Faculty Member, Philosophy
Associate Professor
About
Current research interests
My research explores questions of embodiment, memory and intersubjectivity in terms both of affectivity and perception. My work follows two trajectories.
(1) I am currently completing a book manuscript entitled Body Memories: Merleau-Ponty, Bergson and the time of intersubjectivity. The aim of this book is to think intersubjectivity in temporal terms. Crucial to my account is an elaboration of the time of embodiment, in its perceptual, affective and memorial dimensions. In developing this theory of embodied time, I base myself on the philosophies of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Henri Bergson. At stake in my book is both a transformation of how intersubjectivity is conceived and a rethinking of time itself as not simply internal to consciousness or to the subject, but as the time of intercorporeity. This is a time of plural pasts, incompossible memories, and open futurity—the time of difference.
(2) I have been engaged in offering a feminist analysis of representations of Muslim women in contemporary Western imaginaries by questioning the ways in which race and gender are at play in representations of the Muslim headscarf or “veil”. I have published articles on “the French headscarf affair” and on the use of a rhetoric of freedom to justify the U.S.-led war on Afghanistan. I am currently working on a book-length manuscript on this topic entitled Veiling, Feminism, and Cultural Racism.
These two trajectories of my research come together in terms of a project to theoretically elaborate the critical and ethical potential of vision. This project draws on phenomenological, feminist and critical-race analyses of objectifying—specifically racializing—ways of seeing. I am carrying out this project by means of a grant on Merleau-Ponty and the phenomenology of race from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (2009-2012).
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