Dr. Karen Wendling

Areas of feminist research: social and political philosophy, feminist philosophy, philosophy of medicine, ethics

I'm interested in egalitarianism, broadly conceived. Much of my work has focussed on institutional inequalities, particularly those that are informally rather than formally institutionalized. I understand institutions as systems of rules; informal institutions are social patterns of rule-following behaviour in which the rules are widely understood and followed but not formally codified as laws, by-laws, policies, procedures, and so on. Language, friendship and etiquette are largely informal institutions. My particular interest is in informally institutionalized forms of social inequality such as sexism and racism, in the forms of both discrimination and privilege. I'm also interested in the development of radical egalitarian political thought, beginning with heretical pre-Reformation religious sects, continuing through the development of liberalism in the seventeenth century, the revolutions of the eighteenth century, the rise of socialism, the gradual extension of the franchise, abolitionism and the woman's rights movement in the nineteenth century, and into the equality-seeking movements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.