Hello, I’m Shelley Tremain and I would like to welcome you to the one hundred and twenty-sixth 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 Caroline Christoff. Caroline took a Ph.D. from University of Texas at Austin and is an Assistant Professor at Muskingum University. Her recent publications include “Performative Trauma Narratives: Imperfect Memories and Epistemic Harms,”“The Cyborg Nature of Cognitive Disabilities: An Existential Analysis of Rationalist Frameworks,” and “Teaching Ethics with the Additional Labors of Marginalized Social Identity: A Disabled Professor’s Perspective”. In her spare time, Caroline enjoys creating costumes and attending fan conventions.

Welcome to Dialogues on Disability, Caroline! You were institutionalized as a child and engaged in a years-long struggle to get the education that would eventually lead you to a career in philosophy. Please explain that journey.

Even today, I suspect that the general public does not know much about the institutionalization of very young children. There has been some limited spotlight on the “troubled teen” industry and the abuses that go on in these programs, but these industries do not have a lower-age limit and there is a lot of overlap between children who are “troubled” and children who are “disabled”. In fact, it is possible to be in one of these institutions without being either. These programs are for-profit and will take the child of any parent who is willing to pay their tuition fees.

From, approximately, the ages 8 to 17, I spent time alongside a variety of other patients/students—which of these titles was assigned to us depended on the program—who ranged from physically disabled, to mentally disabled, to addicted, to “troubled,” to otherwise fine but happened to have parents that needed to have children who appeared unwell. Education in these programs was non-existent. Treatment given to the wide-ranging population that these programs were meant to serve was, at the very least, not evidence-based. Some of the treatments included physical restraints or prolonged periods of isolation and should have been considered unsafe and abusive.

Given the for-profit nature of these programs, they do not exactly push you out into the real world at the age of 18. So, I had a complicated legal and ethical fight around my eighteenth birthday for the right to leave my last institution. Thankfully, it never became an actual court case, although I think that was mostly due to everyone’s exhaustion as the fight took nearly a full year and, to varying degrees, involved nearly twenty people by the end of it.

Since I did not know what the outcome of my case would be until about a week before college was supposed to start, the shift was rough for me. I knew that I would be attending college against so-called medical advice and that most people in my life at the time expected me to fail. The predicted “failure” remained opaque to me, as throughout the battle to leave the institution, no one seemed able to give me a reason why it was dangerous for me to go to college. Regardless, I felt that I could neither trust nor believe in myself, though I wanted to try.

I was terrified that someone at college would realize that I should be in an institute; so, I kept my head down. I probably did seem a little “weird” to people at that point in my life, especially since I refused to explain my childhood history to anyone. I was a good student, if only because I was a student who wanted to be at college and worked hard to stay there.

I enjoyed philosophy classes instantly. I loved that everything in a philosophy class needed proof. You could not just decide that someone was irrational. If someone said something that made sense, you had to listen to it. Above all, after hearing some awful arguments in my childhood about why I should not have control over my own life, I liked a world where truth won. It was an easy choice to stay in that world. While philosophers have their biases, I can easily give anyone in our field an argument for why I am a rational adult and my autonomy should be respected, and I will be believed. Ultimately, when I was growing up, I dreamed of a world where I would be judged based on my ideas rather than be labeled on the basis of what others had pre-determined that I was meant to be. While I do not doubt that philosophers still judge people based on how they look, philosophy still gave me a voice that I never felt that I had before.

At times, Caroline, your experiences as a disabled woman philosopher without family support have been both extremely stressful and even potentially dangerous for you, especially during the pandemic. Do you wish to share with readers and listeners of this interview some of the circumstances of your professional and personal life during these years?

I graduated from my Ph.D. program in late 2019 and subsequently took a series of visiting professorships at various institutions across the United States. In describing this period, I want to be clear that my departments of the academic institutions where I worked were wonderful and tried to help where they could. It is also worth noting that I did not communicate many of my struggles to these departments as it was a difficult time for other faculty members too. I assumed, therefore, that there was not much anyone could do to help me.

That said, I did meet the definition for tertiary homelessness from about 2018 to when I got a permanent academic job in late 2021. During this period, I never lived anywhere longer than three months at a time. I stayed in a combination of friends’ houses, very questionably built Airbnb’s, extended-stay hotels, and occasionally my car. Depending on how you count one-night stays in hotels, I lived anywhere from 30-50 places during this time, moving on average every 28 days. In all honesty, the constant moving was still easier both physically and psychologically than my childhood, so I guess it was easier for me to adapt than it would be for others.

