Hello, I’m Shelley Tremain and I would like to welcome you to the one hundred and thirtieth 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 Emily R. Douglas. Emily is currently an instructor of Humanities at CEGEP Vanier College in so-called Montréal, Québec, also known as Tiohtiake or Mooniyang by the Kanienʼkehá:ka and the Anishinaabeg. Emily’s encyclopedia entry on “Temporality and Disability” is forthcoming in the Philosophy and Theory of Disability Area of the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Disability Studies. They enjoy spending time gardening, knitting, and birdwatching.

[Description of photo below: It’s summer. Emily, who is standing on their balcony beside a flowerpot of petunias, is bent towards the camera and laughing. Photo credit to Laurence Philomene.]

Welcome back to Dialogues on Disability, Emily! When I interviewed you in 2020, you were deep in the activity of writing your Ph.D. dissertation. Please bring us up to date on the broad outlines of your career trajectory and life in general if you wish since our last conversation.

Thank you for inviting me to be interviewed again, Shelley. I would like to update readers on my academic trajectory, including my teaching, as well as my shifting disability status.

In Spring 2022, I graduated from McGill University with my Ph.D. in Philosophy and an accompanying certificate in Women’s and Gender Studies. My dissertation, while heavily rooted in the frameworks and thinking of both Foucault and Fanon (as I indicated in my previous interview), engaged with a plurality of thinkers while following the general methods of critical phenomenology and lessons from intersectional feminist theory, particularly Black feminist disability studies and crip-of-colour critique.

The grand arc of my dissertation argued that when claims are made about the agency of the body in so-called psychosomatic disorders, these claims are usually based upon temporality and racialization. Bodies are unpredictable, and though they may “keep the score” or “say no” (to quote Bessel van der Kolk and Gabor Maté), they just as often exhibit what Anna Mollow calls “somatic non-compliance”. Bodies do not simply receive power, nor do they possess power, as Foucauldian understandings of power would remind us. In the dissertation, I used diverse case studies and conceptual tools from cultural studies and Black Studies, in addition to philosophy, to demonstrate that discourse about agency in these cases of disability is indexed against racialization and perceived temporality.

Before finishing my dissertation, I began teaching to support myself. In January 2021, I started working at CEGEP Vanier College as an instructor of humanities. Because the process of earning seniority at a CEGEP is lengthy and depends upon retirements, sick leaves, etc., I have consistently depended upon additional part-time work over the last 5 years. All this additional work has been done entirely online, including teaching Philosophy of Sex and Sexuality (St. Mary’s University, 2021), acting as individualized tutor for philosophy courses on Critical Thinking (Athabasca University, 2021-2023), co-writing and co-designing a Master’s level course on Critical Disability Studies (Athabasca University, 2022-2023), teaching Gender and Science in the Feminist and Gender Studies Department of Mount Allison University (2024), and teaching the aforementioned Master’s course for Athabasca in 2025.

Teaching online in a robust manner has both given me new skills related to online and remote teaching and put the lie to the demands of many in-person institutions who insist that in-person learning is the only way to avoid learning loss. Indeed, a large lesson that many of us learned in the early (“lockdown”) days of the COVID-19 pandemic is that it is entirely possible to use online and remote access to reduce barriers to education and to other kinds of spheres/events.

The ways in which traditional, in-classroom teachers assess and evaluate participation are limited. For example, in my teaching for Mount Allison, I found that very few students were willing or able to turn on their cameras. Because of the climate and structure of the class, however, participation in the text chat-box and by voice came at an extremely high rate in the form of questions, comments, and even debate among students. It is now common for instructors to belabor “the days when we were all online” as if they were homogeneously horrible for both students and faculty. Yet my experience teaching online, both synchronously and asynchronously, has proven that these forms of teaching are by no means doomed to failure, though they may require different skills than in-person teaching.

In August of 2022, I contracted COVID-19 for the first time. This viral infection has changed my life permanently in a variety of ways, including that I now face new barriers in academia. I have been diagnosed with Long COVID, or Post-COVID-19, condition. Long COVID is an umbrella term that applies to a number of permanent or long-lasting changes in the bodymind following a COVID infection, though significant clusters of patients with Long COVID have common parcels of symptoms. In my case, I have a variety of symptoms such as Post-Exertional Malaise (PEM)—a delayed temporal structure of fatigue that causes crashes after exertion—as well as orthostatic intolerance and other symptoms consistent with Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome (POTS).

