Please join us for a reading and conversation with Asha Bhandary to celebrate the publication of her book Freedom to Care: Liberalism, Dependency Care, and Culture. She will be joined in conversation with Lina Murillo.

To join this virtual event, register here.

Anthony Simon Laden of The Philosophical Quarterly says of the book "Freedom to Care shows the sort of attention and responsiveness to complex details and competing value demands that make not only for good care work but good political philosophy. Bhandary insists that to think well about the requirements of justice with regard to care work, we need to think of it as work, and thus distinguish it as much as possible from the relations of affection and love in which it is often carried out. This helps her pay attention not only to the gendered aspects of who cares for whom but the racial ones as well: all the ways that care work is not only unfairly distributed within families but in the expectation that some people will care for other people’s children and elderly parents."

Asha Leena Bhandary is a political philosopher, feminist ethicist, and Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Iowa and Obermann Fellow in Residence whose published work develops a new form of liberalism to remedies the invisibility of caregiving practices in western liberal social forms. In her first book, the monograph Freedom to Care: Liberalism, Dependency Care, and Culture (Routledge, 2020), she identifies how liberalism – a theory that prioritizes the freedom and autonomy of the individual - must change when caregivers, and those who society expects to care for others, are no longer silenced. She has published articles on this subject in numerous philosophy journals, and, with Amy R. Baehr, co-edited the volume Caring for Liberalism (2021). She is also the co-author of a video game called Surviving the “Indifferents”. A second-generation American with parents from the disparate cultures of central Finland and a matrilineal community in South India’s western coast, her work is cross-culturally informed, but the liberal theory of justice she advances is firmly rooted in the U.S. She is currently writing her next book, Being at Home: Liberal Autonomy for an Unjust World, which weaves together personal narrative and philosophical analysis for an account of autonomy informed by perspectival insights as a woman of color.

Lina-Maria Murillo received her doctorate in Borderlands History at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) in 2016. She received her M.A. in 2011 from UTEP and her B.A. in History and Raza Studies from San Francisco State University in 2007. She is completing her manuscript titled Fighting for Control: Race and Reproductive Rights Activism in the U.S-Mexico Borderlands. Describing the clinics, organizations, and institutions that helped to foster access to reproductive care along the border in the twentieth century, this history reveals the tensions between advocates for population control and those committed to greater reproductive rights for the majority Mexican-origin women in the region. The study focuses on the history of Planned Parenthood along the line and shines a light on the unknown history of abortion, population control, and Chicana activism that comprised the movement in the borderlands.