Hi! I’m Balam. I research philosophical questions about disability, animality, power, and materiality.
This is my personal academic website where you’ll find my CV, teaching portfolio and highlights from my research.
I am three cats in a trench coat who intermittently passes for a doctoral candidate at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture at Concordia University. I’ve always been interested in minoritized bodies, especially at their points of contact with oppressive systems. My current work traces the historical and material entanglements of ableism and anthropocentrism under capitalism.
When I am not studying in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal, I live with two humans, five cats, and two dogs in Istanbul. Unless I’m on a deadline, I can often be found (or lost) researching tangential topics, watching horror films, and doodling.
“Now philosophy has become mundane, and the most striking proof of this is that philosophical consciousness itself has been drawn into the torment of the struggle, not only externally but also internally. But, if constructing the future and settling everything for all times are not our affair, it is all the more clear what we have to accomplish at present: I am referring to ruthless criticism of all that exists, ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be.”
Concordia University is located on unceded Kanien’kehá:ka land.
As a Third World settler scholar and precarious guest on Turtle Island, whose presence is entirely mediated by the settler state, I am implicated in the colonial project—past, present, and future. As a settler in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal, I am indebted to this location’s First peoples, as well as the lands, waters, and other-than-human inhabitants alongside whom I teach and learn.