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Caleb Ward

@calebw.bsky.social
3.9K followers 1.6K following 4.7K posts

The Unflinching Philosophy of Audre Lorde.... coming in 2027 Postdoc at Free University Berlin www.calebward.xyz Life is impermanent and so are reposts.

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Caleb Ward @calebw.bsky.social · 11h
A close friend of mine just got great, lifechanging news… even more lifechanging than winning a MacArthur Award. Is that feeling what they call hope?
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Caleb Ward @calebw.bsky.social · 21h
Current mood
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paulpro @mariopro.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Rose Anne Prevec groundhoghill.ca
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Caleb Ward @calebw.bsky.social · 22h
I'm feeling pretty enraged today at how shitty my people are (men). I hate this for us! I hate this for everyone we force to cast their lot with us! What the actual fuck.
SImone de Beauvoir leading Braveheart charge
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Talia "ATTACK DOGS is out now!" Bhatt ⚢ @taliabhatt.itch.io · 22h
"Institutes of higher education harbour known rape dens where men foster a culture of apathy and contempt towards women and are enabled to commit sexual assault" is perhaps something we should consider more objectionable than we currently do.
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Tereza Hendl @terezahendl.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
The theme of our next RUTA conference is freedom—what it is and what it isn’t. Who are the theorists, dissidents, and artists from the RUTA regions of Europe's East, Baltic, Caucasus, Central & Northern Asia—and globally—whose work we build on when we think about what freedom and oppression entail?
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Caleb Ward @calebw.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
On the essential importance of producing questions and not just answers👇
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Caleb Ward @calebw.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Any knowledge that doesn’t lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain the temperature required for sustaining life. In the most extreme cases, it even poses a lethal threat to society. —Wisława Szymborska
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Mark Anthony Neal (@NewBlackMan on X) @markanthonyneal.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
The Mighty Sparrow, Trinidadian Titan of Calypso, Is Dead at 91 He was sometimes described as the last of the true calypso singers. But in fact he simultaneously preserved calypso tradition and invented it anew. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/27/a...
nytimes.com
The Mighty Sparrow, Trinidadian Titan of Calypso, Is Dead at 91 (Gift Article)
He was sometimes described as the last of the true calypso singers. But in fact he simultaneously preserved calypso tradition and invented it anew.
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Caleb Ward @calebw.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Poets are the worst. Their work is hopelessly unphotogenic. —Wisława Szymborska
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Caleb Ward @calebw.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Ladies and gentletheys, I have today discovered the answer to this question! Green. The outfit is green.
Photo by Dagmar Schultz of Audre Lorde talking with Rina Nissim in Geneva in the late 1980s
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Caleb Ward @calebw.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
I say read Butler’s Parable of the Sower if you’re not sure where to start 🌱
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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Please try to reclaim your precious precious attention, at all costs. Do puzzles. Take walks without a phone. Dear god, try to read, almost anything that isn’t a manifesto will really do. You are going to need your brain.
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Caleb Ward @calebw.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
This is the vibe #philsky
Caption: "There can be no peace until they renounce their Rabbit God and accept our Duck God."

