Lisa Guenther

Education

• BA, Bishop’s
• PhD, University of Toronto

Specializations / Research Interests

Critical Prison Studies, Phenomenology, Feminism, Continental Philosophy, Social and Political Philosophy, Critical Race Theory

Personal Website

About

Lisa Guenther is Queen’s National Scholar in Political Philosophy and Critical Prison Studies.  She is the author of Solitary Confinement: Social Death and its Afterlives (2013) and The Gift of the Other: Levinas and the Politics of Reproduction (2007), and co-editor of Death and Other Penalties: Philosophy in a Time of Mass Incarceration (2015). She has published articles and book chapters in phenomenology, feminism, prison studies, and critical race studies, including recent work on police violence, prisoner resistance, and carceral space. As a public philosopher, Guenther’s work has appeared in The New York Times, The Globe and Mail, Aeon, and CBC’s Ideas. From 2012-17, she facilitated a discussion group with men on death row in Tennessee called REACH Coalition, and she is currently a member of the Advisory Board for the P4W Memorial Collective. Guenther teaches philosophy classes at Collins Bay Institution through the Walls to Bridges Program. She is working on a critical phenomenology of prison abolition and decolonization on Turtle Island. 

Monographs

• Solitary Confinement: Social Death and its Afterlives. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.
• The Gift of the Other: Levinas and the Politics of Reproduction. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2006.

Edited Books / Collections

• Death and Other Penalties: Philosophy in a Time of Mass Incarceration. Co-edited with Geoff Adelsberg and Scott Zeman.  New York: Fordham University Press, 2015.

Edited Journal Issues

• Co-editor with Chloë Taylor, Special Issue: Queer, Trans, and Feminist Responses to the Prison Nation, philoSOPHIA: A Journal of Continental Feminism 6.1, Winter 2016.
• Co-editor with Ami Harbin, Special Issue: Phenomenology, Affect, and Emotion, PhaenEx: Journal of Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture 7.2, Fall 2012.
• Co-editor with Chloë Taylor, Special Issue: Continental Perspectives on Animals, PhaenEx: Journal of Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture 2:2, Fall 2007.

