷand the BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY blog more generallyꟷhave played in the development and expansion of philosophy of disability, in raising the public and professional profile of many disabled philosophers around the world, and in educating members of the philosophical community internationally about ableism and the apparatus of disability. Indeed, the philosophical community will, for many years to come, be indebted to the extraordinary disabled philosophers whose stories the series comprises. The Dialogues on Disability archive, which holds their interviews from the past ten years, can be found here. The Patreon account to support my work on the series can be found here. Another shout-out to my steadfast Patreon subscribers who generously support the series!

[Description of image below: Cover of The Bloomsbury Guide to Philosophy of Disability. The book’s title appears on two lines across the top of the cover which is a salmon tone. The names of the editor and the author of the foreword appear in white letters at the bottom of the book. The publisher’s name is printed below the other names in white letters. At the centre, a vertical white rectangle is the background for a sculpture by fibre artist Judith Scott.]

Everyone who wants to be up to date on what is happening in philosophy of disability should read/listen to The Bloomsbury Guide to Philosophy of Disability, which I edited, and which was published in December 2023 (hence, the 2024 date of publication). The collection, which includes 26 chapters, my introduction, and a comprehensive index is groundbreaking, provocative, and thought-provoking. Revolutionary.

I also want to recommend the Philosophy and Theory of Disability area of The Oxford Online Encyclopedia of Disability Studies, the expansive online resource that I am curating which will include more than 35 outstanding entries on a range of hot topics by leading philosophers and theorists of disability. A list of the wonderful contributors to this much-anticipated encyclopedia can be found here and a list of the fascinating topics that the encyclopedia will comprise can be found here. This online resource is forthcoming in January 2026.

Most of my sole-authored publications can be found on my PhilPapers/PhilPeople pages and can be read in development in posts on BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY. I will highlight some of them that are relevant to themes and issues that I have discussed in this interview:

For my critique of bioethics and my arguments about the mystique of bioethics and bioethics as a technology of government, I refer people to: Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability, especially chapter 5; “Reproductive Freedom, Self-Regulation and the Government of Impairment In Utero;” “Stemming the Tide of Normalization;” “The Biopolitics of Bioethics and Disability;” “Biopower, Styles of Reasoning, and What’s Still Missing from the Stem Cell Debates;” and my chapter “Disaster Ableism, Epistemologies of Crisis, and the Mystique of Bioethics,” in The Bloomsbury Guide to Philosophy of Disability

For my writing on impairment and disability and critique of the British social model of disability (BSM), I refer people to: “On the Government of Disability;” the first three chapters of Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability; and my chapter in The Bloomsbury Guide to Philosophy of Disability.

My critiques of ableism in philosophy, including in feminist philosophy, can be found throughout many of my publications; however, I also want to refer people to: “Introducing Feminist Philosophy of Disability,” the introduction to a special issue of Disability Studies Quarterly that I guest edited on the theme of feminist philosophy and theory of disability, and “When Moral Responsibility Theory Met my Philosophy of Disability,” my contribution to the special issue of Feminist Philosophy Quarterly that Mich guest edited.

On disability as an apparatus: “Philosophy and the Apparatus of Disability;” ”Field Notes on the Naturalization and Denaturalization of Disability in (Feminist) Philosophy: What They Do and How They Do It;” and “Philosophy of Disability, Conceptual Engineering, and the Nursing Home-Industrial Complex in Canada, as well as my chapter in The Bloomsbury Guide to Philosophy of Disability.

[Description of image below: Cover of Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability. The book’s title appears on three lines across the top of the cover. A sculpture by fibre artist Judith Scott appears at the centre.]

For my work on Foucault and disability more specifically, I refer people to articles and chapters that I have already mentioned, my monograph Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability; my article “Educating Jouy;” my article “This is What a Historical and Relativist Feminist Philosophy of Disability Looks Like,” which appeared in the special issue of Foucault Studies that I guest edited; and the two editions of Foucault and the Government of Disability that I edited, the first of which includes my long introduction, “Foucault, Governmentality, and Critical Disability Theory: An Introduction.” I also want to mention “Foucault: The Premier Disabled Philosopher of Disability (My Love Letter to Foucault),” which is forthcoming in The Foucauldian Mind, edited by Daniele Lorenzini (Routledge 2026).