Description: An army lines up for battle, holding flags with an image that looks like a duck and a rabbit. The opposing army holds the same flags.
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Caleb Ward @calebw.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Someone’s putting up the philosophers of language bat sign again
News article: SPORTS
Kyle Juszczyk gets fined for chugging celebration that NFL says was beer and he says was juice
C
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1 of 3| San Francisco 49ers fullback Kyle Juszczyk gestures after a play against the Miami Dolphins during the second ha Read More
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robin celikates @robin-c.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
I’m so angry I wrote an article: In Germany, fascist majorities are a real possibility again, but the centrist merger of a revived Red Scare with open racism shows that mainstream media & politics are unable or unwilling to comprehend the seriousness of the crisis tribunemag.co.uk/2026/09/germ...
tribunemag.co.uk
Warning from Germany: It’s Socialism or Barbarism
Fascism is at the door, and liberals are ushering it in. Only the left offers hope.
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Caleb Ward @calebw.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
This is what the kids these days call "Rees mogging"
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Caleb Ward @calebw.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
I know you'll think I've been living under a rock, but I'm right now reading my first obvious mostly LLM-generated seminar paper and it is NOT FUN.
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Caleb Ward @calebw.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Hey everyone, you should read Tara Mastrelli's excellent piece of feminist philosophy about identity formation and epistemic resistance for breast cancer survivors. It's written from a deeply personal perspective and draws richly from Audre Lorde's cancer narratives.
cambridge.org
Hermeneutical Rebellion as Lordean Self-Care: Resisting Identity Harm Through and Against Breast Cancer Survivor Narratives | Hypatia | Cambridge Core
Hermeneutical Rebellion as Lordean Self-Care: Resisting Identity Harm Through and Against Breast Cancer Survivor Narratives
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Caleb Ward @calebw.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Hey everyone, you should read Tara Mastrelli's excellent piece of feminist philosophy about identity formation and epistemic resistance for breast cancer survivors. It's written from a deeply personal perspective and draws richly from Audre Lorde's cancer narratives.
cambridge.org
Hermeneutical Rebellion as Lordean Self-Care: Resisting Identity Harm Through and Against Breast Cancer Survivor Narratives | Hypatia | Cambridge Core
Hermeneutical Rebellion as Lordean Self-Care: Resisting Identity Harm Through and Against Breast Cancer Survivor Narratives
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Caleb Ward @calebw.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Just bald-faced, pay to play corruption endemic in the US. Mainers are gonna hate this tho 🤞
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Caleb Ward @calebw.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Audre Lorde often used to say: "The rumor that you can’t fight city hall is circulated by city hall. It is a position that only serves the status quo." (Here quoted from her 1984 seminar in Berlin on "The Poet as Outsider")
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Sham Jaff @shamjaff.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
If you are relieved that the AfD did not win Berlin, I understand (me too). The Left came first, while the AfD received around 16% of the votes. But there’s something else that I’d like you to pay attention to. I think it’s equally important: who gets counted in Berlin’s democracy and who does not.
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Ahana the Sun Goddess ☀️ 🌞 @antisanitygirl.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
NEW ESSAY! I meditate on how shame and hurt coexist with more empowering forms of affect and experience, and that even the most brutal moments contain residues and ephemera of personal power. Shame's narratives eliminate these residues from thought. tenderlyborderline.substack.com/p/beside-sha...
tenderlyborderline.substack.com
Beside Shame
Subsisting within the contours of shame
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Caleb Ward @calebw.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
my partner who loves both Haribo gummy bears and Ritter Sport chocolate tries their collab for the first time 😂😂💀 Can’t believe she let me post this
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Caleb Ward @calebw.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Having authors visit your class is an evergreen trick to wow & enrich your students. I taught a figure seminar on Sally Haslanger a couple yrs ago, and I'm sure I got such awesome seminar papers because she showed up (virtually) for one of our final sessions. it was a major event for the students.
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Caleb Ward @calebw.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
In the archive I found a short little note from Audre Lorde to Allen Ginsberg, written on Lorde’s letterhead from her home in St. Croix. It's dated Feb. 11, 1990, and she sent him a copy of a poem and wrote: "I LOVE it that you told Fidel you wanted to sleep with Raoul!"
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Durba Mitra @durba.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
UT Austin has barred students from studying WGS, even as it holds the archives of extraordinary feminists like Lugones. Harvard has demolished WGS, with essentially no experts left who can teach its vast feminist archives, from suffrage to Angela Davis and June Jordan at the Schlesinger Library 😞
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Caleb Ward @calebw.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
yess get their asses
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Caleb Ward @calebw.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
There's a guy who presented an orphaned conference paper on consent in the 1980s that everyone in the 90s cited as a major insight into the difference between "attitudinal" and "performative" (i.e., communicative) theories of what consent is. I think of that guy often.
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Melissa Stewart @lissajostewart.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
What is the point of having “go fuck yourself” amounts of money if you won’t use it to tell the worst people to go fuck themselves?
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Nick Clanchy @nickclanchy.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
Pleased this paper has now finally been published: journals.publishing.umich.edu/ergo/article...
journals.publishing.umich.edu
Infrapolitical Strategies for Preventing Hermeneutical Injustices Amidst the Global Trans Panic
Previously proposed strategies for preventing hermeneutical injustices mostly take for granted the interests people have in various things about themselves being intelligible, and aim only to enable t...
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Caleb Ward @calebw.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
This is so fucked. It’s also a blueprint to those who would hope to achieve similar elsewhere…
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Sukaina @sukaina.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
all of this to say: no, we did not get too woke! it is not a mistake to fight aggressively for social justice!!! the mistake is to let yourself be convinced you can achieve largely material goals through largely symbolic means!
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Caleb Ward @calebw.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Just put pen to paper on a contract to work at Free University Berlin for the next 2 years. huzzah! The whole social philosophy scene there is so fertile for both my teaching & my research. Can't wait. Obligatory website screenshot👇
Screenshot of my website: "Welcome! I'm a postdoc in philosophy at Free University Berlin. I research unjust social structures and their effects on agency and moral imagination." Picture of bespectacled me smiling wide on the mic
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Lydia Moland @lydiamoland.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
Great news in history of women in philosophy--new book by Alison Stone on Julia Wedgwood, whose "law of imperfect antithesis" is a fascinating alternative to mainstream ethical theory. Watch Alison's terrific video summmary here: www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.116... #philsky #womeninphilosophy
openbookpublishers.com
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Caleb Ward @calebw.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
Close up of a woman who has seized control of her own destiny (see original quoted post for detailed alt text)
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Interrupting Criminalization @interruptcrim.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
NYC: This short film tells the story of the groundbreaking 1975 case of the first woman in US history to be acquitted for using deadly force to resist sexual assault. Sun, Sep 20, 2:30pm: Q&A w/IC cofounder Mariame Kaba & the director. For tickets & other special engagements, visit bit.ly/DCTVFJL
Free Joan Little NY Theatrical Premier Firehouse DCTV's Cinema for Documentary Film September 18-24 RSVP: bit.ly/DCTVFJL
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Ahana the Sun Goddess ☀️ 🌞 @antisanitygirl.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
NEW ESSAY! I write disability and ability into stories about gendered conduct. Read if you’re interested in crip and neuroqueer theories and would benefit from a concrete analysis of how discourses of gender and dis/ability produce embodied identity. tenderlyborderline.substack.com/p/disability...
tenderlyborderline.substack.com
Dis/ability/gender: Figuring gender through disablism and ableism
Disability and gender/sexuality share a long co-history.
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Caleb Ward @calebw.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
Wasn’t looking for a memento mori from a random coffee cup I grabbed in my office today, but sometimes you get what you need and not what you want…
Small white coffee cup with logo on it of two vertical shadows with hearts crossed by a horizontal shadow with head and feet. It reads Pomnik Hospicjum Miastu Oswiecim (a memorial hospice)
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Stuart Presnell @logopetria.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
Reading 1984 and shaking my head the whole time so the people watching the bus security cameras know I love Big Brother
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Caleb Ward @calebw.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
Got those good seats again 👌 #fibawwc
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Caleb Ward @calebw.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
Just had my manuscript bound and shipped off by a worker-run printshop (est. 1983) in small-town western Mass. By Mon or Tues it’ll be in the hands of an advance reader who’s a big hero of mine. Never done this before, but I’m liking it!
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Eric Schwitzgebel @eschwitz.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
New paper in draft! I've been working on this one since 2018, never satisfied, redrafting over and over. I'm sure it still needs considerable work, but I'm finally ready to circulate it. Walking the Walk Ethicists who advocate moral principles without trying to live by them will generally 1/4
Walking the Walk title page
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Heba Gowayed هبة جويد @hebagowayed.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
9/11/2001 I was a freshman in high school in Alabama, I wore a hijab. In gym class my teacher wheeled in a screen. Something horrible was happening. I watched, mouth agape as the second tower hit. We were silent. As that period reached an end, my name was announced on the loud speaker. 1/
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Caleb Ward @calebw.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
“There is nothing in my life that cannot be used for something … I need to use whoever I am in whatever the battles are that I’m fighting.” —Audre Lorde, 1988 interview on Swiss public radio
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Caleb Ward @calebw.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
Many such cases
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Caleb Ward @calebw.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
Philosophers, putting on our metaphorical hard hats: "We do conceptual engineering" 👯‍♂️ Industrial spammers, in my email inbox: "We specialize in the exact type of high-precision hydraulic cylinders that power such demanding applications"
Email screengrab
Subject: OEM & ODM Electric Forklift Manufacturer | Mightlift