The pandemic ushered in a lot of logistical challenges that many people did not think about and, as a result, I became one of those people who fell through the cracks. Even before the pandemic, many academic institutions were not (and still are not) great about guaranteeing housing for their temporary employees. In 2020, things got both harder and more bureaucratic. At that point, any meager furniture that I had was in storage and I had no method of moving it. As a smaller person, that is, I was unable to move it on my own and most moving companies were closed at that point. Although all my temporary jobs offered moving stipends, no one seemed aware of the practicalities of moving across the country during the pandemic.

During this time, I was also invisible to the government and most COVID-relief programs. Although I am sure that things were even more difficult for those without jobs or beds to sleep in, most organizations seemed to be unaware that there was a category of people who had jobs, but not permanent places to live, nor means of easily acquiring permanent places to live. As I travelled from place to place, I met a lot of people in similar situations: workers on temporary contracts who were unable to find permanent housing. Many of them had families and all were frustrated by the lack of resources. Like for me, for most of them, the issue was not a lack of money, but rather lack support combined with an unwillingness to put down roots in a place that might never really be your home.

Overall, the pandemic was isolating for me, as I am sure it was for a lot of people. There really were not a lot of resources given to people who were truly alone. Some of it might have been unavoidable. I did not touch another human being for nearly two years, but I could at least recognize that the lack of contact was a tradeoff that would save lives. However, some of the problems that this situation created are still a problem in academia. Many people struggle with a string of temporary philosophy jobs before they find a permanent one. In addition to the logistical problems this precarity creates, it also carries an emotional burden. It is hard to spend years never knowing where you will call home. Even without a pandemic stopping you, it is hard to form any kind of relationship in a place where you might only spend a year. Moreover, the shift in academia to this à la carte-style of academic service heavily favors abled-bodied philosophers from supportive family environments. People who have spouses or parents willing to share the burdens moving and, in some cases, the raising of children are more able to stay on the current academic job market longer. 

Tell us about your research on disability, what compels you to do it, and why you avoided doing so early in your career.

I hid my disability early in my academic career for several reasons. First, I was, frankly, afraid that I was too disabled to be part of society. It also did not help that my parents purposefully manipulated my graduate-school acceptances so that I was forced to attend grad school in the city in which I had been last institutionalized. How they managed to do so is a very long story. Only four years had passed since I had left that institution, so I still knew some of the people “enrolled” in it. I was terrified that someone in the university would find out that I was at the institution and that it would end my academic career. I still assume that is what some members of family and various caregivers hoped would happen. Back then, I still assumed that they were right: I was just pretending to be a functional adult and would get found out eventually. I am at a loss as to why anyone would care what I did after I attended college and did not otherwise bother anyone for four years. Either way, it was not really a dynamic that I wanted anyone to know about. Doing research in philosophy of disability would have risked them finding out.

Second, there are a lot of gender stereotypes around applied philosophy. Many people seem to think that applied philosophy is “women’s philosophy;” thus it has a reputation as vaguely easier than other types of philosophy. While I have never believed these stereotypes were true, I was worried about how I would be labeled in the department if I worked on applied topics.

Third, I frankly was not very aware that philosophy of disability was a subfield of philosophy early my career. My undergraduate training was in the liberal arts of great thinkers and my graduate school coursework focused heavily on LEMM topics, so I did not know much about applied philosophy generally.

Things shifted, however, as I started working on my dissertation. My mother died unexpectedly around this time. With her death, the calls to place me back in an institution vanished. Again, I suspect this reprieve had more to do with the general exhaustion of everyone involved at the time than it had to do with anything else. Nevertheless, I felt freer and more removed from my childhood than I had ever been before.

I saw a call for papers to be included in a special issue of American Association of Philosophy Teacher’s Studies in Pedagogy on inclusive pedagogy. I felt compelled to submit something for it; so I gave a talk about invisible disabilities in higher education to my fellow graduate students. After the talk, multiple people came up to me and mentioned that I highlighted a lot of issues that they had never thought about before. At the point, I realized that my standpoint knowledge might be important for the field of philosophy. I revised that talk and the sequent paper was accepted into the journal.

Since then, the philosophical fight for disabled rights has become even more important to me. Like with race and gender, people tend to view disabled rights as a progress narrative where we’ve made improvements over time. As someone who, quite recently, was abused as a result being disabled, I find these narratives frustrating. All the “programs” that I attended as a child are still open and continue to operate with largely the same policies. There is an “othering” of disabled minds and bodies within our society. Most people think that disabled people do not deserve the same rights as nondisabled people. I hope that my work can do a little to change that view.

