Associate Professor Allison Weir
Biography
Allison Weir teaches in the Doctoral Program in Political and Social Thought at UWS, and is a member of the Institute for Democracy and Human Rights at the University of Sydney and at UWS. She works in the areas of social and political philosophy, feminist and gender theories, and critical theory. Her work focuses on intersections of gender, sexuality, class, ethnicity, and religion in the development of individual and collective identities, and on the relation of identity to agency and freedom, power and solidarity, as well as on caregiving as a global issue. She is currently working on a project exploring and developing diverse conceptions of freedom, and a book, Rethinking Freedom. Allison Weir is the author of Identities and Freedom (Oxford 2013) and Sacrificial Logics: Feminist Theory and the Critique of Identity (Routledge 1996). She moved to Sydney in 2010 from Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada, where she was Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy and the Program in Gender and Women’s Studies, and has held visiting positions at Goethe University in Frankfurt, the New School for Social Research in New York, the University of Dundee, Scotland, and Concordia University in Montreal.
Areas of Research / Teaching Expertise
- Feminist theory, gender theories
- Critical theory, poststructuralism
- Social and political philosophy
- 19th and 20th century continental philosophy
- Theories of individual and collective identities
- Race and ethnicity
- Religion and secularism
- Theories of freedom
- Caregiving as a global issue
Selected Publications
Books authored
Identities and Freedom. Oxford University Press, 2013.
Sacrificial Logics: Feminist Theory and the Critique of Identity. New York and London: Routledge, 1996.
Articles in Refereed Journals
'Feminism and the Islamic Revival: Freedom as a Practice of Belonging,' Hypatia: Special Issue on Crossing Borders 28, 2, 2013.
'Gender and the Politics of our Selves,' Critical Horizons, 2013.
'Who Are We? Between Taylor and Foucault,' Philosophy and Social Criticism 35, 5, June 2009.'Global Feminism and Transformative Identity Politics,' Hypatia 23, 4, Fall 2008.
'Home and Identity: In Memory of Iris Marion Young,' Hypatia: Special Issue on Iris Marion Young 23, 3, Summer 2008.
'Global Care Chains: Freedom, Responsibility, and Solidarity,' The Southern Journal of Philosophy 46, 2008.
'The Global Universal Caregiver: Imagining Women’s Liberation in the Third Millenium,' Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory, 12, 3, September 2005: 308-330.
Chapters in Books
'A Life Not Lost.' In Vanessa Reimer and Sarah Sahagian, ed. Mother of Invention. Demeter, 2013.
'The Subversion of Identity: Luce Irigaray and the Critique of Phallogocentrism,' in Ann Cahill and Jennifer Hansen, ed. French Feminists: Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory (Routledge, 2008). (reprinted from Sacrificial Logics: Feminist Theory and the Critique of Identity)