Journal Articles

• ‘Stiftung dekolonisiert: Eine Lektüre von Merleau-Pontys Vorlesungen über Institution’ (German translation of ‘Asking Different Questions: A Decolonial of Reading of Merleau-Ponty’s Institution Course Notes’), Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 71:6 (2023), 921–932. 
• ‘#AbolishCanada: Breaking Down the 2022 Freedom Convoy,’ Special Section, Against the Day: Abolition Politics, South Atlantic Quarterly 122:3 (July 2023), 651-9.
• ‘Property, Dispossession, and State Violence: The Criminalization of Indigenous Resistance in Canada,’ Special Issue on Violent Democracies, Philosophy Today 67:1 (Winter 2023), 81-98.
• ‘Asking Different Questions: A Decolonial of Reading of Merleau-Ponty’s Institution Course Notes,’ Chiasmi International (Special Issue on ‘Critical Phenomenology After Merleau-Ponty, Part II’) 24, 2022.
• ‘Abolish the World As We Know It: Notes for a Praxis of Phenomenology Beyond Critique,’ Puncta: Journal of Critical Phenomenology (Special Issue on Dwelling in the Contemporary Condition) 5:2, 2022. https://journals.oregondigital.org/index.php/pjcp/article/view/4922 
• Linda Mussell, Justin Piché, Kevin Walby, and Lisa Guenther, ‘‘A prison is no place for a party’: Neoliberalism, charitable fundraising, carceral enjoyments and abolitionist killjoys,’ Contemporary Justice Review, 30 Jan 2022. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10282580.2021.2018655
• 'Dwelling in Carceral Space,’ Levinas Studies 12, 2018.
• ‘The Unmaking and Remaking of the World in Long-Term Solitary Confinement,’ Social Philosophy Today 34, 2018.
• ‘The Unmaking and Remaking of the World in Long-Term Solitary Confinement,’ Puncta: Journal of Critical Phenomenology 1:1, 2018.
• ‘Prison Beds and Compensated Man-Days: The Spatio-Temporal Order of Carceral Neoliberalism,’ Special Issue on Neoliberal Confinements: Social Suffering in the Carceral State, Social Justice 44:2/3, 2018.
• ‘A Critical Phenomenology of Dwelling in Carceral Space,’ Special issue on Phenomenology against Architectural Phenomenology, Log 42, Winter 2018.
• ‘The Creaturely Politics of Prison Resistance Movements,’ Carceral Notebooks, “Challenging the Punitive Society,” ed. Perry Zurn and Andrew Dilts, 12, 2016. 
• (with Chloë Taylor) ‘Introduction: Queer, Trans, and Feminist Responses to the Prison Nation’, philoSOPHIA: A Journal of Continental Feminism 6.1, 1-8, Winter 2016.
• ‘Political Action at the End of the World: Hannah Arendt and the California Prison Hunger Strikes,’ The Canadian Journal for Human Rights 4:1, 2015.
• ‘The Most Dangerous Place: Pro-Life Politics and the Rhetoric of Slavery.’ Postmodern Culture 22:2 (January), 2013.
• ‘Fecundity and Natal Alienation: Rethinking Kinship with Emmanuel Levinas and Orlando Patterson.’ Levinas Studies 7. Special Issue on Levinas and Race, Ed. John Drabinski, 2012.
• ‘Beyond Dehumanization: A Post-Humanist Critique of Intensive Confinement.’ Journal for Critical Animal Studies 10:2, Special Issue on Animals and Prisons, 2012.
• ‘Resisting Agamben: The Biopolitics of Shame and Humiliation.’ Philosophy and Social Criticism 38:1, 2012, pp. 59-79.
• ‘The Ethics and Politics of Otherness: Negotiating Alterity and Racial Difference.’ philoSOPHIA 1.2, 2011, pp 195-214.
• ‘Subjects without a World? An Husserlian Analysis of Solitary Confinement.’ Human Studies 34, 2011, pp 257–276.
• ‘Merleau-Ponty and the Sense of Sexual Difference.’ Angelaki 16:2, 2011, pp 19-33.
• ‘Shame and the Temporality of Social Life.’ Continental Philosophy Review 44:1, March 2011.
• ‘Other Fecundities: Proust and Irigaray on Sexual Difference.’ differences: a journal of feminist cultural studies 21:2, 2010, pp 24-45.
• ‘‘Nameless Singularity’: Levinas on Individuation and Ethical Singularity.’ Epoché 14:1, Fall 2009, pp 167–187.
• ‘Who follows whom?  Derrida, Animals and Women.’  Derrida Today 2:2, 151-65, 2009.
• ‘Being-from-Others: Reading Heidegger after Cavarero.’ Hypatia 23:4, Fall 2008.
• ‘Le flair animal: Levinas and the possibility of friendship.’ PhaenEx: Journal of Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture 2:2, Fall 2007.
• ‘‘Like a Maternal Body’: Levinas and the Motherhood of Moses,’ Hyaptia 21:1, Special Issue on Maternal Bodies, 119-136, Winter 2006.
• ‘Lucky Burden: Beauvoir and the Ethical Temporality of Birth’, Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy, 9:2, 177-194, 2005. 
• ‘Unborn Mothers: The old rhetoric of New Reproductive Technologies’, Radical Philosophy, 130, 2-6, March/April 2005.
• ‘Towards a Phenomenology of Dwelling,’ Canadian Journal of Environmental Education, Vol. 7(2), 38-46, 2002. 

