#CripPhilosophy: On Disability and Disabled Persons

RESCHEDULED DUE TO COVID-19
New dates TBA.

Minnesota MAP invites you to join us for the #CripPhilosophy Workshop! Schedule and list of speakers coming soon.

Motivation and Plan:
Historically, academia subscribed to the medical model of disability. This view sees disability and disabled persons through a deficit-first, biological lens, which confines scholarly inquiry into disability --- medical, ethical, and otherwise ---  to the biomedical sphere. As a result, philosophers’ ongoing, robust work on disability and disabled persons was not recognized as philosophy. Worse, a deficit-first view allowed philosophy as a discipline to exclude disabled persons as philosophers. Now, only 1% of professional philosophers are disabled persons, while 19% of the U.S. labor force are disabled persons. Thanks to the willingness of disabled philosophers and philosophers of disability (and their allies) to argue for their own legitimacy, most philosophers now acknowledge the discipline’s failure to progressively improve inclusion and diversity writ large, both in areas of specialization and demographics. One positive outcome of this activism is that philosophers in leadership roles are beginning  to enact corrective measures. Another is an increasing awareness of past and present scholarship in philosophy of disability. Thus, contemporary philosophy of disability benefits from growing interest among scholars from various areas of philosophical study, kindling interesting cross-specialty work. 
 

The purpose of this workshop is to bring together philosophers of disability, especially disabled philosophers, and welcome interested scholars from any area of philosophy into our community of inquiry. We hope to not only expand knowledge of current scholarship in philosophy of disability, but also spark creative new philosophical thought about disability and disabled persons. Finally, we at Minnesota MAP join MAP International in striving to build a supportive, global community of disabled student-philosophers. This workshop, we hope, will serve that goal.