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 […]
CFP: Precarity and Precariousness Conference, University of Warwick, Apr. 4, 2019 (deadline: Mar. 1, 2019)
“Lives are by definition precarious: they can be expunged at will or by accident; their persistence is in no sense guaranteed. In some sense, this is a feature of all life, and there is no thinking of life which is not precarious […] Precarity designates the politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from […]
