Welcome to my website! I am a philosopher, writer, and philosophy for children practitioner.

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, bioethics, feminist philosophy, philosophy for children, and public philosophy.

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). You can access some of my academic articles on topics like migration and reproductive justice, Mexican philosophy, and philosophy of education here.

Currently, I am developing a feminist theory of borders for my in-progress monograph Intimate Borders: Feminism at the Margins of the State. I aim, therein, to provide a decolonial, feminist theory of “intimate borders” that helps to render visible ethical challenges connected to the border-crossing experiences of women, Indigenous communities, and other marginalized groups–challenges that have tended to be 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 boundaries of the philosophical “open borders debate” and develop a universal, non-ideal, decolonial border ethic that carefully assesses the complicated intimacies of various borders in order to reduce oppression in the realm of migration. Many of the book’s chapters take a “grounded theory” approach that focuses on particular ways in which crossing borders for abortion and prenatal care often constitutes intimacy violation, as well as intimacy violations experienced by LGBTQ border-crossers and Indigenous borderlands communities.

I also have integrated research and community outreach interests in philosophy for children (P4C). During the 2022-2023 academic year I was a a Fulbright García-Robles Scholar in Mexico, pursuing P4C and other outreach projects in the states of Hidalgo and Puebla.  Prior to this, I founded the Oaxaca Philosophy for Children Initiative in Oaxaca City, Mexico, and 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 the Las Vegas community.

Finally, as a public philosopher I have written for LA Times En Español, Salon, Ms. Magazine, Psyche, BBC News Online, The Guardian, The Morning Call, The News (Mexico City), In Madrid, The Nevada Independent, and other publications. From 2021-2022, I was an inaugural Marc Sanders Foundation Philosophers in the Media Fellow. You can access some of my public-facing writings here.

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