Welcome, and thanks for joining the Blog! Could you tell us more about yourself? What do you think our readers should know about you? 

Thanks for having me! I’m someone who doesn’t fit neatly into any boxes. Take my name: my Iranian name is Shadi, which means “happiness” in Persian. When I immigrated to North America, I felt the need to adopt an English name as well, and chose Soph(ie), from philo-sophia. Now, I go by both, depending on the occasion.

Philosophically, I’ve also moved across and between traditions. I trained at institutions in Iran, Canada, and the US. I received training in both Islamic and Western philosophy, across traditions that emphasize big-picture, historically grounded approaches as well as those that prioritize focused, problem-solving methods, in both the continental and analytic schools of thought. Even my current role reflects this hybridity: I’m a philosopher working at a new medical school in Summerlin, Nevada (Roseman University College of Medicine).

At the root of everything I do is a shared commitment to non-ideal theory (especially stemming from my training in feminist philosophy and social epistemology), not as an inherited tradition, but as an insurgent method. I draw on the method not to reinforce dominant frameworks, but to examine and reconfigure how concepts function across medical, mental, and digital forms of life. I refuse neat binaries like oppression vs. autonomy, conscious vs. unconscious, and objective vs. subjective. I examine how people inhabit and make sense of structurally distorted medical, mental, and technological domains, and I remain critical of theoretical approaches that seek to resolve these distortions too neatly.

What brought you to philosophy? What kinds of philosophical questions interest you?

For a good chunk of high school, I was on my school’s robotics team, and that was my jam. I was going to become an engineer and spend my life building robots. But when I was around 16 or 17, I met someone from the boys’ division of our school system (in Iran, schools are gender segregated, so even if you’re technically in the same school network, boys and girls attend different buildings). His world revolved around the humanities, especially Persian literature. That was my first real encounter with humanities as a serious academic space, and it opened up an entire world I hadn’t even known was possible.

We didn’t stay in touch, but that moment stayed with me. I remember still being on the robotics team while devouring books on history and sociology. I explored a lot of fields across the humanities and social sciences, but philosophy stuck with me. Honestly, I still feel like philosophy chose me, not the other way around. My friends joke that my relationship with philosophy is the longest one I’ve ever had, over 15 years now, and they’re not wrong.

Even before I formally studied it as an undergrad, philosophy felt different from everything else I had read. It still does. I couldn’t not do this, and so, it became personal, and it’s stayed that way. At the time, because of my robotics background, I was especially drawn to questions about the mind, particularly consciousness. I remember reading Thomas Nagel and David Chalmers as a young girl and feeling like I had entered a kind of magic world. I’m still in love with that space, but as I’ve grown older, I’ve come to recognize the importance of other questions too.

That shift has a lot to do with what’s been happening in Iran and the whole SWANA region (Southwest Asia and North Africa), and with how my own immigration journey unfolded. Back in 2016, I originally planned to move to the US for grad school. Despite receiving multiple admissions, I couldn’t go because of the Muslim Ban in January 2017. That part of my journey was covered by The New York Times and Mother Jones. I ended up pursuing a master’s in Canada instead, and that part of the story was covered by CBC.

Throughout it all, I stayed hopeful and tried to support other students affected by the Ban. My case was eventually used in both Congress and the Supreme Court to help overturn a version of the Muslim Ban that created exemptions for student visas in its later forms. I was not able to achieve my own dream at the time, but I was grateful my case helped thousands of others pursue their goals.

Eventually, I earned my M.A. in Philosophy from the University of Western Ontario, and in 2019, I was finally able to start my Ph.D. at the University of Florida, just as mass protests erupted in Iran, COVID-19 hit, and attacks on academic freedom intensified in Florida. And now fast-forward to 2025, we’re dealing with renewed threats of authoritarianism and fascism all over again.

So, for me, it’s never been about choosing one area of philosophy over another. It’s all interconnected. It all grows out of different aspects of who I am, and we humans are multifaceted. Whether I’m focusing on the questions of consciousness in humans, echo chambers on social media, or adaptive preferences in medical decision-making, each project speaks deeply to who I am and who I want to be as a philosopher.

Why do you think this work of public-facing philosophy addressing the work and concerns of women philosophers is important?