You mentioned your article “Teaching Ethics with the Additional Labors of Marginalized Social Identity: A Disabled Professor’s Perspective,” which is included in a special issue of American Association of Philosophy Teachers Studies in Pedagogy. Please outline the contents of the article and what motivated you to write it.

The article is a reflection on teaching with a disability and some of the internal struggles with which I have had to deal in teaching students about the philosophy of disability. Disability is a category that is generally thought to be intrinsically bad. So, if I want to fairly represent the debate about disability to students, I must question the badness of my own personhood to students. In other words, this pedagogical practice is a form of additional emotional labor that I, as a disabled person, am forced to confront when teaching this material that a nondisabled person does not have to face when they teach it. More generally, some people’s rights are assumed in today’s world, while the rights of others must be argued for. While there are many fantastic cis white male philosophy professors, they will never be required to present arguments that attack their own rights to be in the classroom. Other people must. When these people talk about the abortion debate, the American civil rights movement, or other social issues, they are talking about their own bodies. I wanted to write something about the disparity in this experience and how it affected me.

I was inspired to write it after hearing about the controversy surrounding Peter Singer—who has notably argued for euthanasia of infants with disabilities—speaking at Rhodes College a few years ago. As I mention in the article, I teach Singer’s argument in my class, so I clearly do not think that his ideas should be entirely censored. However, I was annoyed that this highly specific issue in which one scholar, whose views are offensive to others, was prevented from speaking at another academic situation on one occasion received more attention and outrage from the philosophical community than any of the many instances of discrimination against disabled philosophers. While I recognize that academic freedom is important, I wondered why the philosophical community chose this particular case as their vehicle for advocating for it, especially given little evidence that this set of events is a recurrent problem in philosophy. While many people protest Singer’s views, as is their right, Singer’s position at Princeton was secure. Likewise, it’s not as though Rhodes College had a history of overruling their philosophy department’s chosen speakers.

For me, the debate felt personal. I could not help but think that, by Singer’s own utilitarian philosophy, he should not speak. After all, the pain that having him speak there would cause disabled students surely outweighed the knowledge gained by having him on campus which could have easily been gotten through other means. I did not see Singer, nor any other scholar, make this argument, which got me thinking about how philosophical argumentation is situated as ahistorical when it is not ahistorical at all.

I suspect all philosophers would admit that some ideas are morally repugnant, generally the ones meant to justify sexist and racist positions. Most would agree that scholars who attempt to publish these ideas should generally not be given opportunity to give invited talks nor likely hold academic positions. The reason for this conclusion is simple: morally repugnant arguments are also specious arguments. A philosopher who holds these ideas is considered a bad philosopher. Arguments about the moral worth of disabled people are perceived differently, however; that is, they are clearly not yet considered to use the same specious reasoning as arguments about gender or race. This discrepancy carries with it the obvious implication that disability as a category is normatively distinct from other social categories such as gender or race.

Because the debate with respect to Singer’s speaking arrangement was construed as a debate about academic freedom, the debate lacked the important context which legitimated why his arguments were published in the first place. Had Singer written those same things about race or gender, he likely would not be considered a good philosopher. People seemed unaware that defending him in the context of disability entails legitimating the claim that, at this point in history, disability is not like race or gender. At this point in history, the rights of disabled people are still a philosophical question, a topic of philosophical debate. The standard according to which disabled people are evaluated is different. It is apparently fine to use the utility calculus to discuss which disabilities make life not worth living, but we must use the language of rights (rather than the utility calculus) to discuss which speakers we bring to a college campus.

My article attempts to highlight the difference between how disability is treated as a social category and the specific struggle for a disabled instructor who recognizes that, historically, disabled rights are still up for debate. Since the question of disability rights is still a question, I feel compelled to present the issue of disability rights as a debate given that is how the students will think of it. Yet I don’t believe that disabled people’s rights should be debated any more than sexist or racist views are debated. I believe that many disabled instructors struggle with this issue; and I wanted to give voice to it.

To be clear, in answering this question, I do not wish to be misinterpreted as attacking Singer directly. While I obviously do not agree with his views, I do not view his arguments themselves as the problem, nor do I think that they should be censored. They are representative of our current place in history and deserve to be discussed at this current place in history, as frankly it would be impossible to talk about disability without discussing them. My issue is, rather, with how we currently engage with disability in philosophy; and this specific issue was meant to highlight broader themes within the philosophical community. For whatever reason, the history of philosophy of disability refuses to move on.

