Hello, I’m Shelley Tremain and I would like to welcome you to the one hundred and twenty-fifth 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 Mich Ciurria. Mich’s areas of specialization are disability justice, Marxist feminism, social epistemology, and youth liberation. Mich’s recent publications include “Strawsonian Responsibility: Three Critiques from the Margins,” “Reclaiming Responsibility: An Ameliorative Proposal,” and “LLMs and Crisis Epistemology.” In Mich’s spare time, she enjoys knitting, embroidery, swimming, writing in a café or library, and taking care of cats.

[Description of photo below: Headshot photo of Mich, who has short dark hair, dark eyes, and white skin, is looking directly into the shot and smiling.]

Welcome back to Dialogues on Disability, Mich! As faithful readers and listeners of BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY know, you are a vital contributor to the blog, posting on a range of pertinent topics. They may also remember that I interviewed you in September 2020 and February 2022. Both these interviews were fascinating and remain popular with readers and listeners of BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY. It seems like the appropriate time for you to give us an update on events in your life and your situation. What has transpired since our previous interview? In particular, why have you returned to Canada?

To begin, I moved to Missouri to do a postdoc at Washington University in St. Louis (WashU). After completing the program, I took a one-year postdoc in Sydney, Australia, and then moved back to St. Louis to work as an adjunct. To obtain the necessary immigration documents—including a NAFTA visa, a conditional green card, and a host of other documents and permissions from U.S. immigration authorities—I hired several immigration lawyers, whom I paid thousands of dollars. My initial attempt to submit my own application was instantly rejected by a U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officer, who would say only that there was a “formatting error.” From then on, I relied on immigration lawyers who, despite their best efforts, were unable to get me anywhere near permanent residency, let alone citizenship due to the Kafka-esque U.S. immigration process. The process is expensive, traumatizing, and often pointless. 

I could have stuck around hoping for a full green card; but, like many disabled, queer, and gender-variant people, I decided to leave the United States because of the rise of the fascist regime, marked by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids, mass deportations, and detention in concentration camps. After Trump was elected, my immigration lawyer advised me to delete my social medial accounts, keep a low profile, and avoid crossing the U.S. border. I was effectively forced to hide and silence myself. No more protests, no more critiques of Trump, no more visiting family. I did not feel safe publishing blog posts like this post on how Palestinian liberation is disability justice, or this post calling Elon Musk a techno-fascist, or this post describing Trump as a remorseless gaslighter—all while awaiting my interview with U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services (USCIS) to determine whether I “deserved” an unconditional green card. I could not continue to live in fear of U.S. immigration enforcement; so I left.

My trip back to Canada was harrowing. I did not have the correct documents to cross the border, so I was sent back through U.S. Customs. The American Customs officers yelled at me, “Get out of the vehicle!” “Don’t touch anything!” “Don’t turn around!” They made me put my cats in a crate and go to a waiting room where people were crying and interrogated. There, an officer asked if I wanted to appear in court or relinquish my green card on the spot. I chose the latter—I did not want to go to the back room with him and risk being sexually assaulted or worse. When I got back to my car, it had been completely ransacked. The trunk, engine hood, and all four doors were open, and my belongings were scattered on the ground. I quickly packed up and drove away, terrified.

I am relieved that I avoided immigration detention. But I never want to go through that ordeal again. I suggest to American philosophers that they host events online rather than in person. It is irresponsible to encourage anyone to cross the border into a fascist regime.  

How do you think professional philosophers have contributed to the current crisis in the United States?

As you know, Shelley, professional philosophers have been far too complicit in systems of oppression, either by taking the wrong side or by presenting both sides as legitimate.

In March, Saba Fatima gave an excellent talk at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville (SIUE) on philosophers’ role in the rise of American fascism. She identified one of the problems as both-sideism: the idea that we should always present “both sides” of an issue without regard to asymmetries of power or the consequences of these debates for oppressed people. The term both-sideism is typically applied to media outlets that try to be “impartial” at the expense of taking a stand on life-and-death issues like Palestine, transphobia, and immigration. Historian Timothy Snyder describes both-sideism as “suicide for democracy” because it gives legitimacy to anti-democratic groups like fascists and neo-Nazis.

