Welcome to my website

Image description: a head-and-shoulders picture of me, a white man with dark brown hair, medium brown glasses, wearing a rust-brown corduroy shirt. I’m in front of a bookcase. A plant and a painting are the background.

I’m a philosopher and critical disability theorist. Until recently, I was an Irish Research Council Government of Ireland Postgraduate Scholar in the University College Dublin School of Philosophy. I’m currently working towards monograph publication. I use feminist and continental philosophy, critical phenomenology and actor-network theory, to understand the reality of disability (without recourse to explanation in terms of either natural or social facts, or some combination of these). I think disability is something that happens, and emerges from relationships, rather than something that exists in bodies or social structures. I consider how it happens in concrete and practical experience, as a ‘constructed’ category, and as a purported deviation from the fully or properly human.

I’m also developing an ethical approach that avoids shortcomings of humanist approaches to disability. This is based in feminist philosophies of vulnerability (as a ubiquitous potential that is always and everywhere realised in concrete conditions). I stress the role of biopolitical rationales in the mitigation or production of vulnerability. I’m also interested in biopolitical dimensions of COVID-19 responses, the ableist commitments these betray, and the unjust outcomes they produce.

You can read more about me and my research here. As it stands, this website is mostly somewhere to share conference and workshop papers. You can read these by tapping ‘Updates’. Some drafts contain ideas that I was developing at the time, but do not wholeheartedly subscribe to any longer. More recent works are most indicative of my current positions.

You can find me on Twitter, and at the other places linked below.