Meet the APA: Asha Bhandary
Asha Bhandary is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Iowa. She works in social and political philosophy as a feminist philosopher. Through her books and articles, she advances a theory called intersectional liberalism, which is a liberal political theory that values personal autonomy while addressing the human needs for care and belonging. She also serves as chair of the APA Committee on Asian and Asian American Philosophers and Philosophies, where one of her main initiatives has been to support Asian American feminism. What is your work about? In Being at Home: Living Autonomously in an Unjust World, I reimagine liberal philosophy through the lens of intersectionality, showing how race, gender, and caregiving relationships must reshape our understanding of autonomy. As the first care-responsive theory of liberalism to address intersectionality and racism, it makes a unique contribution, reorienting debates about autonomy in liberalism, multiculturalism, and feminist care theory when the “normative subject”—the subject whose experiences informed the idealizations embedded in the conception of the person in the theory—is a biracial woman of color, an Asian woman …
