Thammasat University students interested in philosophy, allied health sciences, disability rights, education, sociology, and related subjects may find it useful to participate in a free 14 and 15 December Zoom webinar on Philosophy, Disability and Social Change.
The event, on Thursday, 14 December and Friday, 15 December 2023 at 7pm Bangkok time, is presented by the Blavatnik School of Government, a school of public policy at the University of Oxford in England.
The TU Library collection includes several books about different aspects of philosophy and diability.
Students are invited to register at this link:
https://www.bsg.ox.ac.uk/events/philosophy-disability-and-social-change-4-phidissocch4
The event webpage notes that Philosophy, Disability and Social Change will feature presentations by disabled philosophers whose research challenges members of the philosophical community to 1) think more critically about the metaphysical and epistemological status of disability; 2) examine how philosophy of disability is related to the tradition and discipline of philosophy; and 3) consider how philosophy and philosophers contribute to the inequality and subordination that disabled people face in society.
This year’s conference will feature a book launch of The Bloomsbury Guide to Philosophy of Disability, a collection edited by Shelley Lynn Tremain that will be published on December 14.
TU students may access The Bloomsbury Guide to Philosophy of Disability through the TU Library Interlibrary Loan (ILL) service.
Dr. Shelley Lynn Tremain holds a Ph.D. in philosophy; has taught in Canada, the United States, and Australia; and publishes on a range of topics.
She explained in a recent podcast:
I’m a disabled philosopher of disability, disabled feminist philosopher of disability. I have a PhD in philosophy from York University in Canada. So my areas of specialization in philosophy, or philosophy of disability, Foucault, feminist philosophy and social metaphysics and social epistemology, and bioethics and bio politics. I’m the author of a book entitled “Foucault and feminist philosophy of disability”, and quite a number of publications, articles and reviews on philosophy of disability, which can be found online, most of them can be found online. And I’m also the and this is a very important part of what I do. I’m also the coordinator, a co-coordinator of the bio political philosophy blog, which is a blog that focuses on underrepresentation and philosophy and, you know, tries to bring marginalized philosophers and marginalized areas of philosophy to the center of discourse in philosophy.
I guess in response to your question about how I got into philosophy. You know, when you suggested that question to me last week, I really had to think about this because in the dialogues on disability interviews that I do in post a bio political philosophy, I usually start off my interviews by asking my interviewee you know, how they got into philosophy, what kept them in philosophy, etc. But I haven’t really thought about it too much with respect to myself and my own career, such as it is, so but I guess I’d have to say that I got in for probably know, a couple of reasons, at least, one of them was I had one of my first philosophy professors in my undergraduate degree, one of the first philosophy professors that really had an impact upon me, hadn’t had any impact upon me, because he was very difficult to work with, he was very demanding, who was very demanding. And so I which of course, motivated me to want to, you know, he would tell me that my writing was, you know, was very good. So, which motivated me to try, you know, really try to improve my writing philosophically. And he actually ended up being the philosopher that I worked with the most did took independent reading courses with did my MA thesis with because I stayed where I was, and did my MA thesis there, my MA there, and which was McMaster University in Hamilton.
And also, I guess what I had, I guess another reason I went on to do philosophy, or felt that there was a need for someone like me in philosophy was, was my experiences taking bioethics, as an undergrad. The professor for bioethics at McMaster, was quite well known in the area. And so his lectures were huge, you know, he had a big room full of students, and I just found that the topics and the way disability was being talked about so, so unsettling and so just so going in a direction that I, you know, just start was not the direction that should be followed, that I guess, I, I wanted to see, if there was something more, you know, more could be said about this, about these issues and how they could be, how it how it can be said. So that led me to, to continue doing work as an MA student, and then I went on to do a PhD and got into feminist philosophy and then started to research, research disability. And that sums it up. […]
[P]hilosophy of disability is a subfield of philosophy that I actually initiated when I finished was finishing up my doctoral dissertation, and I gave them gave it the name philosophy of disability the area of study, but it wasn’t just resistance, because apart from what what was being sad about disability and bioethics, and also In, you know, ethics and political philosophy, there wasn’t much to really go with in terms of there wasn’t really much to resist because the way that philosophers were talking about disability when they talked about it at all, was very much very much in medicalized terms. And so it was, it wasn’t, it wasn’t as if there was a lot to, you know, disagree with on, you know, a minor level, it was more like a systemic approach needed to be a systemic shift needed to be needed to be taken. So it wasn’t even so much a resistance. Well, it was a resistance to what wasn’t being said, as much as what was being said, or even more what wasn’t being said. […]
So okay, so far, we’ve talked about how philosophy of disability, critical work on disability is classified in the discipline. There are also, you know, barriers with respect to disabled philosophers themselves being seen, because if you have, this is the argument, the central argument of my book is that the prevailing conception of disability in philosophy is medicalized and individualized, in the terms of which disability is regarded as a natural disadvantage or personal misfortune, a natural attribute or difference or property of individuals. And if you think that that’s what disability is, you’re going to think that someone who identifies as disabled is flawed in some way. So that’s going to have an impact. And you know, it’s going to affect perceptions and prospects of disabled philosophers because, and I show throughout, and I argue throughout the book that these two things are mutually constitutive, and mutually reinforcing the conception of disability that’s held, and the exclusion of disabled philosophers and marginalization of philosophy of disability, those are mutually constitutive and mutually reinforcing. So there’s another barrier. And there’s also sorry, there’s also of course, the barriers that you know, any barriers that persist across the university to disabled people, you know, disabled people becoming student, university students, getting into student you know, getting into university as a student, and then, you know, continuing on as graduating as a graduate student. I mean, those disabled philosophers also encounter you know, all the barriers that disabled students in sociology encounter and barriers with respect to accessibility, getting back and forth to university, transportation’s a problem, and professors who are unwilling to change their pedagogy and their practices to enable disabled students.
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)