Creating a Black Vernacular Philosophy explores how everyday Black vernacular practices, developed to negotiate survival and joy, can be understood as philosophy in their own right. Devonya N. Havis argues that many unique cultural and intellectual practices of African diasporic communities have done the work of traditional philosophies. Focusing on creative practices that take place within Black American diasporic cultures via narratives, the blues, jazz, work songs, and other expressive forms, this book articulates a form of Black vernacular Philosophy that is centered within and emerges from meaning structures cultivated by Black communities. These distinct philosophical practices, running parallel with and often improvising on European philosophy, should be acknowledged for their rigorous theoretical formation and for their disruption of traditional Western philosophical ontologies.

Addressing Ableism is a set of philosophical meditations outlining the scale and scope of ableism. By explicating concepts like experience, diagnosis, precariousness, and prosthesis, Scuro maps out the institutionalized and intergenerational forms of this bias as it is analogous and yet also distinct from other kinds of dehumanization, discrimination, and oppression. This project also includes a dialogical chapter on intersectionality with Devonya Havis and Lydia Brown, a philosopher and writer/activist respectively. Utilizing theorists like Judith Butler, Tobin Siebers, Emmanuel Levinas, and Hannah Arendt to address ableism, Scuro thoroughly critiques the neoliberal culture and politics that underwrites ableist affections and phobias. This project exposes the many material and non-material harms of ableism, and it offers multiple avenues to better confront and resist ableism in its many forms. Scuro provides crucial insights into the many uninhabitable and unsustainable effects of ableism and how we might revise our intentions and desires for the sake of a less ableist world.

Knowledge emerges from contexts, which are shaped by people's experiences. The varied essays in Thinking the US South: Contemporary Philosophy from Southern Perspectives demonstrate that Southern identities, borders, and practices play an important but unacknowledged role in ethical, political, emotional, and global issues connected to knowledge production. Not merely one geographical region among others, the US South is sometimes a fantasy and other times a nightmare, but it is always a prominent component of the American national imaginary. In connection with the Global North and Global South, the US South provides a valuable perspective from which to explore race, class, gender, and other inter- and intra-American differences. The result is a fresh look at how identity is constituted; the role of place, ancestors, and belonging in identity formation; the impact of regional differences on what counts as political resistance; the ways that affect and emotional labor circulate; practices of boundary policing, deportation, and mourning; issues of disability and slowness; racial and other forms of suffering; and above all, the question of whether and how doing philosophy changes when done from Southern standpoints. Examining racist tropes, Indigenous land claims, Black Southern philosophical perspectives, migrant labor, and more, this incisive anthology makes clear that roots matter.