Erinn Gilson | Merrimack College (original) (raw)

Books by Erinn Gilson

Rowman and Littlefield International (see the up-to-date table of contents in the pdf), 2018

This volume takes up the pressing issues of justice and responsibility that arise at the intersec... more This volume takes up the pressing issues of justice and responsibility that arise at the intersection of food and agricultural systems, environmental degradation, and global climate change. The diverse contributions examine both the various ways that food and agricultural practices contribute to environmental degradation, especially climate change, and the impact that climate change is having and will have on food and agricultural practices. Central questions include: How can the connections between food and agriculture, environmental issues, and climate change best be understood? What are the ethical and political responsibilities of various parties in relation to this nexus of problems? Whose knowledge, concerns, and voices are, and should be, valued in making global climate policy and agricultural and food policy? What are the limitations of existing policies, practices, and theoretical frameworks for understanding and responding to these complex problems?

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Routledge, Jan 30, 2014

As concerns about violence, war, terrorism, sexuality, and embodiment have garnered attention in ... more As concerns about violence, war, terrorism, sexuality, and embodiment have garnered attention in philosophy, the concept of vulnerability has become a shared reference point in these discussions. As a fundamental part of the human condition, vulnerability has significant ethical import: how one responds to vulnerability matters, whom one conceives as vulnerable and which criteria are used to make such demarcations matters, how one deals with one’s own vulnerability matters, and how one understands the meaning of vulnerability matters. Yet, the meaning of vulnerability is commonly taken for granted and it is assumed that vulnerability is almost exclusively negative, equated with weakness, dependency, powerlessness, deficiency, and passivity. This reductively negative view leads to problematic implications, imperiling ethical responsiveness to vulnerability, and so prevents the concept from possessing the normative value many theorists wish it to have. When vulnerability is regarded as weakness and, concomitantly, invulnerability is prized, attentiveness to one’s own vulnerability and ethical response to vulnerable others remain out of reach goals. Thus, this book critiques the ideal of invulnerability, analyzes the problems that arise from a negative view of vulnerability, and articulates in its stead a non-dualistic concept of vulnerability that can remedy these problems.

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Papers by Erinn Gilson

Hypatia

Public discussion of sexual victimization has intensified within the US context and globally. One... more Public discussion of sexual victimization has intensified within the US context and globally. One noteworthy feature of recent public discourse in the US is that it calls for a broadening of responsibility with respect to both the parties involved and the forms of sexual victimization for which people are held to account. Yet often the narratives about responsibility and practices of responsibility-taking that dominate in this discussion remain individualizing and penalizing. This essay takes stock of the myriad failures of responsibility for sexual injustices in these existing practices and narratives. The first section outlines four philosophical objections to common ways of thinking about responsibility. The second section extends these objections by analyzing the dominant neoliberal narrative framework for responsibility so as then to critique how responsibility is thought about and practiced in relation to sexuality. Finally, given the failures of these narratives and practices...

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Hypatia, 2022

Public discussion of sexual victimization has intensified within the US context and globally. One... more Public discussion of sexual victimization has intensified within the US context and globally. One noteworthy feature of recent public discourse in the US is that it calls for a broadening of responsibility with respect to both the parties involved and the forms of sexual victimization for which people are held to account. Yet often the narratives about responsibility and practices of responsibility-taking that dominate in this discussion remain individualizing and penalizing. This essay takes stock of the myriad failures of responsibility for sexual injustices in these existing practices and narratives. The first section outlines four philosophical objections to common ways of thinking about responsibility. The second section extends these objections by analyzing the dominant neoliberal narrative framework for responsibility so as then to critique how responsibility is thought about and practiced in relation to sexuality. Finally, given the failures of these narratives and practices, the third section elaborates an alternative that can redress them: an intersectional feminist account of responsibility for sexual injustices that is nonpunitive and takes responsibility to be an intentional practice of altering social relations.

