•  1969
    Epistemic Injustice and Epistemic Redlining
    Ethics and Social Welfare 11 (2): 177-190. 2017.
    The practice of Emergency Management in Michigan raises anew the question of whose knowledge matters to whom and for what reasons, against the background of what projects, challenges, and systemic imperatives. In this paper, I offer a historical overview of state intervention laws across the United States, focusing specifically on Michigan’s Emergency Manager laws. I draw on recent analyses of these laws to develop an account of a phenomenon that I call epistemic redlining, which, I suggest, is …Read more
  •  1379
    Resisting Structural Epistemic Injustice
    Feminist Philosophy Quarterly 4 (4). 2018.
    What form must a theory of epistemic injustice take in order to successfully illuminate the epistemic dimensions of struggles that are primarily political? How can such struggles be understood as involving collective struggles for epistemic recognition and self-determination that seek to improve practices of knowledge production and make lives more liveable? In this paper, I argue that currently dominant, Fricker-inspired approaches to theorizing epistemic wrongs and remedies make it difficult, …Read more
  •  1261
    Climate Change and Complacency
    Hypatia 29 (3): 634-650. 2014.
    In this paper I engage interdisciplinary conversation on inaction as the dominant response to climate change, and develop an analysis of the specific phenomenon of complacency through a critical-feminist lens. I suggest that Chris Cuomo's discussion of the “insufficiency” problem and Susan Sherwin's call for a “public ethics” jointly point toward particularly promising harm-reduction strategies. I draw upon and extend their work by arguing that extant philosophical accounts of complacency are in…Read more
  •  1002
    Detroit to Flint and Back Again: Solidarity Forever
    with Ami Harbin 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
  •  922
    Paracelsus on Erfahrung and the Wisdom of Praxis
    Analecta Hermeneutica 1 168-185. 2009.
    Not only did Paracelsus (1493-1541) censure the logic of the Aristotelians, but also their "Godless" approach to questioning nature. He declared that Aristotle was “a heathen whose work had rightly been condemned repeatedly in church councils." In this essay I elucidate some of the more salient features of Paracelsus’s "epistemology," and draw parallels between his notion of experientia (Erfahrung) and that of Hans-Georg Gadamer. I also discuss Paracelsus’s educational metaphor, his creation my…Read more
  •  846
    The evidence is overwhelming that members of particularly wealthy and industry-owning segments of Western societies have much larger carbon footprints than most other humans, and thereby contribute far more than their “fair share” to the enormous problem of climate change. Nonetheless, in this paper we shall counsel against a strategy focused primarily on blaming and shaming and propose, instead, a change in the ethical conversation about climate change. We recommend a shift in the ethical frame…Read more
  •  777
    Responsibility for Collective Inaction and the Knowledge Condition
    Social Epistemology 30 (5-6): 532-554. 2016.
    When confronted with especially complex ecological and social problems such as climate change, how are we to think about responsibility for collective inaction? Social and political philosophers have begun to consider the complexities of acting collectively with a view to creating more just and sustainable societies. Some have recently turned their attention to the question of whether more or less formally organized groups can ever be held morally responsible for not acting collectively, or else…Read more
  •  507
    Embodying Autistic Cognition: Towards Reconceiving Certain 'Autism-Related' Behavioral Atypicalities as Functional
    with Andrew Fenton
    In Jami L. Anderson & Simon Cushing (eds.), The Philosophy of Autism, Rowman & Littlefield. 2013.
    Some researchers and autistic activists have recently suggested that because some ‘autism-related’ behavioural atypicalities have a function or purpose they may be desirable rather than undesirable. Examples of such behavioural atypicalities include hand-flapping, repeatedly ordering objects (e.g., toys) in rows, and profoundly restricted routines. A common view, as represented in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) IV-TR (APA, 2000), is that many of these behaviours …Read more
  •  484
    Collective Inaction and Collective Epistemic Agency
    In Deborah Tollefsen & Saba Bazargan Forward (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Collective Responsibility, . pp. 202-215. 2020.
    In this chapter I offer a critique of the received way of thinking about responsibility for collective inaction and propose an alternative approach that takes as its point of departure the epistemic agency exhibited by people navigating impossible situations together. One such situation is becoming increasingly common in the context of climate change: so-called “natural” disasters wreaking havoc on communities—flooding homes, collapsing infrastructures, and straining the capacities of existing o…Read more
  •  461
    Public Health and Precarity
    with Ami Harbin
    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 Shea Howell and Ami Harbin
    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
  •  212
    For an Impure, Antiauthoritarian Ethics
    Apa Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy 18 (1): 8-12. 2018.
    My commentary deals with the fourth chapter of Against Purity, entitled “Consuming Suffering,” where Shotwell invites us to imagine what an alternative to ethical individualism might look like in practice. I am particularly interested in the analogy she develops to help pull us into the frame of what she calls a “distributed” or “social” approach to ethics. I will argue that grappling with this analogy can help illuminate three challenges confronting those of us seeking a genuine alternative to …Read more
  •  207
    So Goes the Nation? (Review of The Fifty Year Rebellion) (review)
    Riverwise Magazine 1 (3): 30. 2017.
    The Fifty-Year Rebellion invites us to consider Detroit’s recent history as both epitomizing and shaping national trends. But it’s not the kind of invitation we’ve all grown used to...
  •  129
    Joy in Community Study (Review of Border & Rule) (review)
    Riverwise Magazine 1 (19). 2022.
    In gloomy and despairing times, we who work for liberation generate light and joy. We experience this every time we work together to defend our communities, when we fight to win collective victories, when we build something new. Much of the time these experiences are in marches and meetings – really important spaces for movement work. But here we want to amplify the usefulness of collective study, and share some thoughts about why Harsha Walia’s new book Border and Rule would be a great place to…Read more