Thus, both the Autumn season immediately following my Ph.D. graduation and the following Spring were greatly slowed down. I missed deadlines for postdocs and teaching positions, had to apply for extension letters for eligibility, and had to make further decisions to protect my health. Because of the poor state of the health-care system in Québec, I was without a primary-care doctor until 2024. In other words, I spent more than two years trying to get medical care through “walk-in” clinics. In Fall 2024, when my symptoms increased rapidly, I needed to take more than a month away from teaching. Since January 2025, I have been on partial sick leave at Vanier College. I am not sure when I will be able to return to full-time work at the CEGEP, given several accessibility barriers.

These last years of my life have resulted in my need for additional “crip doulaship,” an idea elaborated by disability justice writers such as Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and the late Stacey Park Milbern. A crip doula, or disability doula, is a disabled person who, as Milbern put it, does labour “supporting people rebirthing themselves as disabled or more disabled”: navigating access in difficult societal systems, surviving amidst new pains, barriers, or life organizations. I previously performed a great deal of crip doulaship myself, aiding others with both bodily transitions and ableist barriers related to madness and musculoskeletal chronic pain. My entry into the world of Long COVID has required that I, myself, receive help through additional doulaship from others living with Long COVID, ME/CFS (myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome), and POTS, among others.

My contraction of Long COVID is, in some senses, ironic or serendipitous, and in other senses, totally pedestrian. My doctoral research and postdoctoral projects focused on conditions that are often deemed “psychosomatic” and are overly psychologized, as well as medically unexplained illnesses. In other words, I was, for many years, already studying and benefiting from philosophical, crip, and feminist analyses of maligned diagnoses such as ME/CFS and Chronic Lyme disease. Just as my research portfolio on temporality in these populations was taking off, receiving considerable praise from notable scholars upon the release of my dissertation, I developed a post-viral condition, and now I live in a shifting temporality that makes my work much more difficult due to the unpredictable and dynamic nature of symptoms such as PEM.

My current and future research happens in fits and starts along new rhythms in my life. I am currently working on a paper on exhaustion and PEM, drawing upon phenomenologies of fatigue—including the late Jonathan Sterne’s political phenomenology of impairment); a paper on so-called “temporal pathologies” in both psychiatric and physiological spheres; a paper on disability justice discussions of access fatigue; and a paper on the longstanding political-resistance provocation of Johanna Hedva‘s “Sick Woman Theory,” in which she asks the question: “How do you throw a brick through the window of a bank if you can’t get out of bed?”

Emily, you currently teach a course entitled “Madness, Mental Illness, and Emotional Distress” and a course entitled “Disability Ethics and Justice” at a CEGEP. Please tell us about the courses and your motivation to teach them at the CEGEP level.

For the readers and listeners who might be unfamiliar with this type of post-secondary institution, I will explain that a CEGEP (Collège d’enseignement général et professionnel) is an institution particular to Québec. Grade 11 is the last year of high school in Québec. High-school students who wish to subsequently attend university must first acquire a two-year diploma at a CEGEP, after which their B.A. degree can be completed in three years. CEGEPs also house technical programs for career training, such as nursing, early-childhood education, respiratory technician training, and HVAC installation and repair. Many CEGEP students are newly graduated from high school; however, there is also a significant population of older students, particularly immigrants, who are retraining or upgrading at CEGEPS.

Teachers at CEGEPs are not expected to do research, though it is possible to do so. Many CEGEP teachers present at conferences and publish, without the haunting specter of “publish or perish” that full universities often expect. Most philosophers who teach at English-language CEGEPs do so in humanities departments, whose courses serve as general-education requirements. One wonderful thing about teaching philosophical topics as a humanities general-education course is that the courses are competency-based: teachers have to equip students with a list of necessary skills by the end of the course but can decide which topics and readings to use to get that result.

“Madness, Mental Illness, and Emotional Distress” is the first course that I designed for CEGEP students. My aim was to indirectly provide students with a partial genealogy of madness—always partial, since this is a gargantuan undertaking. Many of the students are enrolled in the mainstream psychology major at Vanier. By the end of the course, they discover that they have unique skills in philosophy of psychiatry, philosophy of psychotherapy, and have a greater critical knowledge of the roles of “psy-” institutions in some historical periods and in the North American present.

I also knew that I wanted to include some critical analysis of gender and race in the present in this course. We attend to gender relations in the discussion of psychoanalysis; we attend to racialization and the centering of whiteness as normalcy in the unit on antipsychiatry (broadly construed). You can read more about this course in my feature in the Syllabus Showcase series of the APA Blog, though I have modified the final project since that article appeared.

