Social Justice Advocacy
While completing my Ph.D. at Purdue University, I started volunteering at the Lafayette Crisis Center, a 24-hour call center specializing in crisis intervention and suicide prevention. The 40-hour training was intense as was the 156-hour time commitment, but I loved being able to make a direct impact on people's lives. I got more involved by becoming a crisis center volunteer trainer and rape survivor advocate, and accepted a position as project director of the Greater Lafayette Sexual Assault Prevention Coalition. As part of that work I helped facilitate a support group for survivors of sexual assault, taught Rape Aggression Defense classes, and led a campaign to raise awareness about the prevalence of date rape drugs.
"Violated Subjects: A Feminist Phenomenology and Critical Theory of Rape"
Underlying theories of rape in legal philosophy are assumptions about the relationships between rights and property, self and others, mind and body, public and private domains, subject and object. Philosophers who study sexual assault by focusing almost exclusively on the law of rape often fail to interrogate their implicit ways of conceptualizing subjects and the harm done to them. In particular, these analyses often overlook the impact of rape on the development of personal identity and understanding of self. This project provides an analysis of the wrongness of rape that considers rape not as a moment of nonconsent, but as a stage in an experiential process that includes, but is not limited to, the violation of rights. By integrating the philosophical methods of phenomenology and critical theory with current writings on the philosophy of rape law, rape trauma, and critical race theory, this study develops a descriptively full theory of rape that takes the experience of the survivor as the point of departure. A philosophically rich understanding of the harm of rape emerges when approaching the issue through the lived realities of women who have been subjected to sexual violence along with a critical social theory of how the social, historical, and material conditions inform that experience.
"Answering the Call: Crisis Intervention and Rape Survivor Advocacy as Witnessing Trauma"
This chapters focuses on the practice of witnessing from the perspective of a crisis counselor and rape survivor advocate. Weaving together threads of practice and theory, it describes the experience of witnessing others' trauma, and the asymmetrical process of being an empathic and ethical participant in the recovery of others' subjectivity. The chapter explores the impact of trauma on a person's embodied, autonomous, and narrative self, including loss of speech, symptoms recognized in psychiatric literature as PTSD, and anxiety. I emphasize the role of narratives in the recovery of the survivor's subjectivity and in the preservation of the advocate's ability to engage in the dialogic and intersubjective process of witnessing.
In 2003, I participated in a National Endowment of the Humanities Summer Seminar on Feminist Epistemologies (at Pennsylvania State University). In 2017, I participated in the National Endowment of the Humanities Summer Institute on Diverse Philosophical Approaches to Sexual Violence (at Elon University). And, in 2018, I attended the Prindle Institute Applied Epistemology Research Retreat and Workshop (at DePauw University).
"Reflections on the Ford-Kavanaugh Hearings"
Along with Katherine Jenkins and Linda Martin Alcoff, I contributed to on the Blog of the American Philosophical Association on October 11, 2018 following the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the United States Supreme Court.
"Me Too: Epistemic Injustice and the Struggle for Recognition"
Congdon (2017), Giladi (2018), and McConkey (2004) challenge feminist epistemologists and recognition theorists to come together to analyze epistemic injustice. I take up this challenge by highlighting the failure of recognition in cases of testimonial and hermeneutical injustice experienced by victims of sexual harassment and sexual assault. I offer the #MeToo movement as a case study to demonstrate how the process of mutual recognition makes visible and helps overcome the epistemic injustice suffered by victims of sexual harassment and sexual assault. I argue that in declaring “me too,” the epistemic subject emerges in the context of a polyphonic symphony of victims claiming their status as agents who are able to make sense of their own social experiences and able to convey their knowledge to others.
"Date Rape: The Intractability of Hermeneutical Injustice"
Social epistemologists use the term hermeneutical injustice to refer to a form of epistemic injustice in which a structural prejudice in the economy of collective interpretive resources results in a person’s inability to understand his/her/their own social experience. This essay argues that the phenomenon of unacknowledged date rapes, that is, when a person experiences sexual assault yet does not conceptualize him/her/their self as a rape victim, should be regarded as a form of hermeneutical injustice. The fact that the concept of date rape has been widely used for at least three decades indicates the intractability of hermeneutical injustices of this sort and the challenges with its overcoming.
Whether in the form of testimonial injustice, hermeneutical injustice, or contributory injustice, epistemic injustice is characterised as an injustice rather than simply an epistemic harm because it is often motivated by an identity prejudice and exacerbates existing social disadvantages and inequalities. I argue that epistemic injustice can also be utilised against some members of privileged social identity groups in order to preserve the dominant status of the group as a whole. As a case study, I analyse how the harm to male victims of sexual violence is aggravated by the failure of the law to recognise the rape of men as a crime and the failure of other people to recognise the testimony of male rape victims as credible. Analysing shifts in the legal concept of rape and examples from Project Unbreakable, I uncover how these failures of recognition undermine the victims’ status as legal, moral, and epistemic subjects and inflict epistemic injustice against them.
I served as the faculty advisor for Club GEN (Gender Equality Now) from 2010 until 2019. One of my favorite campaigns is "It's on Us," which was spearheaded by the then-president of Associate Students Inc. (ASI), Mike Kwon in 2015-2016.