Check out the fantastic third anniversary installment of Shelley Tremain’s Dialogues on Disability series, published in dialogue with Devonya Havis and Audrey Yap! It’s been an incredible and rich three years – celebrate Shelley’s work and the building of community by reading and commenting.

I am excited to join a group of very interesting academics next week to talk all about enhancement, at the Ethics of Enhancement Workshop hosted by Rutgers University, Camden! Thank you so much to Dr. Eric Chwang for the invitation, and for arranging and funding this event. I look very forward to it.

I had a blast presenting my recent research on the individualization of risk for the Philosophy and Medicine conference at Florida Gulf Coast University last weekend. I also was thrilled by the quality of student papers at the conference! It was fun and fulfilling to get to know new people in the region who are working on topics that matter to me from similar philosophical perspectives. Thanks to Kevin Aho for alerting me to the conference and inviting me to send a submission!

So excited to be part of the philoSOPHIA 2018 panel for Shelley Lynn Tremain’s fabulous book, Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability! I get the honor of introducing the book and kicking off the panel. While I am very disappointed I cannot be there in person, I’ll call in tomorrow and join the wonderful Shelley, Devonya Havis (Canisius College) and Lauren Guilmette (Florida Atlantic University) in a discussion of Shelley’s groundbreaking work.

To the Stetson University and DeLand community:

On February 16th, the Community Education Project (CEP) is hosting Open House for anyone interested in learning more about higher education in prison and potentially getting involved as a lecturer or volunteer.

CEP was established by Stetson professors in 2015 at Tomoka Correctional Institution located in Daytona, Florida with a mission to provide incarcerated people with high quality education. Since then we have been developing CEP with our incarcerated students with much success. Thanks to the support of all our lecturers and volunteers we were able to offer numerous college level courses, guest lectures, workshops and reading groups to incarcerated students. In addition, CEP students have also presented their intellectual work at the regional and national conferences.

During the Open House you will be able to learn about the opportunities to participate in the program and our future initiatives, meet the CEP students through their creative work, and much more.

Sincerely,

CEP team

Co-Directors: Pamela Cappas-Toro, Andy Eisen, Melinda Hall, and Jelena Petrovic

Intern: Julie Varga

Edited Volume

Philosophy of Disability: New Perspectives

(Rowman & Littlefield International)

Kelly Oliver (Vanderbilt University) and Melinda Hall (Stetson University) are very pleased to accept submissions for an edited volume entitled Philosophy of Disability: New Perspectives (Rowman & Littlefield International). The volume will track new developments in the philosophy of disability, emerging issues, and the crucial importance of centering disability concerns in philosophy and the academy.

Potential topics include: what is philosophy of disability? How does philosophy of disability intersect with queer theory, feminist philosophy, or other vital concerns tightly related to the oppression of disabled persons? What insights does a philosophy of disability offer in political contexts of austerity and neoliberalism? We are also very happy to consider fresh perspectives on a variety of topics to demonstrate new paths opened by the philosophy of disability.

We hope that you are interested in submitting to this exciting volume! If you would like to contribute, please submit a chapter of no more than 7,000 words by July 1, 2018 to mchall@stetson.edu.

Shelley Tremain and I wrote a blog post about the ableism of the #MeToo Movement. Here is an excerpt:

“Indeed, the attention of the #MeToo Movement has been unevenly distributed—regarding both who can claim to be a victim and who can be framed as an offender. Gabrielle Union, a black movie star and writer, argues that white women are the primary beneficiaries of the #MeToo Movement, saying: “I think the floodgates have been opened for white women”.

Although the race and class implications of this uneven application have been apparent to some people, we cannot stop the conversation there. We must begin to talk about the insidious and implicit ableism of the movement. A routine Google News search reveals that the word “disability” appears in recent news stories about the #MeToo Movement, but almost always only as part of a list of identifiers which include race and class, almost never as a topic of conversation.”

Read the whole post.