public philosophy (noun): the activity of expanding philosophical education, engagement and discourse to different publics beyond the traditional settings of academic philosophy. 

SPECS & Ethics Integration in Novel Neurotechnology Research
The development of novel neurotechnologies opens a horizon of possibilities of changing individual lives and broader society in ways that are both exciting and unsettling. The Scientific Perspectives and Ethics Commitments Survey (SPECS) is a dialogical ethics tool developed as a response to the Gray Matters report released by the President’s Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues in 2014. The report called for greater integration of ethics into neuroscience research in hopes that the science progressed in ways that took seriously its ethical and social implications. The aim of SPECS is to help researchers identify and consider the multiple ethical implications of their work. The basic idea is that after due reflection of their values and beliefs that bear on their research aims and practices, researchers will be able to reaffirm or reform some of the norms, aims, and practices of their research so that they align with their considered judgments.

SPECS Workshop with researchers at the University of Pittsburgh, May 2019.

The University of Puget Sound Ethics Bowl team competing with the FEPPS Ethics Bowl team in the inaugural Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl at WCCW, April 2019.

Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl in the Washington Corrections Center for Women
​With funding from the Melvin Rader Summer Grant for Innovative Projects in Philosophy, this ongoing project was launched in 2018 to expand the college ethics bowl to the Washington Corrections Center for Women. College ethics bowl teams in Washington state come to the prison to compete with the college ethics bowl team comprised of incarcerated students in the Freedom Education Project Puget Sound (FEPPS) in-prison college program. Due to the its success, the FEPPS ethics bowl team competed in the Northwest Regional Ethics Bowl competition via Zoom in 2019. To the best of my knowledge, the FEPPS ethics bowl team is the first collegiate ethics bowl team inside a women's prison. 

Philosophy within Prisons: A Mixed Enrollment Seminar Series and Symposium
​In collaboration with Anna Bates, this Mellon-funded project through the UW Simpson Center seeks to collaboratively engage the interesting but underappreciated relationship between philosophy and prisons with students incarcerated in the Washington Corrections Center for Women (WCCW) and students in the University of Washington. Prisons have a significant role in the history of philosophy—both as a major context from which philosophers, as incarcerated subjects, have critically examined important philosophical questions and as an object of philosophical inquiry. Our project is to design and conduct a collaborative, mixed-enrollment seminar series, including a symposium at the end, that explores the idea of prison as a generative space for philosophical thought and critically examine the philosophical ideas that underwrite carceral practices. As a mixed-enrollment seminar, participants will include both FEPPS students inside WCCW and students at the University of Washington.

Poster supporting the FEPPS Ethics Bowl team at the Northwest Regional Ethics Bowl competition, November 2019.