Canadian philosophers can examine some empirical data and critical analysis about the structural and systemic ableism of Canadian academia, in general, and of the Canada Research Chairs Program (CRCP), in particular, by reading the damning comprehensive report of a study that researchers at UBC conducted to identify factors that explain why so few Canada Research Chairs (CRCs) are held by disabled academics. I served as a consultant on the project. The final report of the study can be found here. I discussed the report in several posts at BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, including here, here, and here.

David Lepofsky, a disabled lawyer, is the best source of information about the roadblocks to and infringements upon implementation and enforcement of both the Accessible Canada Act (ACA) and the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA). David is the chair of the AODA Alliance whose website is here.

Agnès Berthelot-Raffard’s terrific article “From Capacitalism to Disability Justice in Academia: A Philosophical Manifesto” was recently published in Equity in Education and Society. The article both problematizes the esteem afforded to intellect and constitutes a sophisticated analysis of the mutual constitution of race and disability with respect to intelligence. Agnès, who was interviewed in the Dialogues on Disability series in January, will be contributing an entry on Black Disability Studies to the Philosophy and Theory of Disability area of The Oxford Online Encyclopedia of Disability Studies.

Lavonna Lovern, who is writing an entry on Indigenous “models of difference” for the Philosophy and Theory of Disability area of The Oxford Online Encyclopedia of Disability Studies, published an important article on Indigenous cultures and Western conceptions of disability and their philosophical roots in a special issue of Disability Studies Quarterly on indigeneity and disability.

Gen Eickers, who wrote a pathbreaking chapter on emotions and trans/disabled identities for The Bloomsbury Guide to Philosophy of Disability and will be contributing an entry on emotions and disability to the Philosophy and Theory of Disability area of The Oxford Online Encyclopedia of Disability Studies, has co-authored an excellent article entitled “Emotional Injustice,” which incorporates a critical analysis of ableism and disability. My most recent Dialogues on Disability interview with Gen is here.

Nora Berenstain substantively and consistently engages with the work of disabled feminist philosophers of disability. Nora’s comradeship has been both sustaining and motivating for me. Thus, I want to recommend Nora’s “White Feminist Gaslighting” and “Structural Gaslighting,” as well as “Critical Race Structuralism and Non-ideal Theory,” a chapter in The Routledge Handbook of Non-ideal Theory (edited by Hilkje C. Hänel and Johanna M. Müller) that Nora has co-authored with Elena Ruίz.

The second edition of the Philosophy, Disability, and Social Change conference was mentioned a couple of times in this interview. I cannot say enough about how important this conference seriesꟷwhich I have co-organized with Jonathan Wolffꟷhas been to the emergence of a community of disabled philosophers and to the growth of philosophy of disability. Thus I want to express my sincerest gratitude to Jonathan for his commitment to social justice for disabled people and to The Blavatnik School of Government at The University of Oxford which has supported five editions of the conference.

Last but not least, I want to give a shout-out to Tracy Isaacs’s blog, Vegan Practically, where Tracy often addresses disability, ableism, and their links to veganism and speciesism. More generally, Tracy grapples with philosophical issues that surround the philosophy of veganism, especially objections to it, as well as offers instruction about how to live and eat as a vegan.

Robert and Mich, thank you very much for your encouragement as I wrote responses to your questions for this interview. I hope that my words have been edifying. Let me end this tenth-anniversary installment by saying that I greatly admire the remarkable contributions to philosophical work on disability that both of you make and that your friendship and solidarity mean a great deal to me.

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Readers/listeners are invited to use the Comments section below to respond to my 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.

Please join me here again on Wednesday, May 21, 2025, for the 122nd instalment 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 scheduling of interviews.