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Les ateliers de l'éthique, 2021

This essay argues that dominant responses to the COVID-19 pandemic redouble disparities in vulner... more This essay argues that dominant responses to the COVID-19 pandemic redouble disparities in vulnerability to harms because these responses simply attempt to return to conditions prior to the outbreak of the virus. Although the widespread impact of COVID-19 has made interdependence more vivid, the underlying sociocultural devaluation of vulnerability, relationality, and dependency has intensified structural inequalities. People who were already disempowered and disadvantaged have been consigned to even more precarious conditions. A feminist ethical perspective avows vulnerability, relationality, and dependency as conditions that are both unavoidable and central to life. Such a perspective thus provides insight into why some dominant responses to the virus are unjust and what more ethical and more socially just responses to the pandemic, which foster social health as well as physical health, might look like.

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Vulnerability and the Politics of Care, edited by Victoria Browne, Jason Danely, and Doerthe Rosenow, 2021

The discourse on vulnerability has been beset by criticism. This chapter argues that the account ... more The discourse on vulnerability has been beset by criticism. This chapter argues that the account of vulnerability best suited to address these problems is one that places the ambiguities of the concept at its center. Foregrounding vulnerability’s ambiguity makes it possible both to do justice to the complexity and diversity of experiences of vulnerability, and to provide a sufficiently theoretically complex and nuanced concept. The chapter focuses on three aspects of vulnerability in order to respond to this criticism: the attribution of commonness to vulnerability and the contrast between a universal, ontological notion of vulnerability and a situational one; vulnerability’s connection to affect; and vulnerability’s relationship to social identity, inequality, and oppression. In the final section, the claim that understanding vulnerability as ambiguous best captures its simultaneously political and ethical salience is applied through analysis of two recent assertions of vulnerabili...

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Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Feminism, eds. Janae Scholtz and Cheri Carr, 2019

This essay explores the different ways of parsing the complexity of non-sovereign subjectivity fr... more This essay explores the different ways of parsing the complexity of non-sovereign subjectivity from feminist and Deleuzo-Guattarian perspectives. Frequently, accounts of what it means to undo subjectivity are undertaken in reaction against the assumption of a sovereign, masterful, implicitly masculine subject and to undo the subject is conceived as a project of destabilizing this form of subjectivity. This essay begins, instead, with analysis of the different modes of undoing that are constitutive of the subject. It addresses the diverse range of feminist perspectives on subjectivity, which have often aimed to reconstruct an understanding of the subject centered on formative relationality, and elaborates Deleuze and Guattari’s account of the undone subject in general as a continually reconstituted product of complicated processes. In doing so, an alliance between Deleuzo-Guattarian and feminist thought is forged that aims to transform each beyond its own comfort in order to disturb and undermine the limiting and oppressive structures of contemporary capitalism and its expression in neoliberal logics. Thus, the purpose of the chapter is to consider how undoing the subject might be central to contesting capitalism and oppression.

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Special issue on Phenomenology of Vulnerability in the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology , 2018

This essay elaborates how an imbalanced reciprocity between inhabitants of places of relative saf... more This essay elaborates how an imbalanced reciprocity between inhabitants of places of relative safety and places of greater precarity results from pursuing security on the basis of a reactive fear of vulnerability. It analyzes a range of features that shape the complex forms that vulnerability takes with a particular focus on how the constitution of places as rhetorically and corporeally secure or not renders different groups of people secure and/or subject to heightened exposure to harm. This analysis suggests that vulnerability is better conceived as a process than a quality, mediating between conceptions of vulnerability as a universal condition and as a highly specific empirical condition. Finally, by departing from the negative, reactive view of vulnerability that animates the supposition of the boundedness of selves and places, an alternative conception of security that neither equates it with invulnerability nor opposes it to vulnerability can be developed.

