EXPERTISE
Feminist Philosophy
Social and Political Philosophy
Ethics
FACULTY PROFILE
Kelly Gawel is a feminist philosopher and scholar-activist. She received her PhD in Philosophy from The New School for Social Research, her BA with highest honors in Interdisciplinary Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, and her AA from Sierra College, a public community college in Northern California. Her work centers on radical care, social reproduction, and embodied ethics, and she has been part of experiments in queer and feminist politics in California, Mexico, and New York for over fifteen years.
Her 2023 dissertation, Contradictions of Care, brings together insights from care ethics, materialist feminism, and transformative justice to confront the relational impasses that emerge when care is coerced and denied along racial, gendered, class, ableist, and colonial lines, and also argues that our capacities for care are among the most potent sources of social change available to us. Her academic and public scholarship has appeared in Hypatia, Krisis, and Viewpoint Magazine and she was recently awarded the Iris Marion Young Prize for the best paper in feminist philosophy by the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP). She is currently working on a book project that presents key ideas and practices from her research and collaborations in an accessible way.
Dr. Gawel is an Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Governors State University. She is deeply proud of her vocation as an educator and loves to learn from GovState students and support them as they live into their values and dreams.