I’m looking forward to giving a talk on disability justice at Penn State Law in State College, PA next week! The title of the discussion is: What is Disability Justice?

When: Friday, February 21, 1 to 2:15 pm
Where: Lewis Katz 118

The event is co-sponsored by the Center for Sexual and Gender Diversity and Outlaw. Thank you to Graham Ball for the invitation!

After two long years of work, my entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Critical Disability Theory, has been published. Take a look!

I wrote a brief reflection on the subversive imaginations of N. K. Jemisin and Nnedi Okorafor, linking their protagonists to neurodiversity. The essay is one of several introducing the new issue of the Museum of Science Fiction’s Journal of Science Fiction, now live, with the special theme of disability studies! Sami Schalk and Michael Bérubé also contributed reflections.

Great job to Aisha Matthews, who put together a great issue!

Citation information:

Hall, Melinda. 2019. “What Future People Will There Be? Neurodiverse Heroes for a Changing Planet.” MOSF Journal of Science Fiction 3 (2): 15-17.

CFP: philoSOPHIA 14th Annual Conference, May 14-17, 2020

Hosted by Kelly Oliver at Vanderbilt University

The 14th annual meeting of philoSOPHIA will run from the evening of Thursday, May 14, to Sunday, May 17, 2020, at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN.

Plenary speakers are Kathryn Sophia Belle (Penn State), Lisa Guenther (Queens University), and Tracy Sharpley Whiting (Vanderbilt).

Plenary Panel, “New Perspectives on Disability”, featuring Kim Q. Hall, Melinda C. Hall, Joel Michael Reynolds, and Shelley Lynn Tremain.

The conference will have two workshop streams: “Rethinking Prisons” and “Rethinking Disability”

Submit abstracts (500-700 words) or panel proposals (panel abstract, 500 words, plus panelists’ abstracts, 500-700 words each) on any topic related to Continental Feminism—very broadly construed—for the general program. Indicate on your abstract if you are applying to participate in a workshop.

Send abstracts to: 14thphilosophia@gmail.com

Deadline: December 15th, 2019

I was interviewed for news stories and opinion pieces on working motherhood, prison education, women among freshmen lawmakers, and new abortion laws in May and June. Stories at the links.

Shannon Green, Orlando Sentinel, June 6: Abortion bans aren’t just a war on women, they’re a war among women

Talk Media News, May 22: Female Congressional Staffers getting more leadership roles with freshmen lawmakers

Eileen Zaffiro-Kean, Daytona Beach News Journal, May 11:  ‘You make it work’: Volusia working moms juggle dual roles

T. S. Jarmusz, Daytona Beach News Journal, May 8: Stetson professors venture to prison to education inmates

 

 

My chapter on enhancement and disability for the Oxford Handbook on Philosophy and Disability is now published and available online. Check it out!

Here’s the information:
“Second Thoughts on Enhancement and Disability,” Melinda C. Hall

The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Disability, edited by David T. Wasserman and Adam Cureton

Abstract and Keywords

Transhumanist arguments in support of radical human enhancement are inimical to disability justice projects. Transhumanist thinkers, the strongest promoters of human enhancement, and fellow travelers who claim enhancement is a moral obligation, make arguments that rely on the denigration of disabled embodiment and lives. These arguments link disability with risk. The promotion of human enhancement is therefore open to significant disability critique despite transhumanism’s claims to allyship with disability justice activism. This chapter lays out such a disability critique of enhancement and further supports its claims by describing bioethics, and therefore transhumanism, as biopolitical in the sense Michel Foucault uses the term. Finally, this chapter develops an alternative vision of enhancement. This alternative vision poses a disability-inclusive future, accepts the risks of embodiment, and lays groundwork for a counterdiscourse of enhancement.

Keywords: enhancement, transhumanism, biopolitics, disability justice, the future, risk

In September, my book The Bioethics of Enhancement came out in paperback! Check it out at the new, much lower price! If you’d like me to send you an additional discount let me know.

