Quote of the Week (and It’s Only Thursday): Hypatia’s Ableist Legacy, co-authored with Nora Berenstain

This week’s quote-of-the-week post (though it’s only Thursday) addresses the historical legacy of ableism at Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy. To open our discussion in the post, consider an excerpt from Shelley’s introduction to The Bloomsbury Guide to Philosophy of Disability. The introduction, which is entitled “Situating Philosophy of Disability in/out of Philosophy,” offers a summary […]

Who Is the Subject of the Left?

At the outset of Foucault’s important 1982 interview/text “The Subject and Power,” he provides a sweeping overview of the motivation for his work to that point, making the somewhat astonishing claim that the impetus for his endeavours over 20 years was not (as widely believed) “to analyze the phenomena of power, nor to elaborate the […]

Ableism and Admissions in Philosophy

Later this month, people in Ontario will vote in a provincial election and determine whether the current premier, Doug Ford, and his Progressive Conservative Party will continue to govern. In my riding, Hamilton Centre, the provincial seat is currently held by Sarah Jama, a disabled Black Muslim woman. Sarah, who was initially elected as a […]

Gender, DEI, the NIH, and Neutrality: Who Cares?

The past week has been a whirlwind. The inauguration of Donald Trump to the Office of the U.S. Presidency on January 20 will go down in history as a flashpoint that precipitated sweeping social and cultural shifts in the United States and beyond. Already we have witnessed the promulgation of executive orders from the highest […]

New Book on Technology and Equality

This post is intended to announce the much-anticipated publication (Rowman & Littlefield) next month of Technology and Equality*, edited by Sven Ove Hansson and Colleen Murphy. I am delighted that this important book includes my chapter “Disability and Technology? No, Disability as Technology,” the penultimate version of which you can find on my PhilPeople page […]

Quote of the Week (and It’s Only Thursday): Hypatia’s Ableist Legacy, co-authored with Nora Berenstain

This week’s quote-of-the-week post (though it’s only Thursday) addresses the historical legacy of ableism at Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy. To open our discussion in the post, consider an excerpt from Shelley’s introduction to The Bloomsbury Guide to Philosophy of Disability. The introduction, which is entitled “Situating Philosophy of Disability in/out of Philosophy,” offers a summary […]

Dialogues on Disability: Shelley Tremain Interviews Agnès Berthelot-Raffard

Hello, I’m Shelley Tremain and I would like to welcome you to the one hundred and eighteenth 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 […]

Quote of the Week (and It’s Only Thursday): Canadians on Conscientious Objection, Trudeau Jr., and Annexing Canada

This week’s quote-of-the-week post (though it’s only Thursday) draws attention, once again, to the bioethicist’s revisionist deployment of the notion of “conscientious objection.” Indeed, the post is designed to bolster my problematization (in Foucault’s sense) of the politically potent way in which bioethicists have mobilized the notion. In my last post of 2024 (here), I […]

The Call is Coming from Inside the House; Or How Bioethics Has Compromised Philosophy and Philosophers

Bioethics and the neoliberal eugenics that motivates it have thoroughly compromised philosophy and philosophers–politically, institutionally, ethically, and economically. That is to say, the neoliberal effects of bioethics have become so pervasive and insidious in philosophy that the discipline and profession have, in many ways, become extensions of the medico-scientific-industrial complex. Indeed, few philosophy departments (in […]

Ableist (Philosophy of) Language and Why ‘Crip’ Might Not Be the Answer

Earlier this morning, I inadvertently posted a news item on Bluesky that included ableist language–namely, the term tone deaf. The article, which discusses the forms of structural oppression and discrimination that working-class Scottish students at the University of Edinburgh experience, was especially interesting to me given that my maternal ancestors were poor and working-class people […]