PrairieLights: Reading – Asha Leena Bhandary – Being at Home: Living Autonomously in an Unjust World

University of Iowa professor Asha Leena Bhandary will read from her new book, Being at Home: Living Autonomously in an Unjust World. Described as a “a care-responsive theory of liberalism to address intersectionality and racism,” Being at Home is praised by José Medina, Walter Dill Scott Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University, as “an ambitious and brilliant rethinking of the notion of autonomy from a relational and intersectional perspective, bringing together liberalism and critical philosophy of race and gender in original ways.” It’s also praised by Ashwini Vasanthakumar, author of The Ethics of Exile, who says: “An artful synthesis of memoir, philosophy, law, and literature, this is a beautifully written meditation on home-making in an unjust world, and the practices of buoyancy and community that enable those who live ‘counterfactually’ to nevertheless be ‘at home.”

Asha Bhandary is a social and political philosopher working at the intersection of the ethics of care, philosophy of race, reproductive justice, and political theory. Her work focuses on the structural and distributive requirements for caregiving arrangements in society, developing critical care theory that illuminates racialized and non-western practices of care. In her first monograph, Freedom to Care: Liberalism, Dependency Care, and Culture (2020), she argues that society’s caregiving arrangements must be improved if women, and, women of color, are to have the freedom to care. In her second monograph, Being at Home: Living Autonomously in an Unjust World (2026), she defends the theory of intersectional liberalism, which proceeds from the subject position of the least advantaged, or what she defines as the “grafted subject” (ashabhandary.com).