Philosophers are just as guilty of this practice, as Talia Mae Betther explains. In a post on Daily Nous, she notes that there is a critical difference between debates about the ontological status of tables and chairs—e.g., do they exist?—and debates about the ontology of gender, race, and disability—e.g., do trans women exist? The latter are about people, not objects. While chairs do not care if they are turned into tables, put in storage, or thrown out in the trash, people do care about what happens to them. Nonetheless, philosophers persist in arguing—often dispassionately and abstractly, as Plato and Kant would advise—about whether we, as persecuted minorities, should be allowed to exist. Are we functional people or broken, delusional, dangerous? Should our identities, selves, and cultures be respected and affirmed, or should they be policed, fixed, perhaps even eliminated? Cisgender, nondisabled, white men ponder these questions with cool detachment, as if solving a jigsaw puzzle, rather than deciding whether oppressed people should live or die, participate in public life, or disappear from it altogether.      

In part, these debates are about whether a given culture (trans, queer, disabled…) should be allowed to continue to exist—that is, they are about cultural genocide. Debates about whether trans people should be allowed to play sports or use the bathroom, for instance, are not abstract philosophical questions and ensuing discussions about the nature of gender; rather, these “debates” are attempts to police trans people’s bodies and control trans culture. Like debates about immigration, these “debates” are pretexts for intensified policing. When Trump spoke about deporting undocumented immigrants in 2024, his real goal was to create the largest police force in American history—one capable of arresting political dissidents across every social group. Debates over trans people’s existence are masked justifications for policing dissidents. These “impartial philosophical debates” are prolegomena to carceral creep.

Philosophers do the same thing to disabled people. Julian Savulescu argues that the principle of “reproductive beneficence” demands that disabilities—and by extension, disabled people—be eliminated using reproductive technologies such as prenatal screening and gene editing. This argument treats disabled people as if we were chairs: should we exist? Should we be turned into tables? The stakes in this debate are our lives. Also at stake is our culture, crip culture, a space of disabled flourishing, friendship, and joy. In other words, these “debates” about disabled people, like “the trans question,” are about cultural genocide. By the same token, these debates are about policing disabled people and expanding the police state. When Trump claimed that he was cutting Medicaid to address “waste, fraud, and abuse,” his real goal was to eliminate disability (and thus disabled people), which he views as a cost. In an op-ed for Time magazine, Trump’s nephew Fred Trump reported that the President believes that “disabled Americans should just die.” I predicted in January that Trump would enact this belief in policy, and he did: the Big Beautiful Bill, for example, promises to cut Medicaid by over $1 trillion over the next ten years.

So-called impartial philosophical debates about eliminating disability are pretexts for eugenics, and they fuel mass incarceration. These debates helped Trump pass legislation that forced me to renounce my citizenship and flee from the United States.   

Last October, my old department at WashU hosted a debate titled, “Should Democracy Exist?” One part of the debate focused on Jason Brennan’s book Against Democracy, which defends “epistocracy,” that is, rule by the wise. The debaters treated this book as a legitimate, good-faith piece of writing, instead of (as I would describe it) a stinking pile of corporate propaganda from a boot-licking hack. Although I have a great deal of respect for the debaters—each of whom has done good work on social justice—I think they should not have presented Brennan’s corporate hackery as if it were good-faith philosophy, on a par with their own. Brennan—an avid defender of billionaire philanthropy and a recipient of millions of dollars in private donations—writes, “there is ample and persistent evidence that right now, rich white men know more about politics than poor black women…I would recommend that the President take the advice of the rich white men over the poor black women” (170).

