Welcome to the Sprawl
It’s time for something new. After a year and a half of running Clean Air Club, I’m craving a slower outlet for more long-form writing on the pandemic. My favorite posts I’ve done there have always been the ones that center slow, critical analysis; a new way of seeing what’s right in front of us. But the pace of social media, which asks us to condense, synthesize, and cut, is not conducive to this. Where I have been able to bring a critical perspective to the posts I write for Clean Air Club, I have nonetheless been left with a feeling that they are still truncated and begging for a place to sprawl out — that if only I had more space, more pages, more minutes, I could get the full idea on the page. In the spirit of sprawl, then, I find myself here.
For those who don’t know, I make my unsteady home in academia — I received a PhD in Philosophy in 2021 and have been teaching ethics, political philosophy, and feminist epistemology at universities across Chicago since then. My preferred mode of thinking is what we might call ordinary philosophical; that is, rooting ourselves deeply in the rigor and complexity of theory (and all of the great thinkers who have come before us), while eschewing the jargon and pretension that plagues academic philosophy today. We can speak simply about complex things. We can enliven and sharpen our grip on the world, using theory to cut through the obfuscation rather than add to it. This is always my pedagogical aim in the classroom and in my writing. It is the aim I bring here, too.
I have four years of accumulated ideas about this pandemic we’re living through (if we’re lucky), and it’s time for me to explore them, congeal them, share them. I intend to write these posts as works-in-progress, my attempts to clarify one facet at a time of the larger ideas I’m working out. Many of them will be complementary; some will be contradictory. The goal is exploration and that deeply satisfying unfurling of an idea that can only be accomplished through slowness. Welcome to the sprawl, then. I hope you — and I — find a home here.
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Writings on the moral psychology of the pandemic, ethics in the midst of collapse, and collective memory, from the founder of Clean Air Club.