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Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 2016

Vulnerability is both a vexing and vital concept for feminist theorizing about sexual violence an... more Vulnerability is both a vexing and vital concept for feminist theorizing about sexual violence and victimization. The concept is widely perceived as problematic because of the way it is associated both with femininity and femaleness, and with dependency, weakness, susceptibility to harm, and violability; that is, vulnerability is thought to connote an inherent weakness and unavoidable openness to sexual victimization for women. Yet, feminist thinkers also find the concept of vulnerability productive in light of how it decenters the purported autonomous subject, calls attention to the relational constitution of selves and to the reality of mutual and inevitable interdependence, and holds the promise of new kinds of ethical orientations. This essay argues that a conception of vulnerability is crucial for feminist theory and, specifically, feminist thought and activism concerning sexual violence, but must be critically rethought just as many feminist theorists have critically analyzed the ideas of 'victimization' and 'victim.' Thus, it critically assesses potential problems with the concept and suggests an alternative conceptualization. One central feature of vulnerability that must be recognized is ambiguity. Reframing vulnerability with a focus on its ambiguity both offers a more accurate concept and enables a better understanding of the wrongs associated with rape and other types of sexual victimization. That is, the wrong inheres in exploiting and appropriating another's ambiguous vulnerability thus reducing its plasticity.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Special Issue: Pleasure and Danger: Sexual Freedom and Feminism in the Twenty-First Century, 2016

Vulnerability is both a vexing and vital concept for feminist theorizing about sexual violence an... more Vulnerability is both a vexing and vital concept for feminist theorizing about sexual violence and victimization. The concept is widely perceived as problematic because of the way it is associated both with femininity and femaleness, and with dependency, weakness, susceptibility to harm, and violability; that is, vulnerability is thought to connote an inherent weakness and unavoidable openness to sexual victimization for women. Yet, feminist thinkers also find the concept of vulnerability productive in light of how it decenters the purported autonomous subject, calls attention to the relational constitution of selves and to the reality of mutual and inevitable interdependence, and holds the promise of new kinds of ethical orientations. This essay argues that a conception of vulnerability is crucial for feminist theory and, specifically, feminist thought and activism concerning sexual violence, but must be critically rethought just as many feminist theorists have critically analyzed the ideas of 'victimization' and 'victim.' Thus, it critically assesses potential problems with the concept and suggests an alternative conceptualization. One central feature of vulnerability that must be recognized is ambiguity. Reframing vulnerability with a focus on its ambiguity both offers a more accurate concept and enables a better understanding of the wrongs associated with rape and other types of sexual victimization. That is, the wrong inheres in exploiting and appropriating another's ambiguous vulnerability thus reducing its plasticity.

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Special Issue: Queer, Trans, and Feminist Responses to Mass Incarceration (edited by Lisa Guenther and Chloe Taylor), 2016

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Special Issue on Just Food, 2015

This paper articulates how core concepts in feminist ethical and social theory such as vulnerabil... more This paper articulates how core concepts in feminist ethical and social theory such as vulnerability, relationality, and dependency are central for understanding injustices in contemporary food systems and how best to pursue food justice. It argues that denials of dependency, relationality, and vulnerability take the form of normal but ethically problematic attitudes and practices, such as reductionism, detachment, and privatization. Thus, they constitute the underlying shared roots of myriad agricultural and food-related injustices. This feminist approach helps resolve the tension between critiques of the industrial food system and critiques of the socio-cultural politics of food and health.

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Routledge International Handbook of Ignorance Studies, 2015

Throughout this chapter, I seek to explain ignorance of a particular pattern of susceptibility, s... more Throughout this chapter, I seek to explain ignorance of a particular pattern of susceptibility, susceptibility to sexual violence, in terms of a deeper ignorance, that which concerns the phenomenon of vulnerability in general. In the first two sections I present the methodological background for this inquiry, considering first how ignorance is schematized by philosophers engaged in social criticism, and then how vulnerability has been conceptualized in relationship to ethical and political concerns. The third section sketches the forms taken by ignorance of vulnerability, focusing on the particular case of ignorance concerning rape and sexual assault. I propose that many types of ignorance are under-girded by one particular type: willful ignorance. Moreover, in relation to rape and rape culture, this kind of ignorance takes the form of denials of the fundamental nature of vulnerability as a social and corporeal condition.