Never mind that an immense body of work in social epistemology demonstrates that oppressed people have privileged insight into the nature of oppression, whereas privileged people tend to harbour epistemic vices like prejudice, bad faith, and a susceptibility to gaslighting. Never mind that Brennan, as an affiliate of corporate think tanks and private donors, could be seen as having a conflict of interest. No, according to Brennan, rich white guys know what’s up and we should bow down to our epistemic betters, including him. During the debate, no one mentioned Brennan’s ties to billionaire donors, nor his sloppy arguments that omit the work of oppressed thinkers. Instead, the debaters had a “balanced” conversation about whether some people—in practice, Black, queer, disabled, and otherwise oppressed groups—should lose our right to vote.

I remember when I was a teaching assistant at York University and I was expected to host a debate on whether “homosexuality is a sin” because same-sex love is “repulsive” to straight people, as argued by Leo Kass. (My job was to discuss the assigned readings in weekly tutorials). It was one of those “WTF” moments that Bettcher writes about. WTF was I, a queer person, doing hosting a debate on whether I am disgusting? It was beyond me to present Kass’s arguments as epistemically legitimate. My self-respect prevented me from entertaining the possibility that I am ontologically gross.

To be charitable to my colleagues, especially the junior ones who may be more impressionable and trusting than me, it can sometimes be difficult to identify when a debate is a pretext for fascism. Some people engage in both-sideism by accident. But there are also the hardcore gaslighters—the ones who want us to believe that debates about the existence of certain groups of people are just like debates about furniture’s existence: intellectual puzzles to be solved from a philosophical armchair with no regard to the consequences.

To them: FUCK YOU. I am tired of your stale, old, sloppy arguments about how you deserve more freedom than me. I am tired of your attempts to sue your critics like a bunch of cowards. And I am tired of your fake tears and persecution complexes. You helped Trump expand the police state which forced me to quit my job and move back to Canada. Your “theoretical” arguments have upended my real life, while you continue to profit from poorly-formed arguments about whether people like me should even exist. Well, you won! I fled from the country and left a great department. But at least I have a soul.

[Description of photo below: selfie of Mich outdoors, near a body of water. Sunglasses are propped on their head.]

Mich, given your work on responsibility, do you think it is important to hold philosophers responsible and accountable for their political choices?

Yes, and this is something that philosophers are quite bad at. As you mentioned, one of my areas of specialization is moral responsibility. After immersing myself in the literature of the area, I came to the realization that much of it (at least when I was in grad school) was devoted to excusing capitalist elites—in other words, bootlicking. Many responsibility theorists, especially twentieth-century responsibility theorists, have been trying to burnish the reputations of the privileged. I sadly jumped on the bandwagon when I was in grad school, subsequently publishing a book in which I recanted my own dissertation. In short, I am a recovering bootlicker. 

For example, notable philosophers have argued that colonizers, tyrants, and rapists are not responsible for their oppressive actions. In fact, a central question in the literature is whether, and to what extent, oppressors are responsible for the harms that they inflict on others. The dominant view seems to be: not very. The reasons range from “They couldn’t have known better” to “everyone was doing it” to “They had a difficult childhood.” Now, we might extend these sorts of excuses to a friend who shows up late to dinner, but surely not to a Nazi. Yet these excuses are often extended by philosophers to the worst tyrants. In this way, 20th-century analytic philosophy mirrored the media’s role in “manufacturing consent” to the interests of the rich rather than serving the public good.

Simultaneously, philosophers have been busy writing paragraphs about why me and other neurologically disabled people (schizophrenics, obsessive compulsives, etc.) are not responsible for our choices. Many philosophers continue to make a living in this way: writing about non-neurotypical people’s “broken brains” and “defective agency.” In short, philosophers have gotten things completely backwards. Instead of empowering disabled people, they have been laundering the reputations of eugenicists. I want to note that you, Shelley, have written extensively on the eugenic nature of contemporary bioethics.

Now, some philosophers do not care what academics do. Jason Stanley has said, “I simply no longer have any interest in the sociology of U.S. academic philosophy.” I take him to be referring to demographics, hiring practices, who gives talks, who gets cited, etc. Other philosophers have likewise told me that they do not care what happens in academia because they see it as a distraction from more important political aims. They do not, they say, have time for backroom politics, workplace disputes, and other “Ivory Tower” preoccupations.  