Chapters in Books

• ‘Epistemic Injustice and Political Phenomenology,’ The Routledge Handbook of Political Phenomenology, ed. Steffen Hermann, Gerhard Thonhauser, Sophie Loidolt, Tobias Matzner, and Nils Baratella. Routledge, 2024.  
• ‘Intergenerational Responsibility for Settler Colonial Violence,’ Rethinking Responsibility, ed. Elisabeth Gräb-Schmidt, Ferdinando G. Menga, and Christian Schlenker. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2023, pp. 153-77. 
• ‘Six Senses of Critique for Critical Phenomenology’ (translated into German), Phänomenologie und Kritische Theorie, ed. Jochen Dreher, Alexis Gros, and Hartmut Rosa. Suhrkamp, 2022. 
• ‘Police, Drones, and the Politics of Perception,’ The Ethics of Policing, ed. Eduardo Mendieta and Ben Jones. New York: New York University Press, 2021.
• ‘Settler Colonialism, Incarceration, and the Abolitionist Imperative: Lessons from an Australian Youth Detention Centre,’ Building Abolition: Decarceration and Social Justice, ed. Chloë Taylor and Kelly Struthers Montford. New York: Routledge, 2021.
• ‘CCA/Core Civic,’ I’ll Take You There: Exploring Nashville’s Social Justice Sites, ed. Amie Thurber and Learotha Williams Jr. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2021.
• ‘‘We Charge Genocide’: Anti-Black Racism in the United States as Genocidal Structural Violence,’ Logics of Genocide, ed. Ann O’Byrne and Martin Shuster. New York: Routledge, 2020.
• ‘Critical Phenomenology,’ 50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology, ed. Ann Murphy, Gayle Salamon, and Gail Weiss. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2019.
• ‘Seeing Like a Cop: A Critical Phenomenology of Whiteness as Property,’ Race and Phenomenology, ed. Emily Lee. Rowman and Littlefield, 2019.
• ‘‘An Abolitionism Worthy of the Name: From the Death Penalty to the Prison Industrial Complex,’ Deconstructing the Death Penalty Towards a New Abolitionism: Essays on Derrida’s Death Penalty Seminars, ed. Kelly Oliver, with Stephanie Straub.  Fordham University Press, 2018, pp. 239-258.
• ‘Epistemic Injustice and Phenomenology,’ The Routledge Handbook to Epistemic Injustice, ed. Ian Kidd, José Medina, and Gaile Pohlhaus. New York: Routledge, 2017, pp. 195-204.
• ‘A Critical Phenomenology of Solidarity and Resistance in the 2013 California Prison Hunger Strikes,’ Body/Self/Other: The Phenomenology of Social Encounters, ed. Luna Dolezal and Danielle Petherbridge. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2017, pp. 42-74.
• ‘Angela Davis,’ Fifty Key Feminist Philosophers, ed. Lori Marso. New York: Routledge, 2016.
• ‘Life Behind Bars: The Eugenic Structure of Mass Incarceration,’ Feminist Philosophies of Life, ed. Hasana Sharp and Chloe Taylor. Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2016.
• ‘On Pain of Death: The ‘Grotesque Sovereignty’ of the US Death Penalty,’ The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities. Ed. Anne Whitehead and Angela Woods. Edinburgh University Press, 2016.
• ‘The Living Death of Solitary Confinement’ in The Stone Reader: Modern Philosophy in 133 Arguments. Ed. Peter Catapano and Simon Critchley. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2015.
• ‘Social Death and the Power of Creative Resistance,’ The House That Herman Built, ed. Jackie Sumell and Herman Wallace. Stuttgart, Germany: Reihe Projectiv, 2015.
• ‘Beyond Guilt and Innocence: The Creaturely Life of Prisoner Resistance,’ Active Intolerance: Michel Foucault, the Prisons Information Group, and the Future of Abolition, ed. Andrew Dilts and Perry Zurn. Palgrave 2015.
• ‘The Psychopathology of Space: A Phenomenological Critique of Solitary Confinement,’ Medicine and Society in Continental Perspective, ed. Darian Meacham. Dortrecht: Springer, 2015.
• ‘Inhabiting the House that Herman Built: Merleau-Ponty and the Pathological Space of Solitary Confinement.’ Merleau-Ponty: Space, Place, Architecture, ed. Patricia Locke and Rachel McCann.  Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2015.
• ‘Maroon Philosophy: An Interview with Russell “Maroon” Shoatz,’ Death and Other Penalties: Continental Philosophers on Prisons and the Death Penalty. Co-edited by Geoffrey Adelsberg and Scott Zeman. New York: Fordham University Press, 2015.
• ‘The Birth of Sexual Difference: A Feminist Response to Merleau-Ponty.’ In Coming to Life: Philosophies of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Mothering.  Ed. Sarah LaChance Adams and Caroline R. Lundquist. Fordham University Press, 2012.