My ethics course is titled “Disability Ethics and Justice.” Instructors of ethics courses at the CEGEP are required to cover some of the major moral theories that undergraduates usually learn in introductory ethics university classes. In addition, CEGEP ethics courses are required to teach students how to apply ethical analysis and to articulate theoretical shortcomings in relation to everyday issues. In my ethics course, students begin by learning about the general dismissal of disabled knowledge and expertise in philosophy, framed by the famous essay Harriet McBryde-Johnson wrote, in which she details her interactions with utilitarian Peter Singer. We examine utilitarianism and consequentialism, Kantian deontology, and social contract theory in turn, looking at specific implications for disability.

Following this critical overview of ethical theory, students analyze the strengths and weaknesses of the social model of disability, elaborate intersectional understanding of disability’s relationship to race and gender, examine the current state of Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) policy and legislation in Canada, and are introduced to disability justice. Students read significant portions of Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century, edited by Alice Wong, which comprises short and accessible texts from disabled authors. The course often attracts students from the Special Education Techniques program, which trains students to be personal-care aides for disabled people requiring at-home care.

One key assignment of the course has students perform an accessibility audit of a physical location of their choosing. Students engage in a kind of integrated, active phenomenological experience that changes their viewpoint and assumptions about the place that they chose. The assignment pushes them to think about the impossibility of perfect access, why certain environments or services ought to be accessible in the first place, what kinds of modifications might be made to ensure access, and the universal design / retrofitting binary.

I have been deeply motivated to broach these topics at the CEGEP level. For many students, attendance at the CEGEP constitutes an important transitional period for their life, whether it is the transition between high school and university, the training period for a technical career, or upgrading education later in life. My courses are designed to affect the daily lives of these students, regardless of whether they go on to study philosophy, as well as to give them real tools for discussions with their friends, for navigating and evaluating modes of treatment for mental health, and for fighting lack of accommodation at school or work. CEGEP teaching is particularly rewarding since the students who are most interested and invested in learning from the courses are not always those who attain or seek to attain the highest grades, or even those who plan to study the topic further or attend university.

What are the circumstances and conditions of your employment at Vanier College, Emily?

I have confronted considerable barriers and issues of inaccessibility at my current main employer, CEGEP Vanier College. Human Resources at Vanier offers very basic accommodations only—such as changing one’s classroom assignments to be closer to elevators. The accommodations that would help me most— including ergonomic workstations, classrooms with temperature control, and the ability to teach from home as needed—are not regarded as within the “reasonable” range that the college is willing to provide. Since the return to in-person learning of 2022, the college has enforced a strict rule that instructors can never teach from home, though we can do other activities remotely: some meetings, office hours, grading, and preparation. Human Resources at Vanier refuses to make any exceptions to or modifications of these regulations about teaching online, even for teachers who may need to do only one or two monthly class sessions from home. Local union staff are unwilling to support teachers in challenging the Vanier Human Resources Department in this regard. 

I have been on partial sick leave at Vanier since January 2025, since I cannot medically handle a full course-load. The curse of biocertification—as Ellen Samuels calls it—has been in some ways a gift because my seniority is at least partially protected while I am on sick leave. I was disabled before, but my particular bodymind was not legible in bureaucratic ways. In addition to a note from a doctor, Vanier requires a note that specifies your confirmed or tentative diagnoses, a list of any specialists that you are consulting, and the specific medications that you are pursuing. This requirement quite likely violates human-rights legislation in Canada related to privacy. Without these details, however, the Vanier administration refuses to grant sick leaves. Hence, the worsening of my physical condition has unfortunately granted me the official documentation required for me to avoid losing my job.

[Description of photo below: A selfie of Emily, still lying in bed, hair tousled and sleepy, with an orange tabby cat lying partially on their face.]

The insistence upon teaching in person has also presented new barriers and additional chronic pain that I have developed over the last several years. Public transit in Montréal is no longer accessible to me. Many Montréal metro stations without escalators have long staircases and often the escalators at stations that do have them are not functional. Driving has also become problematic for me: I have intermittent chronic back pain that driving a car in big-city traffic exacerbates.