As a crip Marxist feminist, I must disagree with these sentiments. How are the workers of the world going to unite if we do not even care what our closest co-workers are doing? We should care about all labor relations, including those in our own workplaces. There is a common assumption that work is orthogonal to politics, which is precisely what capitalists want us to think. The truth is that work is a central site of political oppression, as well as political mobilization—a sphere of subordination and liberation. If you understand what capitalism is, you have no choice but to care about the labor relations in which you are immediately enmeshed, which can either save you or ruin you. In my case and yours, Shelley, our careers have wrecked us in a profound way.

In The Problem with Work, Kathi Weeks remarks that there is shockingly little scholarship on work in political theory. This lacuna is surprising because, for many of us, work is where we spend most of our waking hours, where we learn about “consent and obedience,” and “where we often experience the most immediate, unambiguous, and tangible relations of power that most of us will encounter on a daily basis” (2). Work is commonly viewed as simply a way to make a living rather than as a microcosm of broader power relations. Indeed, work is one of the main sites of political subjugation, liberation, obedience, and resistance. Hence, it matters very much what we do at work, no matter where we work. The fact that neoliberal policies have decimated unions and misrepresented work as a private, depoliticized sphere of “productivity” makes it all the more imperative for us to re-frame our work-lives as sites of activism and social change.

Philosophy has been a tool of the master’s house for too long. Contemporary philosophers need to take responsibility for this state of affairs. We need to transform the discipline from a “posh, white boy’s club” and a reputation-laundering machine into a space of activism, care, and justice.

In late January of this year, you posted a presentation to BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY entitled “Crip Pessimism: The Future of Disability Justice?” in which you documented a grim outlook about the prospects of disabled philosophers and disabled people in general. Have you reconsidered your remarks in that presentation in the interim? How do you now think about what the future holds for you and other disabled people?

Frankly, I think that I’m fucked. I will never work in this profession again (aside from unpaid professional service). I will never return to the United States if it continues sliding into fascism, which I think it will. And while, for now, I feel safer in Canada, Donald Trump has credibly threatened to invade Canada and aspires to colonize other countries too. Putin and Xi Jinping also have colonial ambitions. Mussolini-style gangster fascism will continue to spread across the world for the rest of my lifetime and probably well beyond it. I must live with the heavy knowledge that the world, overall, will become more fascist indefinitely. Since fascism is inherently ableist, ableism too will intensify. More people will become disabled and disabled people’s lives will become more difficult and shorter. I call this philosophical outlook “crip pessimism.”

I cope with my crip pessimism by valuing the goods that remain possible, and which are especially valuable under oppression: friendship, solidarity, love, care, joy, complaint. Kathryn Norlock has argued that complaining about seemingly mundane things, like work and relationships, can be a valuable source of knowledge, friendship, and self-respect. Historically, complaining has been derided by philosophers as “effeminate” and “useless.” But under the worst conditions, complaint may be best, and perhaps the only, form of political activism available to us. When we cannot change the world, we can still complain about it, which helps us cope, commiserate, recognize who needs help, and find helpers. This knowledge brings me comfort amidst the deadly and disabling violence of fascism.  

In what ways is disabled people’s oppression more complicated than generally assumed?

I think that ableism is so complex and so insidious that I have barely begun to understand it myself. One dimension of the problem, which I discussed in my keynote at the Midwest Society for Women in Philosophy (MSWIP) conference in November, is the idea that disabled people face a double-bind between incarceration and involuntary hospitalization. Often, these circumstances are parts of the same system. As Virgil Murthy puts it, Madpeople (or, on my framing, neurologically disabled people) and addicts tend to be “ping-pong[ed] between hospitals and prisons, emerging from one institution only to find [themselves] entering another.” Murthy calls this double-bind the “clinical-carceral seesaw.”

