New Bloggers

So as part of a general process of reinvigoration, we are bringing three new bloggers on board.

* Serene Khader is the Jay Newman Chair in Philosophy of Culture at Brooklyn College and Associate Professor of Philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research focuses on moral and political issues relevant to women in the global South. Her areas of research within philosophy include ethics and moral psychology, political philosophy, and feminist philosophy. She also works in the interdisciplinary field of development ethics, studying practices such as microcredit, small-scale development interventions, and commercial gestational surrogacy.

* Her work on adaptive preferences, including her first book _Adaptive Preferences and Women’s Empowerment_ (Oxford University Press 2011), develops an approach to responding to choices made by oppressed and deprived people that perpetuate their own oppression and deprivation. Her second book, _Decolonizing Universalism, Transnational Feminist Ethics_ (under contract with Oxford University Press), concerns the normative commitments required for cross-border feminist solidarity. When she’s not philosophizing, she can often be found lifting heavy weights and cultivating her love of New York City.

* Gina Schouten grew up near Indianapolis and went to college at Ball State University. Before beginning graduate school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she taught kindergarten in Colorado. Following that, she taught philosophy for three years at Illinois State University. She now teaches philosophy at Harvard. Her research interests include gender justice, educational justice, and political legitimacy, and she is currently working on a book tentatively called Liberalism, Neutrality, and the Gendered Division of Labor.

* Astra Taylor is an activist, writer, musician, documentary film maker and general shit stirrer. She was involved in the Occupy movement, co-editing Occupy! with Sarah Leonard and Keith Gessen, as well as helping to found Rolling Jubilee, an organization that purchases and expunges debt. Her movies include _Zizek!_ and _Examined Life_, a series of dialogues with modern philosophers and thinkers, which appeared with a book of the same name. She has written for a wide variety of places – her book on culture in the digital era, The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age is written up at Crooked Timber here. Astra’s new documentary, _Democracy_, interviews Silvia Federici, Cornel West, Wendy Brown, Angela Davis, trauma surgeons, activists, factory workers, asylum seekers, former prime ministers, and others, asking what democracy is, how it can work under conditions of inequality, and how people can reclaim their power. It’s going to be out really soon.

We’re really happy to have them all join.