•  1002
    Detroit to Flint and Back Again: Solidarity Forever
    with Michael D. Doan and Sharon Howell
    Critical Sociology 43. 2017.
    For several years the authors have been working in Detroit with grassroots coalitions resisting Emergency Management. In this essay, we focus on how community groups in Detroit and Flint advanced common struggles for clean, safe, affordable water as a human right, particularly during the period of 2014 to 2016. We explore how, through a series of direct interventions – including public meetings and international gatherings, independent journalism and social media, community-based research projec…Read more
  •  461
    Public Health and Precarity
    International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 13 (2): 108-130. 2020.
    One branch of bioethics assumes that mainly agents of the state are responsible for public health. Following Susan Sherwin’s relational ethics, we suggest moving away from a “state-centered” approach toward a more thoroughly relational approach. Indeed, certain agents must be reconstituted in and through shifting relations with others, complicating discussions of responsibility for public health. Drawing on two case studies—the health politics and activism of the Black Panther Party and the work…Read more
  •  321
    Waging Love from Detroit to Flint
    with Michael Doan and Shea Howell
    In Graham Cassano & Terressa Benz (eds.), Urban Emergency (Mis)Management and the Crisis of Neoliberalism, Brill. pp. 241-280. forthcoming.
    Over the past five years the authors have been working in Detroit with grassroots coalitions resisting emergency management. In this essay, we explore how community groups in Detroit and Flint have advanced common struggles for clean, safe, affordable water as a human right, offering an account of activism that has directly confronted neoliberalism across the state. We analyze how solidarity has been forged through community organizing, interventions into mainstream media portrayals of the water…Read more
  •  78
    Bodily Disorientation and Moral Change
    Hypatia 27 (2): 261-280. 2012.
    Neglect of the moral promise of disorientation is a persistent gap in even the most sophisticated philosophies of embodiment. In this article, I begin to correct this neglect by expanding our sense of the range and nature of disoriented experience and proposing new visions of disorientation as benefiting moral agency. Disorientations are experienced through complex interactions of corporeal, affective, and cognitive processes, and are characterized by feelings of shock, surprise, unease, and dis…Read more
  •  72
    Discomfort, Judgment, and Health Care for Queers
    with Brenda Beagan and Lisa Goldberg
    Journal of Bioethical Inquiry 9 (2): 149-160. 2012.
    This paper draws on findings from qualitative interviews with queer and trans patients and with physicians providing care to queer and trans patients in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, to explore how routine practices of health care can perpetuate or challenge the marginalization of queers. One of the most common “measures” of improved cultural competence in health care practice is self-reported increases in confidence and comfort, though it seems unlikely that an increase in physician comfort lev…Read more
  •  50
    Disorientation and the medicalization of struggle
    International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 7 (1): 99. 2014.
    As a text in use by mental health practitioners, policy makers, and ordinary individuals, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) categorizes a variety of mental, psychological, and emotional experiences on a wide spectrum of disorders. Many common experiences are described there as symptoms, chiefly for the purposes of identifying, diagnosing, and treating disorders. “Disorientations” are not (yet) categorized as a stand-alone disorder in the DSM, but involve a cluster…Read more
  •  45
    Disorientation and Moral Life
    Oxford University Press USA. 2016.
    This book is a philosophical exploration of disorientation and its significance for action. Disorientations are human experiences of losing one's bearings, such that life is disrupted and it is not clear how to go on. In the face of life experiences like trauma, grief, illness, migration, education, queer identification, and consciousness raising, individuals can be deeply disoriented. These and other disorientations are not rare. Although disorientations can be common and powerful parts of indi…Read more
  •  39
    When Doing the Right Thing is Impossible by Lisa Tessman
    Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 28 (1): 15-20. 2018.
    Lisa Tessman's When Doing the Right Thing is Impossible offers an engaging and accessible exploration of the complex philosophical issues surrounding moral dilemmas and moral failure. Are there genuine moral conflicts? Is it true that in some situations a moral agent cannot help but fail? Tessman offers her own answer–yes, in some situations, moral failure is unavoidable–while guiding readers through the debates surrounding these questions, clarifying the various positions sympathetically and ca…Read more
  •  34
    Response to commentaries on Disorientation and Moral Life
    Feminist Philosophy Quarterly 4 (2). 2018.
    In Disorientation and Moral Life, I consider disorientations as experiences of not knowing how to go on following serious life events and experiences like those involved in traumas, grief, illness, education, consciousness raising, and migration. I challenge a history of moral philosophy that I claim has been preoccupied by a focus on the best moral agents as those who are most decisive, wholehearted, and clear about how they ought to act. In this piece, I respond to three commentaries on Disori…Read more
  •  33
    The Disorientations of Acting against Injustice
    Journal of Social Philosophy 45 (2): 162-181. 2014.
  •  32
    Resilience and Group-Based Harm
    International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 12 (1): 24-43. 2019.