What are you working on now, Caroline, and what are your future research plans?

I recently wrote a book chapter titled “The Cyborg Nature of Cognitive Disabilities: An Existential Analysis of Rationalist Frameworks” for Brill’s Existentialist Philosophy and Disability. My chapter considers how the analytic view of cognitively disabled personhood compares to the existentialist view of cognitively disabled personhood. I had not considered cognitively disabled personhood very much from that perspective before I wrote the chapter. In the future, I would like to look more at existentialist accounts of selfhood, which do not seem to have the same rationalist obsession as analytic accounts with respect to separating subject from object. I think the fluidity of the former accounts is under-explored in the analytic moral tradition; I would be interested to see how such views could be adapted to consider moral worth in the modern western sense. I want to note that I worry, nevertheless, that existentialism still tends towards an over-intellectualized self-concept and, thus, I would consider its limitations too.

I have been working on a piece that embraces the notion of a-neuro-normative identity. As someone who was harmed in virtue of psychological labels, I find the current neurotypical/neurodiverse binary–which is currently represented in popular culture and echoed in medicine–to be troubling. I understand that various neurodiverse labels can be useful to some people’s self-understanding; however, I have always felt misassigned in a highly personal way when I see someone mentally label me as “neurodiverse”. The experience always feels similar to how it might feel if someone misgendered me. I want to note that, as a ciswoman, I do not claim to know the true badness of misgendered for trans and nonbinary people, nor do I wish to imply that mislabeling someone as “neurodivergent” is exactly analogous to misgendering. But I think that both experiences involve an uncomfortable type of identity mislabeling in a broad sense.

I do not believe that there is any “deep fact” about whether someone is neurodiverse. The characteristic traits of autism and ADHD are extremely broad and all the tests for them either involve people answering questionnaires or short periods of observation. Hence, I view these labels as fluid and not necessarily indicative in the manner that a cancer diagnosis would, if correct, determine that a person has cancer. In my case, I, like every other human being on earth, exhibit some traits of neurodiversity and some traits of neurotypicalness. However, I do not wish to be labeled as either because I believe that either label would create more epistemic confusion than it would aid in understanding. Moreover, I simply do not like the binary and believe that I have a right to reject it. I would like to be labeled as “a-neuro-normative,” which is a term that I made up to refer to the neurological equivalent of non-binary gender. Like for many non-binary people with respect to gender, I do not view being a-neuro-normative as somewhere in-between neurotypical and neurodivergent. Rather, I view a-neuro-normativity as a deeper rejection of the entire binary.

The project that I am working on at present attempts to legitimate a-neuro-normative as a proper disabled identity. Admittedly, the project is difficult as neuro-normativity is currently medicalized in our society. So, I must demonstrate both that many neurological disorders are not deep facts and that they are not always best considered to be discovered by doctors. In addition, I must address both questions concerning whether or not someone can be wrong about their neuro-normative identity and how neuro-normative status compares to other identity markers. So, the project is quite long and might not find the right home anytime soon.

Caroline, 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?

For those understandably curious as to the nature of my disabilities, I do not like to label them as I feel it generates more epistemic confusion than it creates epistemic understanding. As I hope you can understand from my backstory, the nature of my disabilities is complex and interwoven with trauma in a manner that is difficult for me to unpack through any sort of labeling.

I want to point out that, unfortunately, there is little written about the modern-day institutionalization of children. Since the programs that this institutionalization comprises have crossover with the “troubled teen” industry, however, literature on troubled teen programs can give people an idea of how disabled children’s institutionalization operates. For instance, Help at Any Cost: How the Troubled-Teen Industry Cons Parents and Hurts Kids by Maia Szalavitz, provides a good overview. In addition, the online (and free) visual autobiography “Joe Vs Elan School” provides a vivid and graphic personal look into one of these programs. The true author’s name is kept anonymous for reasons that become apparent if you read autonomy biography, but the author provides proof of its veracity on their website. Finally, I would encourage readers and listeners who are interested in my childhood institutionalization and childhood institutionalization more generally to simply look up so-called boarding schools for troubled or disabled children. You might notice some concerning things if you spent a few minutes thinking about their mission and design.

I would like to thank you, Shelley, for interviewing me. The Dialogues on Disability series helped me feel less alone through graduate school, so I hope that this interview might help future philosophers.

Caroline, thank you so much for this fascinating interview and your provocative insights throughout. The interview will make vital contributions to the archives of Dialogues on Disability.

Readers/listeners are invited to use the Comments section below to respond to Caroline Christoff’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, October 15, 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.