Encyclopedia Entries

• ‘Prison Studies,’ Encyclopedia of Phenomenology, ed. Nicolas de Warren and Ted Toadvine. Springer, 2024. https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-3-030-47253-5_348-1

Work in Progress

• No Prisons on Stolen Land: A Critical Phenomenology of Carceral Colonial Power (book)

Media

• ‘Education Behind Bars: Transformative Pedagogy in Prisons,’ Re-Educated Podcast, 1 May 2024. https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84MzRiMDI1Yy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw/episode/MmVhMjhlM2QtNWRjYS00OTM5LTk5MGEtMmU1NGU2Y2I5Mjk4?sa=X&ved=0CAUQkfYCahcKEwiYmJTYhe2FAxUAAAAAHQAAAAAQAQ 
• Talkback session for ‘The Flood,’ Centaur Theatre, Montreal, 25 Feb 2024.
• ‘An Interview with Lisa Guenther (Beyond the Ivory Tower Series),’ Constanza Porro, 15 Jan 2024. https://justice-everywhere.org/beyond-the-ivory-tower/an-interview-with-lisa-guenther-beyond-the-ivory-tower-series/ 
• Podcast Interview with Rebel Justice, ‘Abolitionists Rising: Reimagining Justice Beyond Prisons with Lisa Guenther,’ 16 December 2023 https://player.fm/series/rebel-justice-changing-the-way-you-see-justice/abolitionists-rising-reimagining-justice-beyond-prisons-with-lisa-guenther  
• ‘Memory and Forgetting at Canada’s Prison for Women,’ Mountjoy Prison and The Dochas Centre (women’s prison), Dublin, 15 Nov. 2023.
• ‘Collective Memory at Canada’s Prison for Women,’ APA Blog on Public Philosophy, 9 Nov. 2023. https://blog.apaonline.org/2023/11/09/collective-memory-at-canadas-prison-for-women/
• ‘Solitary Confinement and the Meaning of Existence,’ Gloucestershire Philosophical Society, UK, 23 March, 2022. Online presentation and discussion. https://glosphilsoc.net/ 
• ‘Prison redevelopment on three continents: Lessons from community-led struggles’ (with Linda Mussell). Spring: A Magazine of Socialist Ideas in Action (31 March, 2021). https://springmag.ca/prison-redevelopment-on-three-continents-lessons-from-community-led-struggles 
• Podcast on solitary confinement with Shokoufeh Sakhi for Solitudes Past and Present. Forthcoming on https://solitudes.qmul.ac.uk/.
• ‘A Short History of Solitude: Locked Down’ (interview with Thomas Dixon for podcast on solitary confinement). Sept. 2020. BBC Sounds.
• ‘Redemption in the DDU’ (interview on solitary confinement for podcast) Hi-Phi Nation. 30 May, 2020. Podcast launched with one-hour webinar for subscribers on 4 June.
• ‘Teachin’ Against the Big House: A Teach-in on Prison Entertainment and Redevelopment,’ John Deutsch University Centre, Queen’s University, 12 Sept., 2019. Co-organizer and facilitator of a teach-in featuring Justin Piché, Kevin Walby, Ann Hansen, Jimmy Hogan, and Donny Hogan.
• ‘The Death Penalty, Sovereignty and Abolition,’ Interview on Rustbelt Abolition Radio, 29 May, 2019.
• ‘Interweaving #4 - Lisa Guenther and Rivka Rocchio on Mass Incarceration,’ 10 May, 2019.
• ‘Justice for Soli: Islamophobia, Race and Prisons’ (roundtable discussion at Queen’s University). 25 March, 2019.
• ‘Blind Date with Knowledge’ (interview on CFRC radio). 17 Oct., 2018.
