Under review

• Paper on institutionalized distrust and monitoring (*draft available upon request*)

• Paper on disability accommodations and institutionalized epistemic injustices (*draft available upon request*)

• Co-authored paper on institutional trustworthiness and administrative burdens (*draft available upon request*)

Manuscripts in progress

• “The Harms of Institutionalized Distrust”

• “Inaccessibility, Loneliness, and Relational Flourishing”

Published work

Work on trust, distrust, and trustworthiness

1. Lajoie, C. 2025. “Fear and Trust Under Oppression.”The Moral Psychology of Fear (ed. Ami Harbin and Mark Alfano). Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.

   Many suggest our lives and societies would benefit from more trust and less fear. This way of thinking about fear and trust often serves as the unexamined background against which we experience, interpret, and respond to fear and trust in ourselves and in others. As fearers, we are reminded—and remind others—that fear is an obstacle to many good things, including our growth, happiness, and success. Meanwhile, we are encouraged to build, boost, and restore trust in our relationships, workplaces, institutions, and communities. While seemingly innocuous, I argue these habits of thinking do more harm than good when they ignore how trust and fear operate under conditions of oppression. In non-ideal worlds marked by deep structural inequalities, fear and distrust can be both protective and generative for oppressed and marginalized people. Some forms of them allow groups and individuals to survive hostile living conditions and spur vital forms of political action. This essay examines both possibilities through the lens of examples drawn from the Covid-19 pandemic in the United States.

2. Lajoie, C. 2024. “Building Institutional Trustworthiness in Times of Crisis and Beyond Them: Lessons from Disability Scholarship and Activism.” In Disability Justice in Public Health Emergencies (ed. Joel Michael Reynolds and Mercer Gary). London: Routledge.

   We hear time and time again that trust in institutions is declining at alarming rates. In recent years, 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. This chapter shifts the focus from discussions of public trust to an examination of the role of institutional trustworthiness in addressing public health concerns and crises. I argue that medical and public health institutions have a responsibility to cultivate and demonstrate trustworthiness toward the populations they serve, especially toward oppressed and marginalized people. This requires taking concrete steps to identify, recognize, and remedy the forms of injustice entrenched in healthcare distribution and delivery and inthe design of public health policies. Understanding what it means—and, centrally, what it takes—to be trustworthy shifts our attention away from individual attitudes of trust and distrust and toward the ethical responsibilities of institutions whose role it is to be stewards of the public good both in times of crisis and beyond them.

Work on disability and accessibility

1. Lajoie, C. 2026. “Noticing Habits: Shifting the Burden of Responsibility.” Topoi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-025-10364-4

   Because our interests, needs, and sensibilities differ, we sometime do not notice the same things in the same environment. While there are many instances in which not noticing something that is apparent to another person has no significant moral implications, I argue that some noticing habits are tied to the perpetuation of structures of inequality and privilege. Structurally privileged agents’ habitual failures of noticing can be seen to excuse them from responsibilities which are displaced onto less privileged agents, who must bear these burdens alone. In this way, failures of noticing can make us complicit in upholding social inequalities. To help shift the weight of some responsibilities, structurally privileged agents must cultivate habits of noticing that render them attentive to aspects of the world they have learned and been enabled to ignore. I consider two scenarios: gendered patterns of attention around domestic work and failures to notice inaccessibility in social spaces.

2. Lajoie, C. and N. Hardy. 2026. “Mapping Accessibility Concepts.” Oxford Encyclopedia of Disability Studies. London: Oxford. https://doi.org/10.1093/9780197852668.003.0030

   This entry introduces readers to the landscape of thinking around accessibility in the field of disability studies. These discourses span, from early protests for legal reform that framed access as a civil rights issue all the way to the fruitful disruptions wrought forth by contemporary disabled activists, artists, and designers who are creatively re-envisioning what access can and should be. We highlight a range of key concepts related to accessibility that have enriched the vocabulary of disability studies, including universal design, retrofits, access intimacy, access fatigue, collective access, and access washing.

3. Lajoie, C. 2024. “Phenomenology and Disability Studies.”Springer Encyclopedia of Phenomenology. New York: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47253-5_330-1

   This essay introduces the field of disability studies to readers of phenomenology and highlights areas where both enterprises can benefit from theoretical engagement with each other. I begin by introducing the origins of disability studies and the field’s rejection of biomedical approaches to disability. I then review some sociopolitical interpretations of disability elaborated in response to the medical model. By reframing disability in social terms, these accounts interrogate the relationship between material embodiment and the social construction of normalcy. Phenomenology also dispenses with a view of disability as biological fact but studies disability, instead, from the perspective of being in the world. The phenomenological model of disability foregrounds the spatiotemporal, affective, sensory, and intercorporeal dimensions of disability.

4. Lajoie, C. 2023. “Disability, Access, and the Promise of Inclusion: Returning to Institutional Language through a Phenomenological Lens.” In The Bloomsbury Guide to Philosophy of Disability (ed. Shelley Tremain). London: Bloomsbury.

   This chapter introduces phenomenology as a key methodological resource with which to study features of our lives that typically remain unnoticed. I call into question taken-for-granted understandings of access and inclusion and show how words can form the “rhetorical background” of institutional lifeworlds. I examine how, by withdrawing from scrutiny, the notions of access and inclusion happily circulate in academic worlds. I then offer a threefold critique of the rhetoric of inclusion, arguing that (1) this rhetoric does not identify or seek to disrupt underlying oppressive structures; (2) it rhetoric can falsely motivate the impression of change and lead us to underestimate both the traction of sedimented institutional habits and the institution’s ability to adapt strategically its mechanisms of exclusion; and (3) it is always conditional and often relies on unspoken distinctions between “undeserving” and “deserving” disabled people.