    This paper considers an area of research in clinical psychology that focuses on the resilience of members of marginalized groups who have experienced traumas directly related to their social identities. The paper describes these as social group-based traumas and outlines three effects of social group-based traumas that can make the experiences of them, as well as experiences of recovery following them, distinct from those involved in other kinds of traumas. In cases where resilience frameworks a…Read more
  •  32
    Safety and Sacrifice
    Ethics and Social Welfare 11 (2): 163-176. 2017.
  •  30
    Prisons and Palliative Politics
    In Lisa Guenther, Geoffrey Adelsberg & Scott Zeman (eds.), Death and Other Penalties: Philosophy in a Time of Mass Incarceration, Fordham Up. pp. 158-173. 2015.
    This chapter examines the death of prisoners from illness in prison. It brings together first-person accounts and other research on the experiences of aging, being ill, and dying in prison, with and without formal hospice care, and the experiences of those working in hospice, caring for other prisoners at end of life. It considers these accounts, emphasizing Butler's analysis of livability and asking the question: what makes life, death, and grief in prison livable? It argues that adequately con…Read more
  •  29
    Sexual Authenticity
    Dialogue 50 (1): 77-93. 2011.
    ABSTRACT: In this paper, I am interested in the ethics of everyday sexual agency: specifically, in moral questions about when, how, and why we identify ourselves as particular kinds of sexual agents. Given that sexual self-identifications involve a complex combination of individual and social processes, a framework which does justice to these processes would help make room for an analysis of the ethics of sexual self-identification. I introduce the concept of sexual authenticity as useful in the…Read more
  •  28
    Against the background of the exclusion of many feminist methodologies from mainstream philosophy, and in light of the methodological challenges of providing accounts of experience responsive to the lives of agents, in this paper I return to early feminist philosophers of emotion to highlight how they anticipate and respond to methodological criticisms. Sue Campbell (1956–2011) was one philosopher who used methodological quandaries to strengthen her account of the formation and expression of fee…Read more
  •  26
    Feminist relational theory
    with Christine M. Koggel and Jennifer J. Llewellyn
    Journal of Global Ethics 18 (1): 1-14. 2022.
    Accounts of human beings as essentially social have had a long history in philosophy as reflected in the Ancient Greeks; in African and Asian philosophy; in Modern European thinkers such as Mary Wo...
  •  25
    Prescribing Posttraumatic Growth
    Bioethics 29 (9): 671-679. 2015.
    This article introduces questions in psychiatric ethics regarding the substantial field of qualitative and quantitative research into ‘posttraumatic growth’, which investigates how, after devastating experiences, individuals can come to feel that they have developed warmer relationships, increased spirituality, or a clearer vision of their priorities. In one area of this research, researchers of posttraumatic growth outline strategies for clinicians interested in assisting their patients in achi…Read more
  •  19
    The relational calibration of fear
    Synthese 200 (3): 1-28. 2022.
    In this article, I consider how fear in contexts of crisis shapes and is shaped by agents’ relationships. I survey a number of approaches to understanding fearing at the intersection of empirical psychology and philosophy, highlighting the extent to which interpersonal relationships are positioned as involved in processes of fearing, and establish what I take to insufficient attention paid by these approaches to the ways interpersonal relations shape the emotions we come to have. Contexts of acu…Read more
  •  18
    Inducing Fear
    Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 23 (3-4): 501-513. 2020.
    This paper offers an ethical consideration of how fear can be a tool of agents, used to deliberately shift people away from existing beliefs, commitments, or habits, or towards new ones. It contends that properly understanding the ethical dimensions of such uses of fear depends in part on a clear understanding of the dynamics of disorientation that can be involved in such uses. Section two begins with a clarification of the connections between fear, orientation, and disorientation. It suggests t…Read more
  •  10
    Fearing is a central part of how we relate to each other and the unpredictable world. Fearing badly is a key part of many of our moral failures, and fearing better a central part of our moral repair. We might think that fearing is undesirable and should be avoided whenever possible. In fact, Fearing Together shows that the avoidance of fear causes some of our greatest threats. By understanding fear as a relational practice, we see that our relationships with other fearers shape what we fear, wha…Read more
  •  10
    In the development of new vaccines, many trials use age de-escalation: after establishing safety and efficacy in adult populations, progressively younger cohorts are enrolled and studied. Age de-escalation promotes many values. The responsibility to protect children from potential risks of experimental vaccines is significant, not only given increased risks of adverse effects but also because parents and medical professionals have a moral responsibility to protect children from harms associated …Read more
  •  3
    Review of The Promise of Happiness (Sara Ahmed) (review)
    Apa Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy 11 (1): 24-26. 2011.
  •  2
    Prisons and Palliative Politics
    In Lisa Guenther, Geoffrey Adelsberg & Scott Zeman (eds.), Death and Other Penalties: Philosophy in a Time of Mass Incarceration, Fordham Up. pp. 158-173. 2015.
  •  1
    Race and Bioethics
    In John Arras, Rebecca Kukla & Elizabeth Fenton (eds.), Routledge Companion to Bioethics, Routledge. pp. 543-556. 2015.
  • Trauma-informed psychiatric research
    In Şerife Tekin & Robyn Bluhm (eds.), The Bloomsbury Companion to Philosophy of Psychiatry, Bloomsbury Academic. 2019.