• ‘What is lost when we pave over a prison,’ The Globe and Mail, 5 July, 2018.
• ‘White ‘Power’ and the Fear of Replacement,’ co-authored with Abigail Levin, The New York Times, 28 Aug., 2017.
• ‘The Ugly Truth behind Mass Incarceration and Recidivism,’ Food for Thought Community Lunchtime Program, Vanderbilt University, 28 March, 2017.
• Lecture on Solitary Confinement, Osher Lifelong Learning Course on Mass Incarceration, Brentwood, TN, 11 Nov., 2016.
• ‘Embodied by Prisons: First the Whip, Then the Chains, and Then…’ Radio interview on Interchange, WFHB, 17 November, 2015.
• ‘A Theorist Unchained,’ profile by David Schimke, Chronicle of Higher Education, 3 August, 2015.
• Radio interview about teaching philosophy on death row, CHQR news radio, Calgary, Alberta, Canada, 10 July, 2015.
• “Teaching Philosophy on Death Row: An Interview with Lisa Guenther,” Albert W. Dzur, Boston Review, 26 June, 2015.
• “The mental and physical effects of solitary confinement,” Interview with Tom Crann and Laura Sullivan, Minnesota Public Radio, 13 April, 2015.
• “The Professor: Lisa Guenther,” Steven Hale, Nashville Scene, People Issue, 19 March, 2015. 
• “An Interview with Lisa Guenther,” Michael Giesbrecht, Affectus: Undergraduate Journal of Philosophy and Theory 1:1, 2014.
• “The Living Tomb,” Radio Interview, The Terry Project, University of British Colombia, 3 July, 2014. 
• ‘The Concrete Abyss: Why Solitary Confinement Degrades Us All,’ Aeon Magazine, 16 April 2014.
• “Solitude’s Despair,” Review of Solitary Confinement by Alexander Nazaryan, Newsweek, 3 April, 2014.
• “Living Philosophically: A Conversation with Dr. Lisa Guenther,” Interview with Rachel Robinson. Ryerson Philosophy Graduate Student’s Union blog, 6 January, 2014.
• Radio Interview about life on Tennessee’s death row, Prison Radio, 27 Dec., 2013.
• Newspaper interview: “Solitary confinement: a phenomenological perspective,” Quinn Richert, The Manitoban, 3 Dec., 2013.
• “Solitary Confinement Is a Legal Form of Torture in Canada,” Interview with Martha Coté, Vice Magazine, 18 Nov., 2013.
• ‘Alone and Apart,’ Philosopher's Zone (ABC Radio Interview), 13 Oct., 2013.
• ‘The California SHU and the End of the World.’ Society and Space, Forum on The US Carceral Society, 24 Sept., 2013.
• ‘Alone Inside,’ Ideas (CBC Radio Documentary on Solitary Confinement), 3 Sept., 2013.
• ‘Erring on the Side of Life,’ New APPS, 22 Aug., 2013.
• ‘The Biopolitics of Starvation in California Prisons.’ Society and Space, 2 Aug., 2013.
• ‘Social Death and the Criminalization of Resistance in the California Prison Hunger Strikes.’ Truthout, 2 Aug., 2013.
• ‘What is the Experience of Isolation?’ Interview in The Believer, June 2013.
• ‘The Living Death of Solitary Confinement.’ The New York Times, 26 Aug., 2012.

Teaching

• PHIL 318 Philosophy of Law
• PHIL 256 Existentialism
• PHIL 276 Critical Perspectives on Social Diversity
• PHIL 406 and PHIL 407 Walls to Bridges
• PHIL 441/841 Critical Phenomenology
• CUST 807/PHIL 821 Settler Colonialism and Incarceration