My first memory of engaging with feminist thought as an undergrad in Iran was encountering the phrase the personal is political. That stuck with me. It resonated with my deep desire to reject neat distinctions, especially ones like public vs. academic, that feminist philosophers and scholars have spent decades challenging. So, part of why this work is important is simply to acknowledge the labor that’s been poured into that fight: the intellectual, emotional, and institutional labor of carving out space where those distinctions no longer hold.

But more than that, what’s kept me in love with philosophy for over 15 years has never been the idea of sitting in an ivory tower, gatekeeping who can say what and to what extent. What drew me in, and what keeps me here, is the courage it takes to ask questions that feel risky. Whether the questions are about the personal, social, political, or existential, philosophy at its best demands that we ask them. That kind of daring inquiry is foundational to a free society, and it sits right at the heart of the public sphere.

Public-facing philosophy reminds people that philosophy isn’t about crafting niche technical terms for a selected few; it’s about engaging with something everyone already does. Every one of us, at some point, wrestles with philosophical questions. I come from a working-class family. Neither of my parents went to university, and I’ve always hated the feeling that they might not understand what I do. But when we talk, really talk, our conversations often get philosophically intense. I keep telling them: that’s it, that’s literally what I do.

To me, feminist philosophy is the flagship example of how philosophy starts in the public and loops back to it. It doesn’t just make space for marginalized philosophers, including women; it insists that space must be porous, responsive, and engaged for everyone. 

What are some ideas that you have for the series? What would you like to see the series doing in the future?

This is a tough question, because on one hand, there is still no mainstream, well-resourced space for women in philosophy. Philosophy remains one of the least diverse disciplines globally, in terms of socioeconomic class, gender, race, and beyond. In the US alone, less than 40% of bachelor’s degrees in philosophy are awarded to women, and only 5% to 14% to ethnoracial minorities. At the graduate level, the numbers drop even further: just 30% of PhDs go to women, and around 5% to ethnoracial minorities. And this problem is also about knowledge production in academic philosophy. Across all philosophy journals over multiple years, the percentage of women authors hovers between 12% and 16%. Even in normative philosophy, where we often hear “things are better now,” women’s authorship in top journals between 1954 and 2015 never exceeded 20%.

So yes, things are bad for women in philosophy. But the issue also exceeds “women in philosophy” in two important ways.

First, we need to think more expansively about gender (including gender identity and sexual orientation) and not just womanhood. There’s a reason we lack conclusive data on Queer philosophers: there simply aren’t enough of us visibly present or included to be tracked in the first place. Second, even among women, the experience of marginalization is not uniform. Yes, philosophy has a gender problem, but it also has elitism, classism, and racism baked into its core. These issues don’t merely intersect with gender; they often define what it means to survive as a woman in this field. Here’s one concrete example: I’ve never met anyone else like myself in academia. And it shouldn’t be that way. If someone is a woman and from a socioeconomically vulnerable background, and an immigrant, and an ethnoracial minority, they should feel welcome here, without having to flatten parts of themselves just to fit into the idea of what “a woman in philosophy” is supposed to be.

And I want to be very clear: when I talk about genuine inclusivity, I’m not talking about the kind of performative identity politics that’s often scapegoated in current reactionary mainstream discourse. I’m talking about what it would actually take to open space for people who dare to ask questions differently, because they think differently, and because they’ve lived their lives differently. Research after research shows that true diversity of viewpoints improves how we work, think, and build knowledge across fields. But philosophy hasn’t caught up yet. And until it does, we have to keep asking: why not?

So, one idea I’d like to propose is this: we consider renaming the blog, not to erase the importance of protecting a space for women in philosophy, but to acknowledge that this space intersects with many other forms of marginalization, many of which remain unrecognized. That gesture would signal an openness to complexity, to multiplicity, and to solidarity across differences.

I’d also love to see the series continue to highlight philosophers who don’t work in philosophy departments, including the many women who’ve built rich intellectual lives in other disciplines or outside academia altogether. The blog has already done a remarkable job uplifting these voices, and I hope it continues to expand this work. I’d especially love to see more contributions from philosophers in the Global South, Queer thinkers across backgrounds, and Trans women, who are currently facing unprecedentedly intensifying dehumanization. And I hope this space continues to welcome those without formal academic credentials in philosophy, but who engage in serious philosophical reflection, whether through other disciplines, community work, or lived experience.