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Social Philosophy Today, 2014

As popular food writers and activists urge consumers to express their social, political, and ethi... more As popular food writers and activists urge consumers to express their social, political, and ethical commitments through their food choices, the imperative to ‘vote with your fork’ has become a common slogan of emerging food movements in the US. I interrogate the conception of responsibility embedded in this dictate, which has become a de facto model for how to comport ourselves ethically with respect to food. I argue that it implicitly endorses a narrow and problematic understanding of responsibility. To contextualize this claim, I utilize Iris Marion Young’s critique of a “liability model” of responsibility to demonstrate that voting with one’s fork is insufficient as model for taking responsibility for food-related injustices. Instead, I suggest that Young’s social connection model of responsibility is best suited for taking stock of responsibility for food and agriculture related injustices since they are structural and systemic ones. I conclude that although consumer choices and purchases may be important dimensions of our conduct with respect to food and eating, imagining responsibility to be centered on this type of conduct—consumer behavior—is detrimental to attempts to develop a more just food system.

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Foucault Studies, Apr 2014

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Hypatia

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Deleuze and Ethics, Jan 1, 2010

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Philosophy today, Jan 1, 2007

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Rowman and Littlefield International (see the up-to-date table of contents in the pdf), 2018

This volume takes up the pressing issues of justice and responsibility that arise at the intersec... more This volume takes up the pressing issues of justice and responsibility that arise at the intersection of food and agricultural systems, environmental degradation, and global climate change. The diverse contributions examine both the various ways that food and agricultural practices contribute to environmental degradation, especially climate change, and the impact that climate change is having and will have on food and agricultural practices. Central questions include: How can the connections between food and agriculture, environmental issues, and climate change best be understood? What are the ethical and political responsibilities of various parties in relation to this nexus of problems? Whose knowledge, concerns, and voices are, and should be, valued in making global climate policy and agricultural and food policy? What are the limitations of existing policies, practices, and theoretical frameworks for understanding and responding to these complex problems?

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Routledge, Jan 30, 2014

As concerns about violence, war, terrorism, sexuality, and embodiment have garnered attention in ... more As concerns about violence, war, terrorism, sexuality, and embodiment have garnered attention in philosophy, the concept of vulnerability has become a shared reference point in these discussions. As a fundamental part of the human condition, vulnerability has significant ethical import: how one responds to vulnerability matters, whom one conceives as vulnerable and which criteria are used to make such demarcations matters, how one deals with one’s own vulnerability matters, and how one understands the meaning of vulnerability matters. Yet, the meaning of vulnerability is commonly taken for granted and it is assumed that vulnerability is almost exclusively negative, equated with weakness, dependency, powerlessness, deficiency, and passivity. This reductively negative view leads to problematic implications, imperiling ethical responsiveness to vulnerability, and so prevents the concept from possessing the normative value many theorists wish it to have. When vulnerability is regarded as weakness and, concomitantly, invulnerability is prized, attentiveness to one’s own vulnerability and ethical response to vulnerable others remain out of reach goals. Thus, this book critiques the ideal of invulnerability, analyzes the problems that arise from a negative view of vulnerability, and articulates in its stead a non-dualistic concept of vulnerability that can remedy these problems.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Hypatia

Public discussion of sexual victimization has intensified within the US context and globally. One... more Public discussion of sexual victimization has intensified within the US context and globally. One noteworthy feature of recent public discourse in the US is that it calls for a broadening of responsibility with respect to both the parties involved and the forms of sexual victimization for which people are held to account. Yet often the narratives about responsibility and practices of responsibility-taking that dominate in this discussion remain individualizing and penalizing. This essay takes stock of the myriad failures of responsibility for sexual injustices in these existing practices and narratives. The first section outlines four philosophical objections to common ways of thinking about responsibility. The second section extends these objections by analyzing the dominant neoliberal narrative framework for responsibility so as then to critique how responsibility is thought about and practiced in relation to sexuality. Finally, given the failures of these narratives and practices...