5. Lajoie, C. 2022. “The Problems of Access: A Crip Rejoinder via the Phenomenology of Belonging.” Journal of the American Philosophical Association 8 (2):318-337. doi:10.1017/apa.2021.6

   This essay denaturalizes the taken-for-granted meaning of ‘access’ and interrogates its role and lived meaning in ableist social worlds, with a focus on spaces of higher education. I suggest that legalistic approaches to access need ‘cripping’ by a disability framework. Currently, these approaches (1) miss the intersubjective sociality of being-in-the-world; (2) they prioritize a narrow conception of access focused on ‘physical’ access and ‘physical’ space (a typology I contest); (3) they approach access as frozen in time, rather than as a relational and temporally dynamic process (4); and, finally, they contribute to bureaucratizing and privatizing disability knowledge. I examine ‘access’ through the lens of belonging by asking how we orient ourselves in spaces shaped by oppressive social norms. I argue that ableist lifeworlds generate serious disorientations for disabled people that are lasting, structurally enforced, and harmful or debilitating.

6. Lajoie, C. 2019. “Bodies at Home: A Feminist Phenomenology of Disorientation in Illness.” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, 34(3): 546-569. https://doi.org/10.1111/hypa.12476

   This article explores the relation among illness, home, and belonging. Through a feminist phenomenological framework, I describe the disorientations of being diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (BPD) and living with mental illness. This research anticipates the consequences of illness and serious (bodily) disorientations for a conception of belonging as seamless body–world compatibility. Instead, this article examines how the (in)stability of bodily dwellings in experiences of disorientation can suggest ways of being in the world that are more attentive to interdependency, unpredictability, and change in human experience. I argue that these types of dwellings function as a more capacious and apposite metaphor to account for variations in belonging. This discussion outlines the ethical importance of building worlds that make room for different ways of being at home in and through our interactions with others.

Work in research ethics

1. Lajoie, C., J. Fortin and E. Racine. 2020. “Lived Experience of Participation in Mental Health Research in Canada: Breaking the Glass Wall.” Disability & Society: https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2020.1833313.

   Research participants are crucial to the entire research enterprise, but they are still predominantly conceived as mostly passive, ‘silent’ partners in the field of research ethics. Participants generally have very limited opportunities to share their lived experiences of participation in research and their views about the ethics of research. This gap is particularly concerning for research participants whose agency is already undermined by unjust social structures, such as individuals living with mental illness. Our study investigates the perspectives on research of mental health research participants and mental health advocates in Canada. We found that many participants had positive experiences of participation in research and valued their experience. The positive impacts of research participation, however, depend the willingness of researchers to actively create an accessible and respectful research environment.

2. Lajoie, C. et al. 2020. “The Concept of Vulnerability in Mental Health Research: A Mixed Methods Study on Researcher Perspectives.” Journal of Empirical Research on Human Research Ethics, 15 (3) :128-142. doi: 10.1177/1556264620902657.

   The concept of vulnerability plays a central role in research ethics in signaling that certain research participants warrant more careful consideration because their risk of harm is heightened due to their participation in research. Despite scholarly debates, the descriptive and normative meanings ascribed to the concept have remained disengaged from the perspective of users of the concept and those concerned by its use. In this study, we report a survey- and interview-based investigation of mental health researcher perspectives on vulnerability. We found that autonomy-based understandings of vulnerability were predominant but that other understandings coexisted, reflecting considerable pluralism. A wide range of challenges were associated with this concept, and further training was recommended by researchers.

3. Lajoie, C., J. Fortin and E. Racine. 2019. “Enriching our Understanding of Vulnerability through the Experiences and Perspectives of Mental Health Research Participants.” Accountability in Research, 26(7): 439-459. doi: 10.1080/08989621.2019.1679121.

   Vulnerability is a central concept in research ethics and typically serves to identify individuals or groups whose participation in research prompts specific concerns or warrants special consideration. While theoretical discussions on vulnerability have contributed valuable insights to discussions of mental health research and care, they have not been enriched thus far by stakeholder perspectives. This oversight has important consequences for the ways in which we frame vulnerability. Our study combines a pragmatist ethics framework and interpretive phenomenological analysis of qualitative interviews to explore user perspectives on the notion of vulnerability through the lived experiences of mental health research participants and patient-advocates. These perspectives offer essential clues to address the difficulties of operationalizing concerns for vulnerability in research contexts.

Work in phenomenology

1. Lajoie, C. 2020. “Sense and Normativity: Merleau-Ponty on Levels of Embodiment and the Disorientations of Love.” Chiasmi International. Trilingual Studies Concerning the Thought of Merleau-Ponty, 22: 393-407.

   The notion of sense is central to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s entire phenomenological project but it remains conspicuously absent from contemporary discussions of perceptual normativity. My intervention in this paper addresses this gap and contributes an account of perceptual norms as embodied orientations towards sense. I introduce Merleau-Ponty’s description of spatial levels as a theoretical exemplar for perceptual normativity in the Phenomenology of Perception (1945) and also consider his analysis of love as a level in the later Passivity lectures (1954-1955).

2. Lajoie, C. 2019. “A Critical Phenomenology of Sickness.” Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy. Special issue: Embodiment, Selfhood, Materiality. Ed. by Christine Daigle, 23 (2): 48-67.

   This paper takes Porochista Khakpour’s personal narrative of chronic illness, disability, and addiction in Sick: A Memoir (2018) as a starting point to reflect on social and material features of sick bodily subjectivity. In ways heretofore largely unexplored by traditional phenomenologies of illness, I ask what different modalities of the body come to light if we move beyond the privatization of disease as a biological dysfunction and instead bring into focus its relation with conditions of existence that make and keep some of us sick.