Dialogues on Disability: Shelley Tremain Interviews Jane Dryden

Hello, I’m Shelley Tremain and I’d like to welcome you to the eighty-fourth 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 […]

IWD, Philosophy of Disability, and Vulnerability

Almost a year ago, I wrote the post below. The post has been viewed thousands of times and effectively launched discussion about COVID-19 and nursing homes on social media and in the popular press in Canada. As increasingly happens when one puts ideas and writing into circulation (especially with the proliferation of new social media […]

The Nursing Home-Industrial-Complex

In a post at the beginning of April, I addressed the way that vulnerability was naturalized in reports in the mainstream press, on bioethics blogs, and elsewhere about the dramatically increasing number of COVID-19 outbreaks in nursing homes in Ontario, across Canada, and elsewhere. My argument in the post drew attention to the systemic ageism […]

Governing COVID in Brazil: Ableism and Authoritarianism

Governing COVID in Brazil: Dissecting the Ableist and Reluctant Authoritarian* By  Francisco Ortega and Michael Orsini Brazilians, says President Jair Bolsonaro, are so tough they can fend off this pesky COVID-19 virus, the same virus that has killed more than 147,000+ people worldwide and counting.  Likening COVID-19 to a “little flu”, the Brazilian leader has exposed, once […]

COVID-19 and The Naturalization of Vulnerability

Since the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, and especially since its effects began to be more directly experienced in Canada, I have carefully watched growing discussions about the pandemic, “seniors,” disabled people, “vulnerability,” and nursing homes unfold on social media and in the mainstream popular press. In particular, I am attentive to the ways that […]

CFP: Philosophical Perspectives on Aging: Vulnerability and Imperfection, Rome, May 25-26, 2020 (deadline: Mar. 2, 2020)

The seminar will develop philosophical perspectives on aging and the life course. One central focus is vulnerability and imperfection. Elderly people are standardly categorized as vulnerable, but vulnerability tends to be understood in a narrowly biomedical way, rather than being seen as a part of life, conceived biographically and existentially and tied to the life […]