About me
I am a doctoral candidate at Concordia University’s Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture.
My areas of disciplinary expertise are Political Philosophy, Critical Disability Studies, and Critical Animal Studies.
The question of whether I am a philosopher with interdisciplinary interests or an interdisciplinary humanities scholar with philosophical worries resolves itself in matters of methodology and political commitment, which are one and the same thing. I adopt whatever mantle is useful in addressing the problems and tasks generated by the work.
The work in question is the work of freedom–whether it takes the form of striving “to be completely other in a completely different world” (Foucault, 1978/2001, p. 248), or of seeking to discover it through relentless critique of the old: “ruthless criticism of all that exists” (Marx, 1843).
My long unconventional academic path and diverse interdisciplinary interests are anchored by problematics such as the ontology of power relations and oppressive systems. The overarching theme of my studies is the investigation of how forces of oppression interact with the materiality of bodies—particularly minoritized bodies, both human and non-human.
I hold a BA in History of Art from Cornell University and an MA in Culture and Performance from UCLA’s World Arts and Cultures Department. My MA thesis at UCLA used Foucault’s care of the self to reclaim so-called “eating disordered” and “obese” bodies as sites of non-normative embodiment and alimentary practice.
After a decade in theater management, I returned to academia and completed an award-winning MA thesis at Boğaziçi University’s Department of Philosophy, where I explored exploitation and oppression through disability studies, Marx’s theory of surplus populations, and intersectional theory.
My doctoral project at Concordia builds on and complicates this earlier work, developing a novel synthesis of Foucauldian and Marxist analyses of power through a critical intersectional lens to examine the entanglements of ableism and anthropocentrism under late capitalism. The project aims to lay the groundwork for a new paradigm of domination that also gestures toward an affirmative zoobiopolitics of multispecies flourishing.
For this end, I attempt to advance a MarxoFoucauldian materialist intersectional intervention into Critical Disability Studies and Critical Animal Studies to bolster the political and theoretical potential of both fields. And secondly, I hope to generate tools for a nuanced analysis of capitalism informed by the mutual addressability of the apparatuses of disability and animality, drawing on Animal Theory, Disability Theory, their contentious encounter as well as their burgeoning crossover.
Preliminary discussions of these ideas and questions have been, and continue to be, slowly developed in research papers presented at academic conferences and meetings over the years, many of which are accessible through the Research menu on this site.
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.