I live, teach, and write on unceded Algonquin land, currently Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. I’m a Professor in Carleton University’s Department of Sociology and Anthropology, where I’m cross-appointed with the Feminist Institute of Social Transformation and the Department of Philosophy. I’m one of the co-investigators for an oral history project on the history of AIDS activism in the Canadian context.
I’m a feminist theorist of relationality, which means that I think it matters that we’re part of the world and connected with each other. Pretty much all of my work is trying to understand the ethical and political implications of starting from this idea, though topically I come at it from a number of different directions.
I have three main writing projects happening right now: No Higher Purpose: Making Meaning in the Mess (about Ursula K. Le Guin’s anarchism and why it’s so great); Only With Others (about the ethical and political usefulness of getting together to solve complex problems in which we are complicit); and a short co-written (with philosopher Kilian Jörg) book project called An Ecology of Moralizing (which asks how we should think about moralizing in our current moment). I’ve done some podcasts and presentations, which give a window into this ongoing work.
Generally, I work in social and political theory, with a focus on complicity and complexity as a ground for ethical and political action. I write about climate change, disability, gender, ecology, art, sexuality, anarchism, race, and emotions. My first book, Knowing Otherwise, argues that unspoken and unspeakable knowledge is epistemically salient to our political lives and that we should pay attention to more than what we can say in words. My second book, Against Purity, is about the problems with purity politics; in it I argue that understanding that we’re implicated in terrible things and that we are deeply imperfect beings who mess up can give us traction rather than immobilizing us.
I am passionately interested in understanding writing as a nourishing practice of thinking. My colleague Rebecca Schein and I have recently received a Teaching Achievement Award for our ongoing work on the project “Writing as Thinking: Strategies for instruction and assessment in the age of generative AI.” I regularly give “suffering-free writing” workshops for academics and activists. Some of the exercises and writing play experiments I use in my own classes are available for anyone to try out.