New Blog: Disabled Philosophers

A new blog is born: Disabled Philosophers. Here's the announcement of the new blog at Feminist Philosophers:

Jenny Saul and I (Magical Ersatz) are very proud to introduce a new project we’ve been working on: Disabled Philosophers.

The goal of this project is to raise awareness of the existence of disabled philosophers. There are lots of issues that arise from the intersection of disability and philosophy. But we thought a very basic starting point – and hopefully a good way of starting a conversation – was to say “Hey! We’re here. We exist. In greater numbers and greater variety than you might’ve thought.”

Though we’re using a blog format, this isn’t a traditional blog. We won’t have posts on a wide variety of topics, and we won’t host discussion. What we’ll do is create a space where we can learn about disabled philosophers – sometimes who they are (though we welcome anonymous contributions), sometimes a little about their experiences of being a philosopher with a disability, sometimes both.

So if you’re a disabled philosopher, please do get in touch. We’d also love to hear from you if you’re a philosopher who loves someone who’s disabled – your partner, your child, etc. Caregiver and partner experiences are a huge part of understanding disability, and philosophers who are caregivers or partners of disabled people give us an important perspective on the interaction between disability and philosophy. So please do write to us – whether you’re yourself disabled or your daily life is affected by disability because of who you care about.

And if, at this point, you’re wondering why on earth you’d want to tell strangers about your experience of disability, we have some reasons for you. We hope you find them persuasive.

Enjoy the site!

As readers may recall, NewAPPS is also hosting the Count Me In campaign, led by Shelley Tremain. This new blog is clearly very much in the spirit of the campaign, even though Shelley has put forward some constructive criticism to the new blog in comments over at the Feminist Philosophers announcement. But given the overarching common goal, there is every reason to believe that that such disagreements will be worked out in due course.

Personally, I am extremely pleased to see the birth of this blog. In comments at the Count Me In threads, I have often mentioned that the issue of visibility (for lack of a better word; apologies for the ableist metaphor!) seems to me to be crucial, for the very reasons mentioned at the Disabled Philosophers blog: the need for role models, the need to start conversations, raising awareness etc. At the same time, I fully realize that in the case of disabilities, the issue of visibility is potentially more delicate than in the case of gender or race, in that a potentially higher burden is placed on those who publicly self-identify as disabled (philosophers or otherwise). This is all the more reason why I am truly impressed and vigorously applaud the new initiative!