Welcome to my website! I am a philosopher, writer, and philosophy for children practitioner who works on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border.

I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy and participating faculty in the Latinx and Latin American Studies Program at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. My primary research interests are in political philosophy, with a special focus on migration issues, Latin American and Latinx philosophies, feminist philosophy, philosophy for children, public philosophy, and bioethics.

I am the author of Socially Undocumented: Identity and Immigration Justice (Oxford University Press, 2020), and the co-editor of Latin American Immigration Ethics (University of Arizona Press, 2021) and Ética, Política, y Migración (UACJ Press, 2021). I also publish academic articles in my areas of research specialization, some of which you can access here.

I have written for publications such as The New Yorker, LA Times En Español, Salon, Ms. Magazine, Psyche, The Nevada Independent, and Common Dreams, among others. You can access some of my other non-academic writings here. From 2021-2022, I was an inaugural Marc Sanders Foundation Philosophers in the Media Fellow.

Currently, I am writing a monograph entitled Intimate Borders: A Feminist Approach to Migration Justice, in which I offer a decolonial, feminist theory of “intimate borders” that aims to render visible ethical challenges connected to the border-crossing experiences of women, children, Indigenous communities, and other marginalized groups–challenges that have long been obscured due to Western philosophy’s long-standing public-private divide. I argue that many of the world’s borders systematically, and wrongfully, violate intimacy and privacy, but that they are also, in certain cases, important intimacy and privacy protectors. After laying out my descriptive account of “intimate borders,” I argue that we ought to transcend the conceptual limitations of the political philosophy’s “open borders debate” in order to develop a universal, decolonial border ethic that can reduce migration-related oppression on a global scale.

I also do integrated research and community outreach in the field philosophy for children (P4C). During the 2022-2023 academic year I was a Fulbright García-Robles Scholar in Mexico, pursuing P4C and other outreach projects in the Mexican states of Hidalgo and Puebla.  Prior to this, I founded the Oaxaca Philosophy for Children Initiative in Oaxaca City, Mexico, as well as the Philosophy for Children in the Borderlands program in El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. Toward the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, as a Whiting Public Engagement Fellow, I also created a free, virtual, asynchronous P4C course in Spanish, which can be accessed and used here. I am now developing a P4C program in the Las Vegas community.

I hold a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Washington, an MSc in Philosophy and Public Policy from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and a BA in Philosophy from Temple University. As an undergraduate I also studied at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid.

Contact me at amy.reed-sandoval@unlv.edu.