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Hypatia, 2022

Public discussion of sexual victimization has intensified within the US context and globally. One... more Public discussion of sexual victimization has intensified within the US context and globally. One noteworthy feature of recent public discourse in the US is that it calls for a broadening of responsibility with respect to both the parties involved and the forms of sexual victimization for which people are held to account. Yet often the narratives about responsibility and practices of responsibility-taking that dominate in this discussion remain individualizing and penalizing. This essay takes stock of the myriad failures of responsibility for sexual injustices in these existing practices and narratives. The first section outlines four philosophical objections to common ways of thinking about responsibility. The second section extends these objections by analyzing the dominant neoliberal narrative framework for responsibility so as then to critique how responsibility is thought about and practiced in relation to sexuality. Finally, given the failures of these narratives and practices, the third section elaborates an alternative that can redress them: an intersectional feminist account of responsibility for sexual injustices that is nonpunitive and takes responsibility to be an intentional practice of altering social relations.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Les ateliers de l'éthique, 2021

This essay argues that dominant responses to the COVID-19 pandemic redouble disparities in vulner... more This essay argues that dominant responses to the COVID-19 pandemic redouble disparities in vulnerability to harms because these responses simply attempt to return to conditions prior to the outbreak of the virus. Although the widespread impact of COVID-19 has made interdependence more vivid, the underlying sociocultural devaluation of vulnerability, relationality, and dependency has intensified structural inequalities. People who were already disempowered and disadvantaged have been consigned to even more precarious conditions. A feminist ethical perspective avows vulnerability, relationality, and dependency as conditions that are both unavoidable and central to life. Such a perspective thus provides insight into why some dominant responses to the virus are unjust and what more ethical and more socially just responses to the pandemic, which foster social health as well as physical health, might look like.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Vulnerability and the Politics of Care, edited by Victoria Browne, Jason Danely, and Doerthe Rosenow, 2021

The discourse on vulnerability has been beset by criticism. This chapter argues that the account ... more The discourse on vulnerability has been beset by criticism. This chapter argues that the account of vulnerability best suited to address these problems is one that places the ambiguities of the concept at its center. Foregrounding vulnerability’s ambiguity makes it possible both to do justice to the complexity and diversity of experiences of vulnerability, and to provide a sufficiently theoretically complex and nuanced concept. The chapter focuses on three aspects of vulnerability in order to respond to this criticism: the attribution of commonness to vulnerability and the contrast between a universal, ontological notion of vulnerability and a situational one; vulnerability’s connection to affect; and vulnerability’s relationship to social identity, inequality, and oppression. In the final section, the claim that understanding vulnerability as ambiguous best captures its simultaneously political and ethical salience is applied through analysis of two recent assertions of vulnerabili...

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Feminism, eds. Janae Scholtz and Cheri Carr, 2019

This essay explores the different ways of parsing the complexity of non-sovereign subjectivity fr... more This essay explores the different ways of parsing the complexity of non-sovereign subjectivity from feminist and Deleuzo-Guattarian perspectives. Frequently, accounts of what it means to undo subjectivity are undertaken in reaction against the assumption of a sovereign, masterful, implicitly masculine subject and to undo the subject is conceived as a project of destabilizing this form of subjectivity. This essay begins, instead, with analysis of the different modes of undoing that are constitutive of the subject. It addresses the diverse range of feminist perspectives on subjectivity, which have often aimed to reconstruct an understanding of the subject centered on formative relationality, and elaborates Deleuze and Guattari’s account of the undone subject in general as a continually reconstituted product of complicated processes. In doing so, an alliance between Deleuzo-Guattarian and feminist thought is forged that aims to transform each beyond its own comfort in order to disturb and undermine the limiting and oppressive structures of contemporary capitalism and its expression in neoliberal logics. Thus, the purpose of the chapter is to consider how undoing the subject might be central to contesting capitalism and oppression.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Special issue on Phenomenology of Vulnerability in the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology , 2018