Several times, I have had to cancel classes because teaching in person has taken a painful toll on my body. Cancelling classes at a CEGEP is not as easy as it is at a full university. Instructors at CEGEPs are limited with respect to the number of sick days or personal days that they can take before they lose income if they cancel a class. Our group-health benefits are also limited in availability to teachers who have earned a given rate of seniority, while extended health benefits—benefits that would make a considerable difference in my well-being and finances—are not available for teachers on sick leave.

Although I deeply enjoy teaching at Vanier College, I am uncertain that I will ever be able to return to full-time work in this position, given the ableism and lack of accommodations that the College administration presents. It is extremely frustrating that I may soon be forced to leave my job due to structural issues given that I am happy with the core of the job—that is, the teaching—and consistently receive high praise from students.

Emily, you are currently applying for postdocs, adjunct positions, and full-time positions in academia. What have you observed or directly experienced with respect to the purported willingness of potential employers to address accessibility in their hiring practices, their work environment, their job requirements, or otherwise?

Over the last few years, I have applied for several postdoctoral, adjunct, and full-time positions, ranging from research-focused postdoctoral projects to teaching-track permanent positions to tenure-track research positions. On paper at least, many of these positions appear to make room for experiences of disability. Applying for the SSHRC Postdoctoral awards or the FRQSC Postdoctoral bursaries must be done within a limited timeframe after one receives their Ph.D. but applicants can include letters from medical professionals and their own letters of explanation that address a desired “extension of eligibility” due to time spent “unable to work” since graduation. I have utilized these options myself and spent extra time tracking down and obtaining documentation to this effect.

So far, I have not found a single competition in Canada that genuinely acknowledges that disability, particularly when one’s access needs and abilities are shifting, may intermittently or even permanently affect one’s ability to work, without work being 100% impossible; that is, there is no option for an extension of eligibility or extra consideration for time spent working at a different rate than expected. The lessons that I have learned about crip time and the interactions of disability and temporality overall show us that, first of all, the idea of an objective time-scale and the designation of a supposedly value-neutral number of desired achievements within a given period is unfair to all workers. It is particularly pernicious when dealing with disability.

For example, I have not been able to publish at the rate of my nondisabled peers. Although I can write and publish at a “reduced rate” compared to the rate at which I published prior to COVID infection, this rate is still not considered in my candidacy. These exemption requests cover only periods of time when someone is completely unable to work. They do not cover periods of time when someone is able to work at a reduced rate or able to work some days of the week but not others. Several times, prospective publications that I wrote were “in the pipeline”’ for special issues but were ultimately withdrawn due to rigid time-constraints.

These “exceptional” documents also cannot attest to the inaccessibility and barriers involved with most philosophy conferences (and even many disability studies, feminist, and gender studies conferences), as you have extensively pointed out, Shelley. Very few conferences are virtual or hybrid. Attending my last in-person conference in 2024, though a thoroughly wonderful experience intellectually, was financially costly for me and even more so in terms of pain: I cannot sit in the poorly-supported plastic chairs often provided to conferences due to chronic back pain; two long plane rides, to and from the 2024 conference, increased my chronic pain for almost three weeks following the conference.

Exemption documents also cannot attest to periods of times when—although I had energy to publish, network, and present at in-person conferences—teaching, my financial survival mechanism, had to be prioritized. I do not have significant monetary partner support or familial support, and the ways in which I am newly disabled cost me more money than ever in our neoliberal, capitalist system where much health care requires interfacing with health-insurance companies. The need for health-care benefits has greatly influenced my job searches. Very many postdoctoral positions, adjunct teaching positions, “teaching- track” permanent positions, and even tenure-track professorial roles are paid very poorly. Very few of these positions come with robust group-health benefits. Furthermore, very many of these positions are located in the United States, which would mean additional health-care costs that I do not currently face in Canada.

Institutions commonly include boilerplate diversity statements in their job ads which indicate that they are willing to support and work with potential employees who need accessibility measures. Since I contracted Long COVID, I have additional accessibility requirements, including the need to wear a N95/KN95 respirator mask in crowded public places, such as post-secondary campuses. I have received no complaints about my teaching with a mask at Vanier College because my employment began during a period when we were entirely remote and much of North American society wore masks. Kelly Fritsch and Aimi Hamraie, in their discussion of crip technoscience, highlight the work of access as friction. The identification of these masks as access needs is highly frictional, largely due to their social demonization. I know that if I am invited to an in-person interview henceforth, I will face additional ableism and barriers from potential new colleagues who may hold a variety of biases about teacher approachability. While in some cases, wearing an opaque mask causes access issues for some students—such as students who lip-read—I am willing to take on various strategies, technological and social, should my access needs conflict with the access needs of one of my students.

