Research

State violence against disabled people and Indigenous people as well as disabled Indigenous people has long been endemic in the US. Recent scholarship in philosophy of disability and disability studies rarely addresses the underlying issue that causes such state violence: settler-colonial conceptions of land. The aim of this article is to begin filling this gap in the literature. We detail settler colonial epistemologies and argue that the property relation underwrites operative concepts of accessibility dominant across disability theory. We show how such concepts of accessibility are Lockean and thereby defined terms of the project of settler colonialism. We instead offer an Indigenized account of access, which we term deep access, that does not rely on the notion of Lockean property and that provides a coalitional path for Indigenous futures and disability justice. On our account, decolonization is and must be a deep access measure.

In this episode host Gladys Rowe engages in a powerful conversation with Indigenous feminist philosopher and educator Shelbi Nahwilet Meissner. Shelbi shares her journey into evaluation through her work on Indigenous language reclamation and her deep engagement within Indigenous research methods. She discusses the significance of relationship-building, the centrality of kinship and gender diversity, and the creation of the Indigenous Feminist Evaluation Framework. Shelbi also highlights her role as the founding director of the Indigenous Futures Lab and her inspiring work on community-driven projects. Together, Gladys and Shelbi reflect on how Indigenous knowledge systems, felt knowledge, and artistic practices like basket weaving can transform research and evaluation processes. This episode is a rich exploration of Indigenous feminist approaches to evaluation and the importance of centering community voices and diverse knowledges.

Abstract 

It is commonly assumed that we currently face a climate crisis insofar as the climatological effects of excessive carbon emissions risk destabilizing advanced civilization and jeopardize cherished modern institutions. The threat posed by climate change is treated as unprecedented, demanding urgent action to avert apocalyptic conditions that will limit or even erase the future of all humankind. In this essay, we argue that this framework—the default climate crisis motif—perpetuates a discursive infrastructure that commits its proponents, if unwittingly, to logics that ultimately reinforce the dynamics driving climate change and its attending injustices. By centering Indigenous feminist environmental discourses, which privilege the role of richly interweaving networks of responsibilities composing extended more-than-human kinship arrangements, we contend that climate crisis is instead primarily a manifestation of devastating multidimensional relational disruptions of Indigenous lands and lives. More pointedly, it is a rebound effect of centuries of accumulating colonial injustices against responsible lifeways that are critical for socioecological adaptability and responsiveness. Framing climate crisis as relational crisis hereby creates discursive space for much needed transformational Indigenous feminist visions for justly and effectively addressing climate change.

This article was published in Vol. 10 No. 1/2 (2024): Revolutionizing Responsibility.

Moving past the conflation of state socialism with all socialist projects, this book opens up avenues for addressing socialist projects rooted in decolonial and antiracist politics. To that end, this anthology brings together scholarship across regions that engages postsocialism as an analytic that connects the ‘afters’ of the capitalist– socialist dynamic to present day politics. Resisting the revolutionary teleology of what was before, “postsocialism” can function to create space to work through ongoing legacies of socialisms in the present.

Looking at the Middle East, Scandanavia, Korea, Romania, China, and the US, the chapters in this book assess ongoing socialist legacies in new ethical collectivities and networks of dissent opposing state- and corporate- based military, economic, and cultural expansionism since the end of the Cold War.

The majority of the chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal, Social Identities.

What is good technology? Is 'good' technology even possible? And how can feminism help us work towards it? The Good Robot addresses these crucial questions through the voices of leading feminist thinkers, activists and technologists. Each thinker provides a snapshot of key challenges, questions and provocations in the field of feminism and technology.

While the question of whether various AI and technological advances can be ethical is not new, the embedded nature of feminist perspectives pulls out whether this perceived 'goodness' or 'wrongness' might actually impact our lives in the 21st century. This book explores both the radical possibilities of technology to disrupt practices of patriarchy, colonialism, racism and beyond but also provides a significant critique of how we can contain the ethical possibilities of entities we cannot predict. In exploring unjust technological practices and engaging critical voices in the tech industry, the existing moral issues are brought to light as well as the possible ethical quagmires.

This book opens a new space of discussion on digital technologies – one that insists that the future of AI is an urgent feminist issue.

