The Ethics of Homelessness
In 2024, I was awarded an internal research development grant from Trent University to undertake a new project on the ethics of homelessness.
Project Description: Homelessness is a social and public health issue that has received little attention from philosophers, despite being an issue in need of urgent addressing as rates of homelessness continue to rise in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and the housing crisis. This project will make contributions to the small literature on homelessness in philosophy by engaging with some recent rebates on autonomy in this context. I argue that some accounts of autonomy given to date fail to properly respect the autonomy of homeless individuals. I suggest that feminist relational accounts of autonomy are a more promising conceptual tool for understanding the autonomy of homeless individuals. To this end, I am preparing a manuscript on the topic for submission to journals in philosophy. The second major contribution of this project is on the ethics of neo-vagrancy laws, where I will develop philosophical arguments against By-laws like those that exist in Peterborough, Ontario that criminalize homelessness. These arguments will be presented in a report for One City Peterborough, a non-profit organization that supports individuals in Peterborough who are experiencing or have experienced homelessness. The report will be made available to the wider public and funds from the grant will be used to host local events to disseminate the report findings.
Doctoral Research
My dissertation focuses on feminist philosophy, moral philosophy, and applied ethics. It is an integrated article thesis, meaning the chapters focus on discrete but related issues.
The first chapter of my dissertation focuses on privilege and attempts to provide general accounts of privilege in philosophical literature. My second chapter analyzes feminist relational theory and issues relating to how it addresses privilege. The third chapter focuses on vaccine hesitancy and early childhood vaccinations.
Policy Research: Time to Attach
From 2018 - 2019, I was a research assistant for the Time to Attach project, which calls for equal EI parental leave benefits for adoptive parents, kin, and customary caregivers in Canada. I was responsible for researching psychological literature on attachment theory.
From left to right: Cathy Murphy, executive director of the Adoption Council of Canada; Elizabeth May, MP for Saanich—Gulf Islands; myself; and Julie Despaties, founder and executive director of Adopt4Life.
I am a co-author on the Time to Attach report, completed for Adopt4Life: Ontario’s Adoptive Parent Association and the Adoption Council of Canada. The report calls for the creation of a 15-week “attachment leave” for parents and caregivers to support families grown through adoption, kinship, or customary care.
I attended meetings with federal MPs from every major political party in Ottawa in October 2018 and April-May 2019 to advocate for the policy changes suggested in the report above.
I also managed the website and social media accounts for the project, which included networking with community partners and the promotion of the survey portion of the report across social media platforms.
In 2023, MP Rosemarie Falk introduced a private member’s bill to amend the Employment Insurance Act and the Canada Labour Code (Bill C-318). It is currently in its third reading in the House of Commons, and if passed, it will move to the Senate. If passed and given Royal Asset, it will ensure adoptive and biological parents have equal parental leave benefits. This could not have been done without the tireless work of Adopt4Life and other community partners!