Mechthild Nagel

SUNY Cortland, Philosophy, Faculty Member

Fulda University of Applied Science, Social and Cultural Sciences, Faculty Member

Fulda University of Applied Science, Social Work, Faculty Member

Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Institute of Philosophy, Research Professor

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Mechthild Nagel, Professor of Philosophy and Africana Studies, is Director of the Center for Ethics, Peace, and Social Justice at SUNY Cortland and Founding Editor of Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women’s and Gender Studies. Author of Masking the Abject: A Genealogy of Play (Lexington, 2002) and Ludic Ubuntu Ethics: Decolonizing Justice (Routledge, 2023), coauthor of Reframing Diversity and Inclusive Leadership (SUNY, 2024), she co-edited 7 anthologies. She's passionate about teaching philosophy to children
Phone: 607 753 2013
Address: Philosophy Dept
SUNY Cortland
POB 2000
Cortland, NY 13045 USA

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Books by Mechthild Nagel

Reframing Diversity and Inclusive Leadership: Race, Gender, and Institutional Change

by Mechthild Nagel and Seth N Asumah

SUNY Press, 2024

How can we tackle racism and sexism on our college and university campuses? What is the role of e... more How can we tackle racism and sexism on our college and university campuses? What is the role of education leaders in advancing social justice? Reframing Diversity and Inclusive Leadership addresses the urgent need for more than merely performative gestures toward—and a redoubled, authentically engaged investment in—diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Seth N. Asumah and Mechthild Nagel examine how traditional leadership models have tended to exacerbate racial and gender inequities in United States higher education and society at large. Using a cross-cultural, comparative approach indebted to critical race theory, critical whiteness studies, and Black feminism, Asumah and Nagel draw on decades of combined experience in the US and globally to provide a framework for inclusive leadership practices, actions, and policies. A valuable resource for administrators, faculty, students, and political and industry leaders, Reframing Diversity and Inclusive Leadership responds to calls for justice on campuses and beyond.

Philosophical perspectives on play from Homer to Hegel. - Philosophical perspectives on play from

Umass Amherst, 1996

This is a PhD dissertation on a critique of play in western philosophy. It was reworked as monogr... more

Contesting Carceral Logic: Towards Abolitionist Futures

contesting carceral logic: towards abolitionist futures, 2022

In our era, carceral logic, or the punishment mindset that suggests imprisonment is usually the b... more In our era, carceral logic, or the punishment mindset that suggests imprisonment is usually the best solution to social problems besetting the 99%, dominates in government thinking and action. The dominance of carceral thinking suggests that not only are modern societies indulging in an assumption that has proven false (that punishment and imprisonment work as solutions to social problems), but that in the process they, like a hammer that sees only contexts in which to pummel, have become carceral states that see only contexts in which to punish and imprison.
This book aims to lay out some of the contours of carceral logic and to contest it by highlighting impacts penal abolition will have. Contesting Carceral Logic: Towards Abolitionist Futures provides an innovative and cutting-edge analysis of the way in which carceral logic has become embedded within society and how we might think, feel and act to leave it the dustbin of historicity. It is an exploration of the consequences and harms of carceral logic from around the world, and as such is a valuable tool for students, activists and scholars engaging with critiques of carceral logic and looking to build alternatives. It is a valuable introduction to key issues and debates for students on penology, criminology, social policy, geography, politics and social history programs in countries all around the world.

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Transitional justice in Rwanda and South Africa

The Routledge International Handbook of Penal Abolition, 2021

This chapter analyzes ideological claims regarding South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commis... more This chapter analyzes ideological claims regarding South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and Rwanda’s Gacaca courts. Both transitional justice practices have been praised as restorative or even therapeutic. The TRC popularized the quasi-religious ethics of Ubuntu (i.e., shared humanity) engendering feelings of forgiveness in victims of apartheid injustice. Similarly, the Gacaca informal justice proceedings have been considered by restorative justice advocates as a paradigm case of overcoming ethnic hatred. I will argue that the TRC may have fallen short of such lofty goal of forgiveness, but in the end it did not succumb to a logic of revenge. By contrast, the Gacaca courts, set up by a Tutsi-dominated government with approval of the world (legal) community, unraveled a retributive victors’ justice while eliding true restorative justice. However, Rwanda’s authoritarian government presented quite successfully Gacaca as a restorative justice model. The comparative analysis will show that the Rwandan experience of tarrying with transitional justice could be characterized as negative Ubuntu or victor’s justice ideology, while the South African experience can be portrayed as Ubuntu in the positive, championing authentic Ubuntu ethics, which avoids an Othering process that often leads to further violence between aggrieved parties.

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Race, Class and Community Identity

The Hydropolitics of Africa: A Contemporary Challenge

Prisons and Punishment: Reconsidering Global Penality

by Mechthild Nagel and Dr. Seth Asumah

Five Faces of Oppression

Diversity, Social Justice, and Inclusive Excellence, Jun 1, 2014

An interdisciplinary anthology exploring issues related to diversity, multiculturalism, and socia... more An interdisciplinary anthology exploring issues related to diversity, multiculturalism, and social justice.

When students are introduced to the study of diversity and social justice, it is usually from sociological and psychological perspectives. The scholars and activists featured in this anthology reject this approach as too limiting, insisting that we adopt a view that is both transdisciplinary and multiperspectival. Their essays focus on the components of diversity, social justice, and inclusive excellence, not just within the United States but in other parts of the world. They examine diversity in the contexts of culture, race, class, gender, learned ability and dis/ability, religion, sexual orientation, and citizenship, and explore how these concepts and identities interrelate. The result is a book that will provide readers with a better theoretical understanding of diversity studies and will enable them to see and think critically about oppression and how systems of oppression may be challenged.

At the State University of New York College at Cortland, Seth N. Asumah is SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor and Professor of Political Science, and Mechthild Nagel is Professor of Philosophy. Together they have coedited Prisons and Punishment: Reconsidering Global Penality.

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The End of Prisons: Voices from the Decarceration Movement

This book brings together a collection of social justice scholars and activists who take Foucault... more This book brings together a collection of social justice scholars and activists who take Foucault’s concept of discipline and punishment to explain how prisons are constructed in society from nursing homes to zoos. This book expands the concept of prison to include any institution that dominates, oppresses, and controls. Criminologists and others, who have been concerned with reforming or dismantling the criminal justice system, have mostly avoided to look at larger carceral structures in society. In this book, for example, scholars and activists question the way patriarchy has incapacitated women and imagine the deinstitutionalization of people with disabilities. In a time when popular sentiment critiques the dominant role of the elites (the “one percenters”), the state’s role in policing dissenting voices, school children, LGBTQ persons, people of color, and American Indian Nations, needs to be investigated. A prison, as defined in this book, is an institution or system that oppresses and does not allow freedom for a particular group. Within this definition, we include the imprisonment of nonhuman animals and plants, which are too often overlooked.

Masking the Abject: A Genealogy of Play

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Dancing with Iris: The Philosophy of Iris Marion Young, Oxford University Press

In this Gedenkschrift, authors honor Iris Marion Young who was a world-renowned feminist moral an... more In this Gedenkschrift, authors honor Iris Marion Young who was a world-renowned feminist moral and political philosopher whose many books and articles spanned more than three decades. She explored issues of social justice and oppression theory, the phenomenology of women's bodies, deliberative democracy and questions of terrorism, violence, international law and the role of the national security state.

Mechthild Nagel

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