This chapter can be found in Part IV: Good Visions, Chapter 15 and was written in collaboration with Felicity Amaya Schaeffer

This article tracks contemporary debates surrounding human trafficking, sex slavery, and the slave trade, in which the specter of the Ottoman empire and its system of slavery—as well as other “Oriental” slave systems—emerge as templates for imagining the place of sex in slavery. At the same time, the authors highlight how Ottoman and “Oriental” slavery is largely considered irrelevant to the genealogy of present‐day racial capitalism. By contrast, the authors argue that considering historically parallel and entangled slave systems is important not just to accounts of modern‐day slavery but also for how we conceptualize the “racial” in racial capitalism and the “queer” and “of color” in queer of color critique. Building on Black feminist historiography on the transatlantic slave trade, the commitments of queer of color critique, and contemporary research concerning sexual violation and racial capitalism, the authors explore how interconnected struggles across the globe are partitioned by imagined frameworks of racial and sexual difference that isolate entangled systems of gendered and sexual enslavement.

At a time when movements for racial justice are front and center in U.S. national politics, this book provides essential new understanding to the study of race, its influence on people's lives, and what we can do to address the persistent and foundational American problem of systemic racism. Knowledge about race and racism changes as social and historical conditions evolve, as different generations of scholars experience unique societal conditions, and as new voices from those who have previously been kept at the margins have challenged us to reconceive our thinking about race and ethnicity. In this collection of essays by prominent sociologists whose work has transformed the understanding of race and ethnicity, each reflects on their career and how their personal experiences have shaped their contribution to understanding racism, both in scholarly and public debate.

Merging biography, memoir, and sociohistorical analysis, these essays provide vital insight into the influence of race on people's perspectives and opportunities both inside and outside of academia, and how racial inequality is felt, experienced, and confronted.

This paper offers some key characteristics of Indigenous feminist approaches to evaluation and spotlights a unique and promising example of Indigenous feminist evaluation methods in the My Two Aunties (M2A) program. Though Indigenous feminist evaluation methods are diverse, complex, and community-specific, some general characteristics we point to in this analysis are commitments to anti-colonial conceptions of family, gender, and belonging, an assertion of the epistemic and evaluative importance of felt knowledge, the explicit confrontation of settler colonialism’s impact on Indigenous life, and the commitment to the transformative potential of community-led caretaking. We then turn to what we see as an exemplar of Indigenous feminist evaluation methods—the evaluation component of the My Two Aunties (M2A) program. Our paper will provide theoretical scaffolding for Indigenous feminist evaluation and add to the growing body of Indigenous scholarship that challenges what “counts” as evidence in settler scholarship arenas.

In 2021, startup companies raised $1.9 billion for what entrepreneur Ida Tin calls FemTech, or digital tools designed to promote women’s health including medical wearables, diagnostic kits, and self-tracking apps. Not only is FemTech a booming industry, but it is touted as an innovative, feminist corrective for how biomedical devices have traditionally been designed with a male body in mind. Two such FemTech products are LOONCUP, the world’s first “smart” menstrual cup, and EverlyWell’s line of home-health tests. Rooted in the neoliberal logic of personal responsibility and individual self-mastery, these products purport to empower women by giving them tools to manage their health but, in fact, work by enlisting them to place their bodies under corporate surveillance. By drawing parallels to the 20^th century FemCare industry, I show how today’s FemTech companies entice customers by offering new, technological solutions to female body management that promise greater convenience and entry into elusive, upper-middle class lifestyles. Through their marketing they co-opt feminist slogans to sell women’s health products, replacing intersectional feminist critique with neoliberal commodity feminism. Then, when customers use these products, their subjective evaluation of their health is replaced with numerical data (despite questionable accuracy) which is subsequently entered into for-profit databank. This misuse of medical technology is not, however, inevitable. In the final section, I offer a feminist framework for reimagining the FemTech industry by allowing product development to emerge from the daily needs of women, prioritizing outward-facing technologies that conceive of health as environmental and collective, replacing built-in goals with open-ended modeling, and engaging in feminist data practices which emphasize user privacy and the democratization of knowledge.

Moving past the conflation of state socialism with all socialist projects, this book opens up avenues for addressing socialist projects rooted in decolonial and antiracist politics. To that end, this anthology brings together scholarship across regions that engages postsocialism as an analytic that connects the ‘afters’ of the capitalist– socialist dynamic to present day politics. Resisting the revolutionary teleology of what was before, “postsocialism” can function to create space to work through ongoing legacies of socialisms in the present.

Looking at the Middle East, Scandanavia, Korea, Romania, China, and the US, the chapters in this book assess ongoing socialist legacies in new ethical collectivities and networks of dissent opposing state- and corporate- based military, economic, and cultural expansionism since the end of the Cold War.

The majority of the chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal, Social Identities.