This year’s conference was full of excellent papers and commentary, leading to very productive conversations in sessions and outside of them. To keep these conversations going, and to allow people who weren’t able to attend all three days to reach out to participants and ask them for papers, we’re putting brief bios of the participants below.
Click Here to Meet The Conference Organizers
The Participants
Tailer Ransom is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Georgia Southern University. He received his PhD in Philosophy and a graduate certificate in cognitive science from the University of Memphis in 2019. He specializes in Phenomenology, Philosophy of Cognitive Science, and Marxist Critical Theory with a specific focus on a critical analysis of embodied habit as the foundation of agency, emerging out of the transactive dialectic of organism and environment.
Marc Cheong is a Senior Lecturer in Information Systems (Digital Ethics) at the University of Melbourne, and Honorary Senior Fellow (at both Melbourne Law School and The Burnet Institute, Australia). He is interested in the intersection of technology (big data, social media, etc) and philosophy (existentialism, ethics, epistemology, and Experimental Philosophy). He is especially interested in the analysis of contemporary social media from an existentialist lens, which has not been as actively researched since the days of de Beauvoir, Sartre, et al, by challenging the contemporary notion of authenticity on social media.
Catherine Fullarton is a Faculty Fellow in the Foundation Year Program at the University of King’s College, in Halifax, NS (Canada), and a Doctoral Candidate (ABD) in Philosophy at Emory University (Atlanta, USA). Her current research engages Aristotle’s ethics, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, and feminist care ethics to propose a model of empathy as a form of ethical expertise. She is also the Partnerships and Community Relations Officer of the Canadian Bioethics Society / Société canadienne de bioétique (CBS/SCB).
Brad Warfield is a Three-Year Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV), where he has worked since 2017. His research focuses on the intersection of theories of the self and moral responsibility within the context of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Continental philosophy. He is particularly interested in examining issues that arise from the ethical dimensions of intersubjective relations, especially in contexts of dialogue, race and anti-black racism, technology, and erotic love. He teaches a variety of courses in ethics and applied ethics, as well as courses such as Existentialism and Phenomenology, Ancient Philosophy, Race, Sexuality, and Class, and the Philosophy of Love and Sex.
Peter Zuk received his PhD in philosophy from Rice University and is currently a research fellow and teaching faculty member at the Harvard Center for Bioethics. His work investigates the relationship between mind and value, especially as it figures in autonomy, welfare, meaningfulness, and their manifestations in debates about emerging neurotechnologies. Peter is currently conducting NIH BRAIN Initiative-funded empirical ethics research on brain-based visual prostheses. He has also been thinking lately about the nature of mental integrity and whether web-enabled digital technologies like smartphones extend our minds or diminish them.
Christopher J. Gomez is a lecturer in the philosophy department at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. He received his PhD in philosophy from the Universidad Veracruzana. His research interests include philosophy of mind, phenomenology, artificial intelligence, and cognition. He has also published in Spanish about the history of philosophy in Mexico and the philosophy of science of Gaston Bachelard.
Liz Rozenberg is a graduate student in the department of philosophy at Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly known as Ryerson University). She received her bachelor of arts (hons) in philosophy at Toronto Metropolitan as well. Her main area of philosophical interest revolves around using different philosophical approaches to questions considering the use of technology in our modern context. Her goal is to bring together both continental and analytic thinkers for the purposes of studying questions about how technology shapes our experience of the world.
Kelby Bibler is a doctoral student in Philosophy at the University of Memphis with broad interests in the philosophy of mind, phenomenology, and embodied (4E) cognition. He is particularly interested in the non-traditional states of consciousness induced by drugs and aesthetic experience, the sources of their perceived content, and their effects on individuals’ personal and social lives.
Dustin Gray is a PhD student at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He earned a master’s degree in philosophy at San Diego State University and a bachelor’s in the same at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. His areas of specialization are in philosophy of technology, philosophy of science, and metaphysics. Dustin’s current research focuses on surveillance technologies and the ways in which they affect the landscape of higher education. More broadly, he is thinking about human relationships with digital technologies especially in regard to autonomy, control, and submission.
Justin Simpson received his PhD in philosophy from the University of Georgia in May 2022. He is currently a lecturer at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, primarily teaching a “Ethics, Technology, and Society” course. His research involves applying the frameworks of Material Feminisms and Science and Technology Studies to address questions within environmental ethics and social epistemology. He is currently co-authoring a book under contract with Lexington Books that argues for loving attention as an environmental virtue in a world of surprising, creative, and playful nonhumans.