Let’s expand what counts as philosophy and who counts as a philosopher. That’s how we begin to build a field that’s truly inclusive.

What kinds of things do you do outside of philosophy?

I do a lot of things. I love comedy; it’s what has consistently kept me on my feet during some of the toughest times in life. I love football (both the European and the American versions). I’m really into music, particularly British rock, opera, and classic Iranian music. And I love cinema, especially Iranian cinema and works from similar contexts where political oppression has forced people to be creative in ways that might seem impossible otherwise.

But if I had to pick one thing, it would definitely be traveling. I love how travel expands my sense of what we humans share at our core, and also all the radically different ways of living that shape our worlds. It’s the thing I enjoy the most, going to different cities and countries, talking to people, seeing how others live. I’m not even sure it’s fully outside of philosophy.

One of the hardest parts of moving to the United States was the impact of visa restrictions for Iranians in particular. Because of the national immigration policy for Iranian visa holders and my own safety concerns for being able to come back to the US, I still haven’t been able to travel globally since moving to the US in 2019. My last international trip before coming to the US was to Kenya, with an organization doing incredible work in both healthcare and education. I was there as a substitute teacher in an under-resourced school in the rural area of Kikuyu. It was tough, seeing how much the students deserved and how little was provided for them, but witnessing their joy, curiosity, and resilience made it one of the most joyful and formative experiences of my life. I think in the end I’ve learned much more from them than they from me. So, I’d love to travel in that same capacity again, hopefully in the next few years, maybe after 2028.

In a future feminist utopia, what do you think academic philosophy would look like? How would it be different from what it is like today?

When I think about a feminist utopia, it’s not about some far-off perfect world. It’s about changing the material conditions of the world we actually have, especially the parts that don’t work for us. In philosophy, that also means rethinking how we produce knowledge. As an early-career scholar, I see clearly how knowledge production is at the core of everything we do, and how it’s long been weaponized to gatekeep.

So, a feminist utopia, to me, would begin with transforming those material structures. Here’s one concrete example. As I mentioned earlier, the authorship numbers for women in philosophy are bleak. And yet, the current system of academic publishing, the gold standard of philosophical legitimacy, relies on anonymous gatekeeping. You submit a paper, maybe it gets desk rejected, maybe it moves on to two or more reviewers. I want to acknowledge that peer review takes time, and we’re all doing it for free. But it would also be dishonest not to admit how often it functions as a tool for exclusion.

Recently, I had a paper rejected from a top philosophy journal. There were some helpful comments, sure, but what stuck with me was that one reviewer dismissed my work as “political” (and clearly meant it pejoratively) simply because I used an example that had been discussed in critical feminist literature. The paper itself had nothing to do with that literature. Every woman I know in this field has stories like that, stories of being pushed out of “serious” or “real” philosophy for simply bringing in different frameworks, methods, or examples.

So, the question becomes: how do we change the very processes that keep women at arm’s length from the centers of philosophical authority?

I’d love to see different publishing models, ones already emerging in other fields, where, after a rigorous initial screening, papers move into a phase of open peer commentary. Members of the academic community can publicly offer feedback, creating a more transparent and collective process. And this is not just about fairness; it’s also about reimagining what philosophical dialogue looks like when it’s no longer structured around control and exclusion. That kind of collectivist solution is one way to transform the material conditions that make the current system feel, frankly, so hostile and dysfunctional to many of us.

A feminist utopia wouldn’t just let more people into the room. It would ask what kind of room we’re trying to build in the first place and who gets to help build it.

The Women in Philosophy series publishes posts on those excluded in the history of philosophy on the basis of gender injustice, issues of gender injustice in the field of philosophy, and issues of gender injustice in the wider world that philosophy can be useful in addressing. If you are interested in writing for the series, please contact the Series Editor Elisabeth Paquette or the Associate Editor Shadi “Soph” Heidarifar.

The post Interview with New Associate Editor of the Women in Philosophy Series first appeared on Blog of the APA.

Read the full article which is published on APA Online (external link)