Impurity and imperfection as a basis for action, environmental justice, racial formation, disability, unspeakable and unspoken knowledge, sexuality, gender, and collective political transformation.
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.
I’m working on a few ongoing projects, which are at various stages of draft:
Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times (University of Minnesota Press, 2016)
Knowing Otherwise: Race, Gender, and Implicit Understanding (Penn State Press, 2011)
“’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.
“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.
