Faculty Biography - Kristin McCartney

Kristin McCartney

Assistant Professor

B.A. Miami University of Ohio
M.A. DePaul University
Ph.D. DePaul University

847.635.1950
kmccartn@oakton.edu
Room 2430 Des Plaines

Web page: http://www.oakton.edu/~kmccartn/

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Biography

Kristin received her PhD in Philosophy from DePaul University. Her undergraduate degree was in Interdisciplinary Studies. As a philosopher, Kristin's focus has been on Very Big Social Problems™. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, it easier to have sympathy with suffering than with thought, but only thought offers any kind of path to solidarity. With her students, Kristin aims to develop complex, critical, and open-ended accounts of justice, violence, identity, happiness, beauty, and so on. Since she has never been to war or given birth or crossed borders alone, she is grateful that the Humanities classroom opens space for students to seriously reflect on the everyday and the extraordinary in their lives. It rocks.

Kristin has lived and taught in Chicago for almost a decade. She spends a lot of her time swimming, dancing, attending community forums, and enjoying the cooking of others. Her fridge is empty. She enjoys reading long political biographies, street fashion blogs, and everything in between. Currently, Kristin is working on one manuscript about how the traumatic memory of the Transatlantic slave trade impacts our understanding of HIV/AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa. Another project compares the oppositional portraits of femininity published during the women's liberation movement with those being created and circulated on Tumblr today. Her essays and reviews have been published in Philosophia Africana, International Studies in Philosophy, Hypatia, and Radical Philosophy Review.