Sara Ruddick’s Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace proposed that the activities involved in mothering children facilitated a distinct mode of thought that she termed ‘maternal thinking’. In this paper, I examine my experience of becoming a mother and how it influenced my scholarly work. Maternity did not hinder my intellectual life; I experienced an explosion of intellectual energy that I found was facilitated by my maternity in ways like those theorised by Ruddick. However, I experienced a simultaneous feeling of becoming invisible to the academy (beyond a network of feminist colleagues), which was compounded by my status as an early-career and casually employed academic. Rather than my new role as mother limiting my career, the constraints of the university seemed to push my maternal self (and its rhythm of inquiry) out of its walls, and I find myself now remaining a scholar as a mother despite the institution. Here, I frame my own maternal thinking as ‘slow philosophy’, following Michelle Boulous Walker’s Slow Philosophy: Reading Against the Institution, to make sense of this incongruence. I argue that framing maternal thinking as slow philosophy helps further illuminate the marginal position that women occupy in relation to the academy.
Wednesday July 8, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST Steele-2373 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
In a forthcoming paper I critique Holly Lawford-Smith’s recent book Gender Critical Feminism for both the incoherence of its underlying metaphysics of sex and gender, and the problematic political effects of that metaphysics. In this talk I will first rehearse the crux of that argument, and then use it to motivate a further question: if bad metaphysics leads to bad politics, what kind of metaphysics might help bring about a liberatory politics?
Authentic subjectivity plays a central role in Simone de Beauvoir’s arguments in both The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947) and The Second Sex (1949). In this paper, I unpack what it means to be an authentic subject. Beauvoir argues that freedom is the ultimate value, which places great responsibility on us to recognise and work towards our own freedom and that of others. Furthermore, to be authentic one must recognise, rather than deny, our ambiguous existence as both transcendent beings who construct and pursue ends freely, and immanent beings whose existence relies on the conditions of life being met consistently.
Patriarchal society relegates women (and others) to the immanent sphere, while simultaneously devaluing that sphere. This is evident in the widespread destruction of our ecosystems and the continued devaluing of reproductive and care labour. Implicit in Beauvoir’s argument, I suggest, is the notion that to be an authentic subject one must challenge the dominant system of values that devalues and exploits the immanent sphere. I extend Beauvoir’s work to argue for the importance of women and other oppressed people working together to create an alternative value system that authentically recognises the ambiguity of existence, and moreover, the value of the immanent.
Wednesday July 8, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm AEST Steele-2373 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