Jana Koch is a PhD candidate in philosophy at the University of Graz in Austria, working on the relations between humans and AI. She is mainly interested in phenomenology, philosophy of mind and interdisciplinary approaches.
Jeff Morrisey is a lecturer in the philosophy department at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. His research centers on the philosophy of art in German idealism and Deweyan pragmatism. He focuses especially on the way materiality and different media (like painting and architecture, as well as, more recently, money and technology) mediate our lived reality and our experience of our social relations and of ourselves.
Agostino Cera is assistant professor of theoretical philosophy at the Department of Humanities of the University of Ferrara (Italy). He works on philosophy of technology, philosophical anthropology, German philosophy between the 19th and 20th century (Löwith, Heidegger, Anders, Nietzsche), philosophy of cinema and, more recently, the Anthropocene. His latest book is: A Philosophical Journey into the Anthropocene: Discovering Terra Incognita (Lexington Books 2023).
Aaron B. Wilson is Associate Professor of Philosophy at South Texas College and parttime lecturer at UTRGV. He’s the Executive Director of the Charles S. Peirce Society and has, among other topics, worked on connections between Peirce, pragmatism, and transhumanism.
Nicholas Osaka is a writer, worker in tech, and graduate student studying philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. They write about Asian-American feminism, philosophy of technology, and fintech (particularly blockchain technology). Their philosophical interests include the history of statistics and computing, cybernetics, diasporic feminist and queer theory, and critiques of neoliberalism. While their interests are always in motion, they find home in the frameworks offered in feminist, queer, and disability theory. Nicholas loves coffee, cats, and film photography.
Violet Victoria is a PhD Candidate in Philosophy at the University of Oklahoma and serves as the Associate Director for the Center for Ethics in Society at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, NH. She is an adjunct instructor for Saint Anselm, and for the MS program in Finance at OU. She holds dual BAs in Political Science and Ethnicity and Race Studies from Columbia University, and an MA in Philosophy from the University of Oklahoma. Before her move to academia, Violet was a stock loan trader at Goldman Sachs. Her research focuses on applied ethics, including an ongoing dissertation on financial ethics and bioethics research published in the Journal of Surgery.
Dr. M. Joseph Aloi is the Agroforestry Network Coordinator for Future Generations University’s Appalachian Sustainable Development Learning Community. The Appalachian Program engages in research, learning, and action for inclusive sustainable community change through partnering with agroforestry producers. His published academic works touch on environmental ethics, economic transition, philosophy of technology, environmental justice, agrarianism, and the role of the forest in Appalachian foodways. His doctorate is in Philosophy from the University of North Texas, the premier program for Environmental Philosophy, where he learned the practice of field philosophy and wrote a dissertation on hermeneutics and environmental aesthetics.
Charles Hayes is currently an adjunct instructor in the philosophy department as well as the Wilderness and Civilization program at the University of Montana. He has spent the last decade in both academia and the non-profit sector, working to understand what makes a healthy environment and helping communities to build them. Charles earned a MLitt in theology (University of St Andrews) and an MA in Environmental Philosophy (University of Montana). His PhD (Michigan State) research details the developing hopes, ethics, and justifications of the Rewilding movement and other forms of ecological restoration. Outside the university setting, Charles has worked organizing local food systems in Appalachia, from the traditional small farms and innovative urban agriculture projects, to cooperative aggregation, packaging, and sales of local food. He enjoys walking farther than is prudent and stopping to identify flowers along the way.
Daniel Barbarrusa is a PhD candidate from University of Seville, Spain. For his dissertation, “The Internet, echo chambers and conspiranoia: digital challenges through the lens of social epistemology,” he tries to unriddle how the new ways to socialize on the Internet may lead us to form distinct beliefs and theories. Daniel’s areas of research specialization include philosophy of the Internet, philosophy of agency, social epistemology, and philosophy of conspiracy theories.
Maciej Bednarski is a Ph.D. student in Philosophy at the Doctoral School of Humanities at the University of Warsaw, Poland. His Ph.D. research project is a philosophical analysis of place(ment) of the University in the context of digitalization. He has published research papers in Kritika & Kontext, Eidos, A Journal for Philosophy of Culture and Przegląd Filozoficzny – Nowa Seria.
Jordan Kokot is a philosopher who specializes in the ethics and phenomenology of technology, the philosophy of art, and the phenomenology of time. His current research focuses on the ethical, social, and phenomenological intersections of XR (extended reality) and AI technologies, and on the ethical dimensions of “synthetic phenomenologies.” He teaches courses on ethics, social and political philosophy, and the philosophy of technology at Brandeis, Boston University, and Harvard.
Digital Worlds Workshop 