A picture of Dr. Camisha Russell smiling on the University of Oregon Campus. She is standing, facing the camera, and wearing a patterned black and white blouse.
I am a feminist philosopher working in Critical Philosophy of Race with a particular strength in Bioethics and a growing interest in the relationship between Blackness and Indigeneity in (the settler colony known as) the United States.
I am an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oregon, where I not only pursues that research, but also strive for engagement, access, and inclusion in teaching, and am grateful for the opportunity to mentor excellent graduate students.
My career has been guided by an overarching desire for social justice and a specific mission of increasing the diversity of the discipline of philosophy, both in terms of its members and its areas of concern. I am also a committed philosophical pluralist and a meliorist, who believes genuinely, if naively, in working within institutions to bring about transformation.
My first book, The Assisted Reproduction of Race (Indiana University Press, 2018), considered the role of the race idea in practices surrounding assisted reproductive technologies and argues for the benefits of thinking of race itself as a technology. I am currently working on a co-written book, Assisted Reproductive Justice (University of California Press), that examines the fertility industry, family formation law, and other practices of assisted reproduction through a Reproductive Justice lens.