Overview
Bianca Waked (they/she) is a Deaf Ph.D. Candidate at Cornell University's Sage School of Philosophy currently writing a dissertation on the intersection of ableism, audism, and racism. Their areas of research include Deaf philosophy, philosophy of disability, feminist philosophy (with a particular focus on Arab-Islamic feminisms), and the philosophy of language. Areas of interests include the history of analytic philosophy, philosophy of art, and the philosophy of law. Their research has been generously funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. They hold a B.A. from McGill University (First-Class Honors) and an M.A. from McMaster University.
Bianca is the founder and program director of "PLUSS," a diversity institute dedicated to supporting students from MSIs and other underrepresented institutions in their graduate school applications. They also sit on the board of directors for the Telluride Association, a non-profit dedicated to free educational programming rooted in critical thinking and democratic self-governance. They are a former Telluride Scholar (CBTA19) as well as a recipient of both the 2021 Mike Yarrow Adventurous Education Award and the 2022 George Lincoln Burr Award.
In August 2025, Bianca will begin as an Assistant Professor of Deaf Studies at Gallaudet University, the world's only institute of higher education designed to serve deaf and hard of hearing students.
Research Focus
"Beyond the Metaphor: A Conceptual Analysis of Audism and Racism" seeks to situate and complicate the conceptual association between “deafness” and “silence” within the racist and colonial ideologies of the 19th century to explain how Deaf people of color have been (and continue to be) uniquely wronged via their intersecting identities. Drawing on modal logic, feminist philosophy, Deaf studies, phenomenology of the body, and imperial intellectual history as well as my original concept of modal oppression, which tracks the different ways in which possibilities can be mobilized against non-normative bodies, I analyze the ways in which possibilities are suppressed for Deaf people of color and the corresponding impact of such suppression.