Dr. Suzanne McCullagh

Dr. Suzanne McCullagh (she/her) joined Athabasca University (AU) in 2019. Before being appointed to the Centre for Humanities at AU she was Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy for four years at Miami University in Ohio, USA. She works in ethical, political, feminist, and environmental philosophy as well as the environmental humanities.

Dr. McCullagh’s research explores ways of thinking about social, ecological, and political community and the formation of subjectivities and capacities for action. Her work involves the philosophical analysis of concepts and discourses; she has worked on the concepts of habit, attention, political space, empathy, heterogeneity, plurality, and solidarity. Her work in ecological justice considers how concepts such as justice, solidarity, and political space are open to contestation and modification by social and ecological thinking which contests the disavowal of the ethical and political significance of human relations with the more than human world. Recently she has been working on projects that critically interrogate how contemporary extinction discourses shape social and political imaginations, one of which analyzes the temporality of extinction discourse. In another current project, McCullagh is developing the concept of posthuman grace to reorient how we think the political subject as constituted by and acting with and in virtue of heterogeneous others.

In addition to her interdisciplinary work in the environmental humanities, Dr. McCullagh has worked with the Canadian Community of Practice in Ecosystem Approaches to Health (CoPEH Canada) and led a team of ecology and health researchers from across Canada in the development and publication of an ecohealth course and teaching manual. Prior to her doctoral studies, she studied the principles of adult learning and distance education through Athabasca’s Centre for Distance Education while she worked as Education Program Manager for the Canadian Society for Training and Development (now The Institute for Performance and Learning).

Discover my research

---

Research interests

• Social and ecological justice
• Environmental discourse and political imagination
• Habit and political subjectivity
• Empathy and solidarity
• Extinction and Anthropocene discourse
• Epistemic justice and reparation
• Feminist and decolonial thought
• Critical posthumanism

---

Educational credentials

• PhD, University of Guelph, 2014
• MA, Memorial University Newfoundland, 2002
• BA, Glendon College, York University,1999

---

Professional affiliations

• Member of the Canadian Philosophical Association
• Member of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment
• Member of the American Weil Society

---