I am guest editing a special issue of Feminist Philosophy Quarterly on Foucault and marginalized perspectives and understandings of his work which is projected to be published next year to commemorate the centennial of his birth on October 15, 1926. The issue will include an amazing interview with Ladelle McWhorter that you and Kristin Rodier have produced. Without giving too much away, please tell our readers and listeners what led you to interview Ladelle and what topics you discuss over the course of the interview.

Shelley, I am so excited that this interview will soon be out in the world. While working for Athabasca University, I was hired to write and design a Master’s-level course on Critical Disability Studies alongside Professor Kristin Rodier. After considering several other books, we decided to use Ladelle’s Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America: A Genealogy as the main textbook for the course. Although we had not initially planned to choose a book that centered Foucault and Foucauldian methods, both Kristin and I have significant education in that realm.

Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America, although published in 2009, stands out as more relevant and needed than ever before. The book engages significantly with histories of race and colonialism and queerness and sexuality, as well as their production in the present, highlighting how both constructions converge around the idea of normal and abnormal bodies. In other words, although neither the term disability nor the term ableism appears in the title of the book, the book is a significant contribution to philosophical genealogies of ableism that take seriously disability’s co-constitution with regimes of racialization and sexualization.

As we finished writing and designing the course, we decided to invite McWhorter for an online interview about the monograph, about disability and ableism, about race and eugenics, about sexuality, and about her future work. In the course of the interview, we discuss how to do genealogy in general and what kinds of motivation are needed for Foucauldian projects; how to trace the resonances between racism and sexual oppression without conflating or collapsing them; how McWhorter’s understanding of her own monograph has shifted over time; and how the 2009 book is continuous with and differs from her newest monograph, Unbecoming Persons: The Rise and Demise of the Modern Moral Self.

For me, one of the most enriching features of that conversation is that it tackles the question of how to do philosophical work, how to do archival work, and how to engage with activist questions as part and parcel of the same project. Both analytic and continental philosophy are prejudiced against archival work, where philosophical work is regarded as somehow antithetical to concrete archival research or philosophical work provides a glossed-over simplification of what are simply “too many details” in the archives.

In truth, as many of your readers and listeners will know, this kind of philosophy is material. Its materiality is proven both through engagement with real facts from history in the archives and experience of the moments of breakthrough and discomfort that arise in attendance and participation at protests, vigils, and anti-oppressive actions more generally. The interview—through both the narrative that it unfolds about how McWhorter came to write Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America and her advice to philosophers and researchers more broadly—acts as a testament to doing philosophy that is thoroughly entangled with concrete materiality.

Emily, 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?

Shelley, thank you for conducting this wonderful interview. I also would like to thank you for your ongoing support and mentorship of disabled philosophers, as well as your commitment to the creation of spaces for disabled knowledge production and dissemination of this disabled knowledge, including the Dialogues on Disability interview series and the virtual conference series, Philosophy, Disability, and Social Change.

In addition, I would like to draw readers’ and listeners’ attention to the vast amount of work that has been left to us by disability-justice activist and writer Alice Wong, who recently died, including through her Disability Visibility project, the anthology book and the podcast, as well as Disability Intimacy: Essays on Love, Care, and Desire and Year of the Tiger: An Activists Life. I want to point out that as someone who herself could not use masks effectively, Alice was particularly tuned into the importance of respirator masks as access in health-care settings.

Over the last few years, I have spent considerable time in my local community working in support of Palestinian liberation and in opposition to Canadian complicity in the genocidal violence in Palestine. So, I would like to mention some of the most important work on Palestine and disability that has been published over the last several years. I worked closely with Jasbir K. Puar’s The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability for sections of my dissertation, which extends work on biopolitics to analyze scenarios in which life is not merely given or taken, but maimed, including the intentional creation of many forms of disablement in post-colonial and ongoing colonial states. Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine, by Lara Sheehi and Stephen Sheehi, provides analysis of psychic harms, engaging deeply with the work of Frantz Fanon on alienation and disalienation to do so.

Emily, thank you for this fabulous interview. Among other things, Canadian philosophers should seriously reflect upon your remarks about the institutionalized ableism of hiring and funding mechanism and practices in Canada. These remarks, among other insights in the interview, make the interview an important contribution to the archives for the series.

Readers/listeners are invited to use the Comments section below to respond to Emily R. Douglas’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, January 21, 2026, 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.