Happy New Year! Help me celebrate the new year with a glance at my new work, the blog BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY!

Shelley Tremain and I are launching this blog today with the hope for a deeply politically engaged conversation featuring marginalized voices in philosophy about social and political issues and justice. I can’t wait to get started!

To begin, check out my post on the new movie Bird Box and disability and Shelley’s draft of new work on feminist philosophy of science, Foucault, and disability! We will post CFPs (there are some up already) and links to new work in marginalized philosophy and beyond.

Soon, you can also start following us on Twitter @biopoliticalph (I had a bit of a Twitter account hiccup, but we’ll be back up and running again soon) and right away you can join our re-christened Facebook group, BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, formerly home of the Discrimination and Disadvantage community. If you are a WordPress user or just like a good blog feed, consider becoming a follower of our website itself, too (option available on the homepage).

The blog will be the home of Shelley’s acclaimed interviews with disabled philosophers, Dialogues on Disability. Her first interview in this venue will go live on January 16th at 8 am. So much exciting stuff is in the works! I am thrilled about this new philosophical (ad)venture.

I am thrilled to announce a new philosophical venture, undertaken with Shelley Tremain. In January, we will launch a blog entitled BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.

The blog will:

• provide up-to-date information and cutting-edge critical analysis of biopolitical asymmetries and other mechanisms and effects of power in philosophy and beyond, especially with respect to disability and apparatuses such as gender, race, class, nationality, and sexuality with which disability is co-constitutive;
• showcase the insights of members of underrepresented constituencies in philosophy and work done in marginalized areas of specialization;
• advertise CFPs and other notices for publications, conferences, workshops, institutes, and projects pertinent to underrepresented philosophers and subordinated areas of philosophical inquiry;
• offer a venue for disabled and other underrepresented and marginalized philosophers to gain the experience and skills required to both engage in philosophical discussion and the profession of philosophy more generally;
• Will be home to Dialogues on Disability, the acclaimed series of interviews that Tremain is conducting with disabled philosophers and posts to the blog on a monthly basis.

More details to follow in the coming weeks!

I was recently quoted in a story for the Washington Times by Christian Toto about the #MeToo movement’s uptake in Hollywood, and whether or not there is a liberal bias driving actors’ willingness to call out public figures.

I shared other thoughts that were not quoted by the author, part of which were as follows:

• I think those in the industry should acknowledge that sexual assault and abuse is not a partisan issue. Hollywood activists use their influence, often, to encourage votes on particular issues and for particular candidates. They should carefully consider that these two issues are separate and present them as such. We should, on the one hand, pursue better policies and candidates that can contribute to an improved sexual culture and work on behalf of oppressed persons, but we should also remember that, on the other hand, doing so does not automatically equal a vote for a particular party.

• The #MeToo movement – in Hollywood and beyond – should consider the following two points in order to be a movement for justice and to take into account the fuller picture of sexual abuse and assault. First, the #MeToo movement often rhetorically relies on the threat of incarceration or related punishment for those who are accused of committing sexual assault. I would protest that mass incarceration is a major injustice and that a feminism that contributes to that injustice by regularly calling for imprisonment is no feminism at all. Further, discussion around imprisonment shows that we have not fully dealt with the embedded nature of sexual abuse in our culture – often, people joke about those in prison getting what’s coming to them (i.e., being sexually assaulted in prison). We should refuse these kinds of jokes to better tackle the depth of our complicity in our culture of abuse. Second, the #MeToo movement is heavily focused on the workplace as the site of sexual abuse and assault. Yet, many people are abused at home, by loved ones, and – in the case of disabled people – by caregivers. In fact, disabled people (who are largely unemployed) are twice as likely or more to be sexually abused in their lifetimes. The #MeToo movement needs to help the general public get clearer on where sexual abuse occurs, and how to fight it – especially in more intimate settings than the workplace.