This essay elaborates how an imbalanced reciprocity between inhabitants of places of relative saf... more This essay elaborates how an imbalanced reciprocity between inhabitants of places of relative safety and places of greater precarity results from pursuing security on the basis of a reactive fear of vulnerability. It analyzes a range of features that shape the complex forms that vulnerability takes with a particular focus on how the constitution of places as rhetorically and corporeally secure or not renders different groups of people secure and/or subject to heightened exposure to harm. This analysis suggests that vulnerability is better conceived as a process than a quality, mediating between conceptions of vulnerability as a universal condition and as a highly specific empirical condition. Finally, by departing from the negative, reactive view of vulnerability that animates the supposition of the boundedness of selves and places, an alternative conception of security that neither equates it with invulnerability nor opposes it to vulnerability can be developed.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 2016

Vulnerability is both a vexing and vital concept for feminist theorizing about sexual violence an... more Vulnerability is both a vexing and vital concept for feminist theorizing about sexual violence and victimization. The concept is widely perceived as problematic because of the way it is associated both with femininity and femaleness, and with dependency, weakness, susceptibility to harm, and violability; that is, vulnerability is thought to connote an inherent weakness and unavoidable openness to sexual victimization for women. Yet, feminist thinkers also find the concept of vulnerability productive in light of how it decenters the purported autonomous subject, calls attention to the relational constitution of selves and to the reality of mutual and inevitable interdependence, and holds the promise of new kinds of ethical orientations. This essay argues that a conception of vulnerability is crucial for feminist theory and, specifically, feminist thought and activism concerning sexual violence, but must be critically rethought just as many feminist theorists have critically analyzed the ideas of 'victimization' and 'victim.' Thus, it critically assesses potential problems with the concept and suggests an alternative conceptualization. One central feature of vulnerability that must be recognized is ambiguity. Reframing vulnerability with a focus on its ambiguity both offers a more accurate concept and enables a better understanding of the wrongs associated with rape and other types of sexual victimization. That is, the wrong inheres in exploiting and appropriating another's ambiguous vulnerability thus reducing its plasticity.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Special Issue: Pleasure and Danger: Sexual Freedom and Feminism in the Twenty-First Century, 2016

Vulnerability is both a vexing and vital concept for feminist theorizing about sexual violence an... more Vulnerability is both a vexing and vital concept for feminist theorizing about sexual violence and victimization. The concept is widely perceived as problematic because of the way it is associated both with femininity and femaleness, and with dependency, weakness, susceptibility to harm, and violability; that is, vulnerability is thought to connote an inherent weakness and unavoidable openness to sexual victimization for women. Yet, feminist thinkers also find the concept of vulnerability productive in light of how it decenters the purported autonomous subject, calls attention to the relational constitution of selves and to the reality of mutual and inevitable interdependence, and holds the promise of new kinds of ethical orientations. This essay argues that a conception of vulnerability is crucial for feminist theory and, specifically, feminist thought and activism concerning sexual violence, but must be critically rethought just as many feminist theorists have critically analyzed the ideas of 'victimization' and 'victim.' Thus, it critically assesses potential problems with the concept and suggests an alternative conceptualization. One central feature of vulnerability that must be recognized is ambiguity. Reframing vulnerability with a focus on its ambiguity both offers a more accurate concept and enables a better understanding of the wrongs associated with rape and other types of sexual victimization. That is, the wrong inheres in exploiting and appropriating another's ambiguous vulnerability thus reducing its plasticity.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Special Issue: Queer, Trans, and Feminist Responses to Mass Incarceration (edited by Lisa Guenther and Chloe Taylor), 2016

