About Feminist Making

Two sculptures depict brightly coloured hands. One is covered in 3-D flowers. The other has a round circle in its palm.

Hand sculptures by Bailey Szustak

Feminist Making, Doing and Sensing: Experiments in Philosophy is a co-edited collection, published by Duke University Press in 2026, that invites play, creative expression and various somatic practices into the terrain of philosophy. The book includes chapters that engage mixtapes, performance art, instruction scores, knitting, filmmaking, scribbling, and many more modes of making/thinking. The book makes the case — in part through intersections with Black studies, trans studies, crip studies, research-creation, feminist science studies, and transdisciplinarity more broadly— for the vital import of voices, practices, and arts-based projects that overturn and interrupt the exclusions of disciplinary gatekeeping.

In the words of Ryan Kendall, feminist philosophy acquisitions assistant editor at Duke University Press, “The collection asks us what philosophy looks like when we hold it close, hold it dearly, press it upon and build it from our bodies, from the spaces we live and work, and from the worlds we inhabit. From this view, the philosophical process is deeply collaborative, sensorial, and affective, from the classroom to the conference center to the workshop, living room, performance stage, to the porch, and, I would add, to the publishing house.”

This book, in other words, invites readers and makers to affirm the attachments (to art and creativity, to solidarity and community-building, to embodied experiences) that enliven and reshape philosophical labour.

Its beginnings took place at several feminist philosophy gatherings, at which graduate students, emerging and established scholars, and artists met to share creative work that seemed to fall outside the bounds of what “counts” as philosophy — even as these projects held tangible significance as contributions to the critical, creative work of feminist philosophy.

These gatherings, organized in the form of arts-based workshops, took place at philoSOPHIA, held at George Mason University in 2022 , at philoSOPHIA, held at University of North Carolina, Charlotte in 2023, and at the Pacific American Philosophical Association held in San Francisco in 2023. These workshops sparked the four-day philoSOPHIA conference, “Feminist Making, Doing, and Sensing,” hosted by the Mount Royal University Library in Calgary, Canada in 2024. The collection itself features work by participants at this conference, as well as an array of invited contributors.

This site, Feminist Making, extends the co-edited book collection by way of offering educational and open-access resources. This work is inspired and influenced by feminist makers who create and shape arts-based, collaborative, pluralistic community. These influences include: