About my forthcoming book: Critical phenomenology is a body of thought that revises and builds upon the phenomenological tradition to account for how gender, race, sexuality, disability, and other forms of social difference shape our worlds and our experience of them. Critical phenomenology provides a sharp language for diagnosing the operations of racism, sexism, transphobia, and other forms of oppression and how they become naturalized in perception and in space. I draw on ordinary, though disorienting, experiences in my everyday life as a trans person – going to the bathroom, passing through the airport, inhabiting my professional spaces – to open up fundamental philosophical questions about space, embodiment, power, violence, and perception.

The book, composed of six short essays traces the contours of my own critical phenomenological project, one in which problems of space, place, perception, and embodiment figure prominently. Drawing on the work of critical theorists of space and phenomenologists, “What is a World?” presents key conceptual terms of this project – world, space, intersubjectivity, difference – terms that run through the rest of the essays and serve as the foundation for a critical phenomenology of social space. Building on these foundations, “Foreclosed Horizons” considers the production of space under white supremacist cisheteropatriarchy, focusing on the forms of existential, social, and material constraint that attend living in and through a minoritized body and subjectivity. Drawing on phenomenologies of race, disability, and gender, I highlight a shared though variegated existential condition that might give rise to a coalitional politics among variously minoritized people. “Institutional Worlds” takes us into the spaces of the institution – in this case, the university – to examine how certain worlds become institutionalized and reproduced. I examine how institutions are productive of particular spaces and subjectivities and how they enforce racialized, gendered, sexualized norms. I experiment with a “phenomenology of institutional language” (Lajoie 2022, 320) and a practice of “writing against the institution” as a means of dismantling the oppressive logics of institutions and their spaces. The brief interlude “Queer Space” charts moments of exit from dominant social and spatial orders, considering the possibility of differential space, of other worlds of meaning and sense-making. These worlds might be accessed and activated, I suggest, through forms of queer relationality and recognition that reckon with the ways our lives are always co-constituted with others. In the conclusion, “Critical Phenomenology Now!” I close with reflections on the political stakes and potentials of critical phenomenology, understood as both an intellectual tradition and as a form of anti-oppressive praxis.

To learn about the contours of the book project, check out

>> Watch "Gendered geographies: Patriarchy and space."

>> Read "Re-encountering Lefebvre: Toward a critical phenomenology of social space."

>> Invite me to give a talk on the book in your department.