Patricia Hill Collins awarded prize

 

I'm delighted to see that Patricia Hill Collins has been awarded $1 Million by the Berggruen Institute.

I've been a huge fan since I started teaching feminist philosophy five years ago and stumbled across her work on intersectionality and epistemic injustice. It was her writing on the agonies of raising Black children in a racist society that first moved me. There is also something gorgeously optimistic in her work, in the way she centers and cheerleads the bravery and creativity of unsung women on the margins. She exposes hypocrisy and injustice, but always with a friendly twinkle in her eye that says 'Let's talk, we can fix this.' She says "this is the way I want to write: critical, informed but where there is space for you to enter."

The ignorance of experts

 You can now watch me chatting to Julian Baggini and Ben Burgis about whether we should trust science, at How the Light Gets In at Hay last year. Full video via the Institute of Art and Ideas 

I argued against the idea that we should bash anti-vaxxers for being wary of politicians who insist they are following the science.

Solo mama role models

I had a bit of an emotional time last week, post-summer blues and despair at how behind I feel with everything. The house seems to be sliding inexorably further away from decent-enough-to invite-people-over. I've got drawers in the kitchen whose contents keep spilling out because the front has fallen off and I can't figure out how to get it back on. The garden is sprawling with weeds, broken furniture and unloved pots (good job I like unkempt gardens, ha!) My bills are eye-watering and consistently outpacing my salary. And work seems to be piling up faster than I can tackle it too.  

Generally feeling overwhelmed and in failuresville, then, and that was before I started reading all this stuff about how single mothers have health problems and reduced life expectancy, even when controlling for poverty (I'm still very much luckier in that regard than most single mothers!) because of all the stress and depression.

What does one do when it all feels too much? I started casting around for role models,

How human do you think you are?

 My essay on the Post-Human body, now freely available online at Public Philosophy Journal 'The Philosopher' thephilosopher1923.org

My favourite things that I taught this semester: Fiona Woollard

 

 

Last semester I had my 'Feminist Philosophy' students read Woollard's prize-winning 2021 paper, 'Mother knows best: Pregnancy, applied ethics, and epistemically transformative experiences.' 

Book check-in

Well this blog has clearly been floundering of late. Six months with no new posts. That seems like a bad thing. It's not all bad news though.