On close scrutiny, however, the two sides of the “dilemma” are not so different: you can live in a prison or you can live in a hospital, but either way, you are excluded from the community. As such, the distinction between the clinical and the carceral—when non-voluntary—is more conceptual than material. So-called “clinical” interventions are often carceral in nature, designed to segregate. This realization should give philosophers pause when they are tempted to defend clinical (medical, therapeutic, educational) programs as a “humane” and “supportive” alternative to punishment: for many disabled people, “clinical” supports, purportedly designed for their own good, follow carceral logics.

Seen in this light, we recognize that the carceral system is far more expansive than many people assume, encompassing not only prisons, but also rehabilitation clinics, psychiatric hospitals, juvenile detentions centers, immigration detentions camps, and beyond (viz., Ben-Moshe 2020). You, Shelley, describe these systems as aspects of what Foucault called the “carceral archipelago,” a diffuse but coordinated network of sites that may appear separate, but collectively function to discipline and punish marginalized groups. This network now includes facilities like Alligator Alcatraz, a concentration camp in the Florida Everglades, modeled on El Salvador’s CECOT mega-prison.

If people were more cognizant of the vast scope of the carceral system, they would not be surprised that ICE is rounding up immigrants and sending them to for-profit concentration camps. ICE is a logical extension of the prison-industrial complex that has been expanding under successive neoliberal regimes for centuries, targeting disabled people, addicts, racialized minorities, and other oppressed groups for the purpose of generating profits. Thus, de-carceration—not merely additional clinical resources—is essential to disability justice. As Murthy observes, when clinical resources are provided (e.g., healthcare, rehabilitation), they are often provided through prisons, and in a form that entrenches disparities between the haves and the have-nots.

Today, I can add a new dimension to ableist oppression based on lived experience: domestic abuse. I did not discuss this aspect in my SWIP presentation; but it has become increasingly salient to me. The alternative to segregation is community living, which, for disabled people, often means living with a family member. According to the World Health Organization, disabled people are significantly more likely than non-disabled people to rely “on support from family members to engage in health and community activities.” Disabled people are excluded from the labor force en masse, making dependence on family a necessity for many of us. As a result, we are highly susceptible to domestic abuse. Just as women in the 1950s were vulnerable to abuse due to financial dependence on husbands and fathers, so too are dependent disabled people today. This, then, is another ableist double-bind: institutionalization or domestic abuse. 

And here, then, is another reason why I am pessimistic about my personal future and the future of disability justice in general. I do not have real options. Every “option” is a closed door: a segregated facility, an abusive relationship, a prison, homelessness, Medical Assistance in Dying-MAiD. My life is a perpetual struggle because I live in an ableist world.  

Mich, 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 should explore for more information about the issues that you have addressed?

I would like to ask my colleagues for help. I had looked forward to contributing to a volume on the intersections of animality and disability, edited by a co-founder of the Ecoability movement; however, this person has allegedly engaged in unprofessional conduct, including sexual harassment, towards several contributors (me included), as well as others outside of the volume. To preserve this important piece of activist scholarship, I have thus volunteered to step in as co-editor of a new version of the volume, a version that does not include the original co-editor.

This new version of the collection, which will no longer focus on “ecoability,” will be published under the title Liberation at the End of Usefulness: On the Intersections of Disability, Animality, and Earth. We are now seeking additional contributors, peer reviewers, and a foreword author for the volume. We are especially interested in contributions from non-Western, decolonial perspectives. Please contact me if you are interested in supporting or contributing to this project. 

[Description of photo below: photo of two of Mich’s long-haired cats–a white one sitting and a gray one lying down–on a windowsill through which light enters the room. Thick brush outside can be seen through the window.]

Mich, thank you so much for your impassioned and perspicacious remarks throughout this interview. The interview will be a testament to the radically transgressive character of the Dialogues on Disability series.

Readers/listeners are invited to use the Comments section below to respond to Mich Ciurria’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, September 17, 2025, for the next 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.