Alexis Shotwell
Areas of Research
Impurity and imperfection as a basis for action, environmental justice, racial formation, disability, unspeakable and unspoken knowledge, sexuality, gender, and collective political transformation.
About
I’m a theory and science fiction fan, functional potter, and I ride my bike in all weather. I’ve been part of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Carleton since 2012, where I’m cross-appointed to Philosophy and the Feminist Institute of Social Transformation. I was proud to teach from 2007-2012 in the Department of Philosophy at Laurentian University, and I mourn its death at the hands of the Ford Government. From 2013-2018 I co-investigated (with Gary Kinsman and others) the history of AIDS activism in the Canadian context – I am slowly working my way through that material and welcome inquiries from graduate students who would like to work on the archive we’ve assembled.
Other Ongoing Projects
I’m working on a few ongoing projects, which are at various stages of draft:
- No Higher Purpose is a book about crafting meaning in the middle of ongoing multiple catastrophes. It is written for readers who are living their lives without recourse to stories about there being a fixed plan for our life, laid out for us by a deity, our genes, the people who raised us, or the society we’re in. Many of us know that we cannot personally solve the huge and complicated problems that shape the conditions of our lives, but we still feel called to offer something to the shared work of trying to help. However haltingly, we might have a sense that there is something important and meaningful about this project of carrying on in the face of despair. No Higher Purpose affirms that it is good to live our lives as though they matter. It is good to imagine a future that, maybe to our surprise, doesn’t end in apocalypse. The book thinks with Ursula K Le Guin’s anarchism to offer pathways for thinking and practicing such futures.
- Only With Others, which begins from the understanding that we face multiple wicked problems that we cannot solve alone and for which we are not equally responsible – complex things like global warming, systemic racism, and chemical pollution. Starting from the understanding that there is no place outside of complicity, I offer approaches to turning towards collectivity rather than individual guilt or immobilization in response to wicked problems. This book constellates three main topics, weaving connections among them: Climate catastrophe and the global extinction crisis; white settler practices of responsibility; and shaping new practices of sexuality and gender.
- A short advice book called This Is Not Writing Advice, in which I offer some of what I’ve learned teaching academic and activist writing, with the aspiration that it can help people suffer less in their writing practice. This book is mostly organized around writing play exercises, and the belief that the best thing we can do as writers is figure out what works for us, then find ways to do it.
Recent Publications
Books:
Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times (University of Minnesota Press, 2016)
Knowing Otherwise: Race, Gender, and Implicit Understanding (Penn State Press, 2011)
Journal articles:
“’All we have is means’: Ursula K. Le Guin’s utopianism as ongoingness.” World Literature Studies 4 vol. 16 2024 (3 – 17)
“Challenging Straightness.” APA Studies on Feminism and Philosophy. Volume 23, number 2 (spring 2024) pp. 46-54
“Building Complicity with Another World.” Parallax, Volume 29, Issue 3 (2023) pp. 364-385
“Flourishing Is Mutual: Relational Ontologies, Mutual Aid, and Eating.” Feminist Philosophy Quarterly 7 (3) 2021. https://ojs.lib.uwo.ca/index.php/fpq/article/view/10850.
Non-academic writing:
“Life as Fanfic: Individual and Collective Narrative-building” Aesthetics for Birds (online publication). February 11, 2022
“Amid more shocking residential schools discoveries, non-Indigenous people must take action” The Conversation June 24, 2021
“The Virus is a Relation.” Upping the Anti: A Journal of Theory and Reflection. Blog post. Published on May 5, 2020.
“Survival Will Always Be Insufficient, but It’s a Good Place to Start.” The Arrow: A Journal of Wakeful Society, Culture, and Politics. Practice, Resilience, and Compassion in the Time of COVID-19 collection. Published on April 16, 2020.
“Vampirement: How the Canadian Pension Plan Investment Board feeds on some futures to secure others” Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. Issue 04: ACCOUNTING Eds. D.T. Cochrane, Alison Cooley, Fraser McCallum, Christine Shaw and Joy Xiang (serial broadsheet, invited contribution). University of Toronto, Blackwood Gallery. (July 2019).
“Claiming Bad Kin” Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. Issue 03: BEARING Eds. D.T. Cochrane, Alison Cooley, Fraser McCallum, Christine Shaw and Joy Xiang (serial broadsheet, invited contribution). University of Toronto, Blackwood Gallery. (March 2019).
With Chris Dixon. “For a grieving optimism” Canadian Dimension (magazine). Vol 52 issue 3, Fall 2018.