Dear Sir/Madam,

I hope this email finds you well.

I've been following your work in the forklift sector. We specialize in the exact type of high-precision hydraulic cylinders that power such demanding applications, and I'm reaching out to see if we could be a valuable partner for your current or upcoming projects.
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Melissa Gira Grant @melissagiragrant.com · 08/09/2026
a gorgeously astute read on Gloria, by @reproutopia.bsky.social:
patreon.com
Eight theses on Gloria Steinem, because goddamn | Sophie Lewis
I think the phrase we’re looking for is social-democratic anticommunism. She was a metonym of the 20th century, which is currently dying. Sh
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Caleb Ward @calebw.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
"Had you entered that afternoon you would have thought you saw a man planting something in a boy's palm"
The Gift
By Li-Young Lee
To pull the metal splinter from my palm
my father recited a story in a low voice.
I watched his lovely face and not the blade.
Before the story ended, he’d removed
the iron sliver I thought I’d die from.

I can’t remember the tale,
but hear his voice still, a well
of dark water, a prayer.
And I recall his hands,
two measures of tenderness
he laid against my face,
the flames of discipline
he raised above my head. Had you entered that afternoon
you would have thought you saw a man
planting something in a boy’s palm,
a silver tear, a tiny flame.
Had you followed that boy
you would have arrived here,
where I bend over my wife’s right hand.

Look how I shave her thumbnail down
so carefully she feels no pain.
Watch as I lift the splinter out.
I was seven when my father
took my hand like this,
and I did not hold that shard
between my fingers and think,
Metal that will bury me,
christen it Little Assassin,
Ore Going Deep for My Heart.
And I did not lift up my wound and cry,
Death visited here!
I did what a child does
when he’s given something to keep.
I kissed my father.
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