Current projects

I am preparing a monograph titled The Ethics of Access: Disability, Flourishing, and Shared Responsibility.

Though interest in questions of accessibility has exploded in recent years, the notion of access has yet to be widely recognized as a topic worthy of examination by philosophers. To date, there has been no book length project that considers access from a philosophical perspective. I address this gap in scholarship by offering a philosophical account of access that centers questions of responsibility. This monograph willframe access as a key philosophical concept and question for our times, one that is centrally connected to the task of creating social arrangements that promote disabled people’s flourishing and foster genuine equality.

My work on these questions has been published in The Journal of the American Philosophical Association, the Bloomsbury Guide to Philosophy of Disability, the Springer Encyclopedia of Phenomenology, and I co-authored an entry in the forthcoming Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Disability Studies.

The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed concerning levels of distrust in medical and public health institutions. Experts suggest that restoring the public’s trust in these institutions is key to ensuring successful healthcare delivery and reducing widely documented health inequities across populations. Amidst this discourse, however, an important point is too often lost: trust is ineffective without trustworthiness. Placing one’s trust in untrustworthy persons or institutions is imprudent. We must aim to trust the trustworthy and distrust the untrustworthy.

For members of socially marginalized groups, conditions of oppression and structural injustice raise the stakes of trust. Reports indicate that members of socially marginalized groups (e.g., Black people, Indigenous people, queer and trans people, and disabled people) are especially distrustful of public institutions. Yet distrust is only rational in the face of institutional failures to reliably serve and protect members of these groups. Indeed, the popular claim that we need more trust is misleading. Instead of generalized trust, I argue we need institutions we can trust. I approach this problem by shifting the locus of concern away from group and individual attitudes of distrust and toward those institutions whose responsibility it is to be stewards of the public good.

Publications:

• (2024) "Building Institutional Trustworthiness in Times of Crisis and Beyond: Lessons from Disability Scholarship and Activism." In Disability Justice in Public Health Emergencies, edited by Joel Michael Reynolds and Mercer Gary. London: Routledge.

• (forthcoming) "Fear and Trust Under Conditions of Oppression." In The Moral Psychology of Fear, edited by Ami Harbin. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.

• (2023) "We Need Trustworthy Institutions: Some Lessons from Discriminatory Triage Policies During Covid-19." Blog of the International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics, click to access here.