Erica Bigelow

My dissertation is titled Bad Feelings, Feeling Badly: Caring for the Emotions. It is a call for recognizing the emotions as normatively evaluable, that is, as things that can be judged as better or worse full-stop, rather than (merely) as better or worse for a particular person at a particular time. I argue that emotions have historically been undertheorized as the instruments of injustice and propose ‘attentive care,’ a re-reading of care ethics in accordance with Iris Murdoch’s writings on loving attention, as a way of clarifying our moral obligations toward others’ emotions. I draw from critical disability studies throughout the dissertation, arguing that too little attention has been paid to the distinctly affective dimensions of ableist prejudice, and that the extant literature on affective injustice cannot yet account for the weaponization of emotional expectations. That is, I elucidate the ways that existing work on emotions and injustice has focused on particular emotions, and not the broader set of cultural scripts and norms that dictate how we ‘ought’ to respond or behave.

I'm a philosopher-in-residence at Rainier Beach High School (Seattle, WA), and facilitate other precollege philosophy sessions with elementary, middle, and high school students through PLATO. I'm also a research assistant for the communications team at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society.