Polishing the Silver(s)

I recently had the distinct pleasure of attending an online presentation that Sara Ahmed gave at UC Berkeley. The presentation was motivated by a discussion of the terms polite and polish and their connotations and derivatives. Anyone who has read Ahmed’s work will know that their analyses often revolve around careful dissection of terms and […]

What Canadian Philosophers Won’t Do

Someone could easily come up with a host of things that Canadian feminist philosophers would, predictably, refuse to do, including invite a “gender-critical” feminist philosopher to keynote at an annual CSWIP conference and promote (on social media and elsewhere) a philosopher who is a notorious sexual harasser of his philosophy graduate students. No group of […]

Ableism in Philosophy According to ChatGPT

I have copied below the discussion I had with ChatGPT about ableism, philosophy, bioethics, and feminist philosophy. My requests for information are in bold. I found the ChatGPT responses instructive insofar as they seemed merely to rehearse conventional, (neo)liberal definitions of what disability is, what ableism is, what counts as ableist, what bioethics is and […]

A Philosophy of Disability Event

Yesterday afternoon, I made a presentation in an illuminating online event, “Troubling Access: Ableism and New Movements in Philosophy of Disability,” which was organized by Joshua St. Pierre, Canada Research Chair in Critical Disability Studies at the University of Alberta, and Kristin Rodier, along with her collaborators of the J-Series (social justice series) at Athabasca […]

A Brief Review of Hay’s Think Like a Feminist (Repost)

[This review appeared on BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY last year on March 9th, the day following International Women’s Day. The original post of it is here.] Yesterday marked International Women’s Day and thus my Twitter feed was replete with neoliberal corporate and other ableist governmental discourses about women’s achievements and goals to commemorate the occasion. Several tweets […]

Why Philosophers (and Everybody Else) Should Stop Using Footnotes

When I sent out submission instructions to the invited contributors of The Bloomsbury Guide to Philosophy of Disability, I informed them that the book would use endnotes rather than footnotes and instructed them that their use of endnotes must be kept to a minimum. Extensive use of footnotes and endnotes usually indicates that the writing […]

Feminism, Ableism, and Medical Assistance in Dying, Mar. 13, 2023, UBC/Online

Sponsor: Peter A. Allard School of Law, University of British Columbia When: Monday, March 13, 12:30pm-2:00pm Pacific Time Where: DLA Piper Hall, Room 104, and virtually EVENT DESCRIPTION This panel discusses Track 2 MAiD in Canada: medical assistance in dying for people with disabilities who are not at the end of their natural lives. Presenters […]

Excerpt from “New Movement in Philosophy: Philosophy of Disability,” introduction to The Bloomsbury Guide to Philosophy of Disability

Philosophy departments in Canada and elsewhere continue to exclude philosophers of disability, especially disabled philosophers of disability, posing real threats to our very lives, including our ability to afford safe shelter, our food security, and our unwillingness to succumb to MAiD. Thus, The Bloomsbury Guide to Philosophy of Disability is urgently needed; indeed, its publication […]

Feminist Philosophers, The Last of Us, and What Solidarity Requires

As you might have inferred from the speakers lists of the Philosophy, Disability and Social Change conferences, from the endurance of the Dialogues on Disability series, and from the table of contents for the forthcoming The Bloomsbury Guide to Philosophy of Disability, I am surrounded by a cadre of disabled and nondisabled philosophers of disability–all […]

Toward an Abolitionist Genealogy of Bioethics

In recent years, philosophers have increasingly engaged with each other in passionate discussions about academic freedom in the discipline of philosophy and academia more widely, as well as participated in heated debates with members of the broader public about freedom of speech in society generally. The topics around which the most impassioned discussions and debates […]