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Special Issue on Just Food, 2015

This paper articulates how core concepts in feminist ethical and social theory such as vulnerabil... more This paper articulates how core concepts in feminist ethical and social theory such as vulnerability, relationality, and dependency are central for understanding injustices in contemporary food systems and how best to pursue food justice. It argues that denials of dependency, relationality, and vulnerability take the form of normal but ethically problematic attitudes and practices, such as reductionism, detachment, and privatization. Thus, they constitute the underlying shared roots of myriad agricultural and food-related injustices. This feminist approach helps resolve the tension between critiques of the industrial food system and critiques of the socio-cultural politics of food and health.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Routledge International Handbook of Ignorance Studies, 2015

Throughout this chapter, I seek to explain ignorance of a particular pattern of susceptibility, s... more Throughout this chapter, I seek to explain ignorance of a particular pattern of susceptibility, susceptibility to sexual violence, in terms of a deeper ignorance, that which concerns the phenomenon of vulnerability in general. In the first two sections I present the methodological background for this inquiry, considering first how ignorance is schematized by philosophers engaged in social criticism, and then how vulnerability has been conceptualized in relationship to ethical and political concerns. The third section sketches the forms taken by ignorance of vulnerability, focusing on the particular case of ignorance concerning rape and sexual assault. I propose that many types of ignorance are under-girded by one particular type: willful ignorance. Moreover, in relation to rape and rape culture, this kind of ignorance takes the form of denials of the fundamental nature of vulnerability as a social and corporeal condition.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Social Philosophy Today, 2014

As popular food writers and activists urge consumers to express their social, political, and ethi... more As popular food writers and activists urge consumers to express their social, political, and ethical commitments through their food choices, the imperative to ‘vote with your fork’ has become a common slogan of emerging food movements in the US. I interrogate the conception of responsibility embedded in this dictate, which has become a de facto model for how to comport ourselves ethically with respect to food. I argue that it implicitly endorses a narrow and problematic understanding of responsibility. To contextualize this claim, I utilize Iris Marion Young’s critique of a “liability model” of responsibility to demonstrate that voting with one’s fork is insufficient as model for taking responsibility for food-related injustices. Instead, I suggest that Young’s social connection model of responsibility is best suited for taking stock of responsibility for food and agriculture related injustices since they are structural and systemic ones. I conclude that although consumer choices and purchases may be important dimensions of our conduct with respect to food and eating, imagining responsibility to be centered on this type of conduct—consumer behavior—is detrimental to attempts to develop a more just food system.

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Foucault Studies, Apr 2014

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Hypatia

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Deleuze and Ethics, Jan 1, 2010

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Philosophy today, Jan 1, 2007

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Teaching Philosophy

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Hypatia Reviews Online

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APA Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy v. 14, no. 2, Jun 2015

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Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy v. 21, issue 1, 2013

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Continental Philosophy Review, Jan 1, 2009

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This talk identifies specific modifications to human spatial and temporal experience that produce... more This talk identifies specific modifications to human spatial and temporal experience that produce disparities in harmful vulnerability and elaborates why they are unjust. In light of this analysis, I contend that common ways of discussing safety and security must be questioned because of how these aims are frequently sought as a form of invulnerability for some achieved through the creation of harmful vulnerability for others. Thus, I explore how to redefine safety and security in a more just manner by abandoning the focus on spatial (and, correspondingly, psychic) boundedness - a focus illustrated through the common anxiety about national borders - by turning instead to consideration of the quality of relations that constitute people and places. How might we conceive of safety without opposing it to vulnerability, and without equating it with impermeability and invulnerability, with being closed off? And, finally, how might the discourse and concept of care facilitate this reconceptualization?

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